The sprawling greater-Denver metro region is in news-media crisis. In the information age, when there seems to be more and more to know, there is less and less being reported by the diminishing number of local mainstream news outlets here. So it comes as little surprise that media watchdog organization FreePress this week is highlighting the Denver news market as a negative example for the nation. The organization reports that, on top of shrinking newspaper reporting, the local TV news market is host to a “severe” form of the kind of sly consolidation that media corporations have been effecting across the country for nearly a decade. FreePress says this “covert consolidation,” where direct ownership is never transferred, is gaining momentum and that it skirts federal ownership laws and erodes market variety and competition. 

Over the last two years, Denver news stations Fox 31 KDVR and CW 2 KWGN have entered a “shared services” agreement through which station operations are merged. The stations share broadcast scripts and reporting, for example, the same way they share staffers, equipment, management personnel and studio and office space.

“Just because the name on the letterhead hasn’t changed, doesn’t mean that the spirit of media ownership laws hasn’t been violated,” FreePress Program Director Josh Stearns told the Colorado Independent. He said the owners of the stations are squatting on public airwave space that could be taken up by another company or organization, which would hire its own writers, reporters and producers to deliver an original and rival product to KDVR and the other stations in the market. Stearns believes the KDVR-KWGN agreement effectively tramples regulations meant to guard against media “duopolies,” where a single company owns two or more stations that serve the same community.

‘We haven’t violated anything’

KDVR/KWGN President and General Manager Peter Maroney has heard these arguments before.

“Listen, that’s one side of the issue. We haven’t violated anything,” Maroney told the Colorado Independent last Thursday. He said he had yet to see the FreePress campaign but he signaled that he thought this debate had long ago been settled.

“The [shared services] agreement doesn’t violate or even challenge the ownership laws. There’s nothing new about local sales and marketing agreements. They have all passed the test with the [Federal Communications] Commission. We’re well within the regulations.”

KDVR is owned by Kentucky-based company LocalTV. KWGN is owned by the Chicago-based Tribune Co.

Maroney said the stations were not squatting on airwave space. He said he was running one organization that was producing two different products.

“Every program on each of the stations has its own decision-makers. There are different line producers, different presenters. What the stations do is produce the news of the day. That hasn’t changed.”

‘Photocopy news’

For the uninitiated, exploring Maroney’s products can be disorienting, at least at first blush.

Call the basic operating number at KDVR and KWGN– it’s the same number– and ask to talk to the management of each of the stations. You get a searching response.

“Well, you see, all of our operations have merged,” staffer Jim Yoshinaga told the Colorado Independent. “We have one news team. One news director. All of our operations are merged by agreement.” If you speak to the manager of one station, he said, then you’ve spoken to the manager of both stations.

It’s a similar experience surfing the station websites. They have been created and are powered by a partnership between the station owner-companies, by LocalTV and the Tribune Co through its digital division. The news personnel lists at the two websites (here and here) are nearly identical. Indeed, the KWGN website is oddly tasked with touting the work its people are doing for KDVR.

“Jeremy Hubbard has returned home to Colorado as anchor of FOX31 News Nightside,” reads the KWGN site. “Dave Fraser is the Associated Press award- winning chief meteorologist of KDVR.”

Of course the stations benefit by pooling resources, FreePress Program Coordinator Libby Reinish said, but the public pays the price. There’s less information and the information the public receives is the same kind of information and reported in this case by the same people with the same backgrounds and biases.

Reinish describes KDVR and KWGN as local news through a funhouse mirror: the same but different. These aren’t broadcasts, she said, as much as “simulcasts.” “They’re not rival products at all.”

“The Denver example is really striking,” she adds, pointing to a video FreePress is distributing on the Web as a part of the new public-awareness campaign. “You have two ostensibly different newscasts, two different stations, but the anchors are reading the same script.”

In the video, hosts from KDVR and KWGN introduce segments on an effort to deal with dog waste in city parks. They finish their introductions with verbatim phrasing. Then each of the hosts introduce the same reporter, Greg Nieto, who delivers the exact same report for viewers watching the different stations.

Reinish says viewers don’t really notice the similarities because they’re not watching two broadcasts simultaneously.

“People have affiliated loyalties. You watch your local news station. You don’t switch over.

“OK, so there’s a different presenter on one of the stations. That’s just a way to maintain some discreet cover. You keep a few different faces but the staff and the material increasingly overlap.”

Reinish said resource sharing starts out as a sensible business decision but that the sharing tends to creep.

“Of course it makes sense to send one crew instead of two to an event. They say they’ll be freeing up staff to do more in-depth reporting on other stories, but that almost never happens. They lay off people instead.”

In making these deals, Renish says TV executives are trading on the widespread impression that news-industry profits are tanking.

“They cry poor,” she said, “but that’s not how it is for TV news. It’s nothing like the newspaper industry.”

Local news bottom lines

FreePress cites a recent FCC report that chronicles the rise in profits at local TV news stations (scroll to Chapter 3 of the report on local TV). Fact is, local TV news remains the greatest source of news among the public. Nearly 80 percent of Americans get their news from local TV stations.

Although profits dipped for years as cable TV rose, 2010 saw profits rise at local news stations, even as newspapers folded around the country gushing red from the bottoms of their balance sheets.

For the first three quarters of the year, profits rose a whopping 27 percent at local TV stations, and the news sector brought in a lion’s share of those profits. After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling lifted restrictions on political spending, local news ad buys have grown enormously and are growing still.

[T]he high percentage of income derived from news—44.7 percent in 2009—is “increasingly significant when considering the average television station that produces news airs an average of just 4 hours and 36 minutes of news per weekday.

Borrell Associates, a consulting firm that focuses on local media and advertising, estimates that the court ruling generated additional political advertising totaling $400 million in the 2010 elections. This created a windfall for local TV stations: in 2010, political advertisers spent an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion on local TV stations, which may be as much as 100 percent more than in 2008— despite the fact that 2008 was a presidential election year and 2010 was not.

Pew reports that the trend is alarming not least because it throws off balance for viewers. Political stories take up mere minutes of each news broadcast while political advertisers bombard viewers with their messages during breaks in the news shows and beyond.

Working off of data compiled by Pew and the FCC, FreePress reports that in states with competitive Senate races last year, four times as many hours were given to advertisements than to coverage of the races.

The 2010 Colorado U.S. Senate race between Michael Bennet and Ken Buck was the closest in the nation. Yet the organization reports that an estimated 88 percent of half-hour news shows in Denver contained no stories about the Senate race.

As the FCC notes, the windfall local TV news profits have also failed to save many journalism jobs. On the contrary, more local TV news is being produced by less reporters and editors. Nearly 65 percent of local TV news stations have cut staff and budgets over the last few years, although station directors are reportedly optimistic that they can add staff this year.

The drying Denver news landscape

Since 2009, when the Rocky Mountain News shuttered, the Denver Post has enjoyed a monopoly in the daily newspaper market here. The small Denver Daily News recently followed the Rocky into history and the weekly Westword survives mostly due to the herculean efforts of its skeleton staff and a wave of generous new medical marijuana advertisers.

For perspective: There are roughly 1.6 million households in the region and the entire front section of the Denver Post most days serves up a mere three or four news stories written by Post reporters about Colorado. Wire service stories make up at least 75 percent of the Denver Post front-section bylines. The Post places New York Times stories in the precious front-page space above the fold. There is no other general interest daily paper and the struggling Post recently cut an additional 4 percent of its budget.

The Rocky Mountain News was the longest-running newspaper serving the region, and its demise made national news. Yet just a few months before the Rocky closed, as FreePress points out, Denver also lost its longest-running locally produced newscast. When KDVR merged through the shared services agreement with KWGN, 30 staffers were sent packing.

Stearns said federal media ownership laws are shaped by local patchworks of regulations, which can be more and less strict depending on a lot of factors, like the size of the market. He said the FCC is presently reviewing its media ownership rules and so the FreePress campaign is designed to shed light on the ways TV news is both expanding and dwindling simultaneously, delivering more of less news.

Twenty percent of commercial TV stations broadcast no local news, Stearns points out in a release, and of those that do, according to the FCC, “nearly one-third say they are running news produced by another station.” In its own reporting FreePress claims to have identified nearly 80 markets where some version of a “shared service” deal is in place, involving more than 200 stations.

Yet, with newspapers struggling, local TV news bears an increased burden in informing the public. Now is the time to act, Stearns said.

The FreePress campaign urges citizens to contact the FCC.

“Call the FCC and tell it that you won’t stand for stations polluting your community with photocopy journalism and junk news.”

[ Top image Flickr, Steve Baron ]

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What are you doing now?

More than a year ago, I left my perch as chief political writer and blogger for The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction to become communications director for the Colorado Department of Law. I am responsible for coordinating our public relations efforts as well as responding to the daily needs of the media throughout Colorado. Having covered the legal profession in New York and our nation’s capital, I have always been fascinated with the law. My current job allows me to continue to learn about the law and to see state government from the other side — the inside — of the fishbowl.

How do you view the present state of Colorado journalism?

All things considered, I think Colorado’s journalism scene actually is all-in-all fairly healthy. Though larger newspapers might be going through a rough patch, smaller, local outlets such as my former newspaper, The Daily Sentinel, along with The Durango Herald, The Longmont Times Call and too many others to mention are doing great local and regional coverage that at times bests the work of their larger peers. For example, Bob Moore at the Fort Collins Coloradoan blows his competition out of the water when it comes to covering the 4th Congressional District.

Colorado broadcast media also is doing some really strong work. From the investigative pieces coming out of the Denver market to the local and regional coverage of outlets like KUNC in Greeley, KREX in Grand Junction and Aspen Public Radio, Colorado’ broadcast outlets do some great work, even if the smaller stations don’t get the notice they deserve. Just as an example of broadcast media expanding, Colorado Public Radio stationed one of its reporters at the Capitol this year to cover the legislative session.

On top of all of this, Colorado’s online media also is flourishing. From the Colorado Independent to Face the State to the work Westword is doing with its blogs, there is decent competition emerging for the traditional print and broadcast media. Do I think they will eclipse the traditional media? Probably not in my lifetime, but they do add another layer to Colorado’s journalism landscape. That can’t hurt.

Will every print, broadcast or new media outlet still be here in five years? Probably not, but Colorado overall is in great shape. Obviously losing the Rocky was a major blow to Colorado journalism, but the show goes on. From The Denver Post, 9 News and KOA on down, there’s still great journalism being done. And from my perspective, I think great journalism will continue to be done in Colorado, even if it’s coming from new outlets or existing outlets being repurposed or reoriented.

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Coming off the bonus circulation it won last year at the death of the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Post suffered significantly dipping numbers, again, part of decade-long slide. Is that how the Denver Post wrote the story of the news? Of course not. It joined in the parade of justification and silverlining featured in the stories on the topic in most of the rest of nation’s papers.

In the business pages, Tom McGhee reported that the ABC data demonstrated that most Rocky Mountain News readers had not yet canceled their subscriptions to the Post. Under the title “Ex-News readers turn to Post” McGhee reported that the Post “has retained 86 percent of News home-delivery customers.”

The new circulation data showed merely a “slight decline.” What was that decline? McGhee was careful to stay in the realm of percentages on that score. Daily circulation was down 8.3 percent. That doesn’t sound so slight. That sounds like a lot. It is a lot. McGhee then gives a double set of circulation numbers with which readers are left to do their own math.

According to a new Denver Scarborough Report, 1.1 million adults read The Sunday Post and 752,570 read the daily paper.

But then this:

The Post’s report to the ABC listed Sunday circulation of 495,485, Saturday circulation of 410,358 and Monday- through-Friday circulation of 340,949.

That’s less good by more than half for some unexplained reason, but okay.

So if the Post lost 8.3 percent of its daily readers, it either lost 62,463 or 28,299 readers, which means the Post in the last six months lost a population of readers equal to or greater than the adult populations of most of the non-Denver cities in the state– a “slight decline.”

A year ago, according to the ABC data, the Rocky Mountain News and the Post combined to sell 420,867 daily papers. In 2000 they sold 893,000 papers. That number has been dipping steadily ever since. Does anyone imagine the number will do anything but dip further in the next six months?

McGhee doesn’t delve into any of that– no analysis of business plans or of what the new numbers mean. Instead there’s this:

Justification:

About 75 percent of declines since the News closed were the result of scaled-back statewide distribution and a reduction of free distribution to area hotels, schools and employees, the company said.

Also, the price of a single copy rose to 75 cents from 50 cents.

Almost every major U.S. daily suffered circulation declines in the April-to-September period, according to the ABC.

Silverlining:

The Post’s website, denverpost .com, has attracted virtually all former Rocky MountainNews.com traffic.

Omniture, an online-marketing and Web-analytics firm, found that denverpost.com and YourHub.com received 4.4 million unique visitors who accessed more than 30 million pages.

McGhee is a business reporter yet he’s telling us about web traffic without tying the numbers even to any rough related revenue figures.

Corrupt politicians and corporate heads must take heart seeing the state paper of record working this hard to cover the major news story of its sinking business with press release-style dodgy reporting and rosy puffball language.

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The “online magazine” as it referred to itself, enjoyed the good will of local news-readers, who lamented the close of the Rocky Mountain News. The new magazine also seemed buoyed by the camaraderie and shared purpose of the journalist-investor staff, cast-offs in the storm-tossed sea of digital-era journalism. But the former newspaper writers struggled from the beginning on the web, the relatively large number of staff posting a well-designed product that was also cumbersome and roaming in a medium that rewards lean efficiency and focus.

RMI showcased high-end photography and in-depth features untethered to the news cycle. It covered politics and culture and sports. The mission statement said the editors were seeking to tell stories that were being left untold in a media environment that produced work that “seems to be about the same thing wherever you turn, shorter and shorter stories about fewer and fewer topics.”

The lofty vision smacked of a past (or future) era, as if the new online writers had never been committed online readers. RMI appeared to have sprung onto the web fresh from the 1990s, unconsciously or semiconsciously modeling early internet journalism efforts like San Francisco-founded Salon, whose magazine-style writers burned through barrels of capital for a decade before finally landing on a formula that updates content hourly with “shorter and shorter” stories and fully embraces the blogosphere in its practice and tone.

Although RMI depended on subscribers, the majority of content was available for free. Paying members received access to contributor journals and chats.

RMI editors reportedly informed freelancers several weeks ago that they would no longer be paying for content. InDenverTimes, an earlier online outlet started by former Rocky Mountain News staffers, quoted yesterday’s email to Rocky Mountain Independent subscribers:

“Our experiment has ended, and we would like to thank all of you who became members of the web site to support us. We have put everything we’ve made into producing content, but the economic reality is that we cannot produce enough content on that budget to justify charging a membership fee.”

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If you’re an older woman who likes younger men, if you’re a younger man who likes older women– InDenverTimes wants all Colorado cougars and cubs on the prowl to know: this is your spot for the news! Apparently there’s some kind of cougar contest promotion going on. You can enter. You can vote for the winners.

Slink over to the site and watch the homemade ad. You won’t be able to look away. Vote for queen cougar and king cub. Attend the coronation party. There’s a website. People are submitting photo entries with short bios.

The 2009 Queen Cougar & King Cub Contest

We want gorgeous gals, ages 35 and up, and handsome young men (cubs), ages 21-35.

The contest will end at midnight on Tuesday, September 22, 2009.

Vote for your favorite cougar and her potential prey below.

The queen and king, will be crowned Wednesday, September 23, 2009 during a royal ceremony held at MiniBar in Cherry Creek.

The festivities begin at 6 p.m. Click on the CougarXing sign for more information.

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It’s the first time since 2006 the Post has increased the price for single-copy sales, when the cost of a Sunday paper jumped by 50 percent from $1. The cost of the daily edition has held steady since 2001 when it cost a quarter, the Denver Business Journal notes. Most readers of the physical Denver Post subscribe to the newspaper so won’t be affected by the price hike.

“Basically, it’s the increase in the cost of doing business and other economic factors,” a circulation executive said.

Those “other economic factors” could include the Post’s recently acquired monopoly position in the Denver market after the competing Rocky Mountain News shut down Feb. 27.

“Theoretically, higher prices for single editions could inspire some people to subscribe as opposed to buying papers one at a time,” Westword media critic Michael Roberts observes.

The Post has been working to hang on to paid readers since it became the only game in town. Two months after taking over the Rocky subscription list, the Post was distributing 17.4 percent fewer paid copies than the two papers had a year before, a Denver Business Journal analysis of the most recent circulation data available found. The CEO of MediaNews Group Inc., William Dean Singleton, said the Post wanted to keep 80 percent of Rocky subscribers when the tabloid-sized daily folded.

Falling newspaper circulation has been accelerating nationwide, with weekday circulation dropping by more than 7 percent in six months according to a report filed at the end of April, compared with a 4.6 percent decline for the previous six months. At the same time, traffic at newspaper Web sites jumped by more than 10 percent in the first quarter of 2009.

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The Citizen’s closing edition has already become an ignominious artifact of the end of the newspaper era, mostly for the classy middle-finger salute it raised to the Internet and online journalism:

To all those bloggers and “citizen journalists” who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here’s your opportunity.

Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources – you have cultivated sources, right? – and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call “reporting.”

To do it right, you’ll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week. If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don’t expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.

We’re rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.

Why the bile? Maybe because the Tucson Citizen is being replaced by Gannett with an online citizen-journalism and local-blog site based on the operating model of that dreaded newspaper killer, the Huffington Post. As Assistant City Editor Mark Evans explains, the goal is to bring in the best local bloggers under one roof and “offer them the economy and power of scale.”

Tuscon-area bloggers beware. Get a contract. When Gannet says it wants to run the new venture like the Huffington Post, it means it wants to draw lots of readers to content that Gannett would like to pay little or nothing to produce. Arianna doesn’t pay Mia Farrow and Alec Baldwin to blog. She pays a few editors to run the site and even fewer staff writers to hone the brand and fill in gaps — and the revenue to do that came only after years of friendly venture-funded experimentation, where she and her crew learned to work the web like crazy and succeeded in building unprecedented traffic.

In Denver, the second-wave project being assembled by the former Rocky Mountain News staff is taking a different tack. After INDenver Times, the first post-Rocky experiment, failed to garner sufficient subscribers this spring, some of the INDenver team, minus the financial backers, announced their plans to produce a new online “daily news magazine” called the Rocky Mountain Independent, which is set to launch this summer.

The RMI is not looking for citizen journalists. It won’t be a “content aggregator.” It is attempting to combine revenue streams to fund staff reporters and editors as well as freelance writers to create daily original content. It also hopes to attract and promote independent partner blogs. The founders describe it as a “general interest publication offering news, analysis, commentary and discussion about issues important to Denver and the Rocky Mountains.”

The business model doesn’t inspire confidence; it’s something that could have been written five years ago. According to the founders, the new publication “will be supported by advertising and members who pay for benefits like premium content and live chats…”

So far, the feature partner blog is IWantMyRocky, the site Rocky Mountain News staffers created in the last few months of the paper’s life. It draws from the same pool of local under-employed journos that will be producing material for The Rocky Mountain Independent.

But IWantMyRocky is not a great advertisement for the Rocky Mountain Independent. IWantMyRocky has positioned itself for now as a source of information and analysis about the news industry. But the information is paltry and the analysis is weak.

Take the piece posted this week by Joe Hanel of the Durango Herald on the thinning ranks of the Capitol press corps. Although Hanel’s piece — part tribute, part lament– has won local fans, it is built on what have become the major cliches of the genre. We are reminded of the noble public service provided by newspapers; we are informed that the camaraderie of the quirky news “tribe” is a crucial part of that service; and we are warned about the bad things to come as a result of the end of traditional newspaper publishing:

The coverage in The Durango Herald will suffer from the loss of [Capitol reporters.] I can’t tell you how yet, but I know that sometime next year, I’m going to have a question on the Department of Agriculture, I’ll turn to ask [freelance reporter K.C. Mason], and she won’t be there. I’ll spend hours finding an answer I could have gotten in minutes, and meanwhile, other reporting will just go undone.

Every reporter pulled off the island disrupts the workings of the whole tribe. Meanwhile, the Capitol will go on running. The various tribes of politicians and lobbyists are doing just fine, as populous and healthy as ever.

But the end of newspapers is not the end of journalism. We are in a transition phase. Some observers believe with good reason that journalism is changing for the better, that we’ll come out on the other side of the contemporary crisis with a more critical and participatory news, a journalism product better suited to democracy.

Note that there are no links in Hanel’s piece to any other stories anywhere on the web, which is on fire these days with material on the declining newspaper industry and the future of news. Hanel’s is not a “networked” post. He hasn’t provided readers with any resources. He hasn’t identified himself with a school of thought on the topic. On the contrary, he has written a newspaper op-ed about the end of newspapers. Does anyone else see an irony there?

As to the value of the “tribe” or the end of newspaper people talking to other newspaper people as sources and as a shortcut to hit deadlines… Sorry, that also fails to impress as a great loss. Don’t talk to the tribe in writing your stories and in the end your stories will likely benefit and your readers will come to appreciate your hard-won knowledge. You might also find something radically different to say on a topic than your colleague K.C. Mason would say– and that’s a good thing.

On the veiled threat that the “populous and healthy” tribe of lobbyists is about to devour our democracy, I would like to know: Are there any major recent investigative stories or series of stories Hanel can point to produced by the Capitol Press tribe that targeted the pernicious effects of any of the state’s lobbyists? Any stories that nailed Capitol corruption? To be clear, that’s not me arguing that lobbyists aren’t always up to perniciousness. I just don’t think the press tribe is doing the work they keep telling us they’re doing.

Hanel’s lament is really a confession. Let’s hope the The Rocky Mountain Independent is intent on doing journalism a lot better than newspapers do it at the end of the newspaper era.

—
Disclosure note: I worked for the Huffington Post citizen-journalism project OffTheBus last year.

“Scam artists are very adept at exploiting the news of the day, and this is just another example of these individuals trying [to] profit off the name of one of Colorado’s former newspaper giants,” Suthers said in a statement. “Coloradans should be wary of anyone selling subscriptions or other products door to door.”

Anyone who might have been victimized by the scam should contact local law enforcement, Suthers said, and can also report suspected con jobs to the Colorado Consumer Line at 1-800-222-4444.

News of the fraudulent peddlers came the day after backers spiked plans to launch an actual “new” Rocky Mountain News, the online-only INDenverTimes venture. Plans by local entrepreneurs and former Rocky staffers fell 47,000 subscribers short of meeting their goal of securing 50,000 readers willing to pay a monthly fee to keep the site in business.

The site is still soliciting subscribers and updating content even after the site’s owners announced Thursday the project was stalled. “[INDener Times] will not charge subscribers’ credit cards on May 4th as initially intended,” the site’s founders said in a release. “A decision about the future of the INDT website will be forthcoming.”

From the release:

Certain members of the INDT newsroom group, led by co?founder Steve Foster and business writer David Milstead, intend to seek backers for their original vision of a robustly staffed online newsroom. “We believe there is money to be made in local journalism by local journalists and that there is a unique opportunity in Denver in the wake of the closure of the Rocky Mountain News.”

That’s money to be made by local journalists, not roving flim-flam artists targeting the elderly. Stay tuned for updates on the plans of former Rocky staffers, but in the meantime remain wary of those door-to-door salesmen.

But Littwin is playing at naif — and that won’t work.

The Internet has been powering its way into the middle of our lives for two decades. It has changed how we approach information, how we read and write and watch video and listen to music and generally communicate and think. It has also created whole new categories of people and friends and employment. That’s what the clumsy Democratic congressman Polis was talking about.

It’s clear from context — his full string of sentences and the forum in which he was speaking — that what Polis thought was a good thing was not the death of the News or the rise of bloggers in relation to reporters, but the evolution that is bringing the news business out of the era of mass media into the networked era, the evolution that sees greater inclusion of readers and blogger-analysts and fact checkers and commenters from across the world into news stories and into news story-making processes.

This is what he said to the Netroots blogger crowd in Denver last weekend:

I have to say, that when we say, “Who killed the Rocky Mountain News?” we are all part of that, we truly are. For better or worse, and I argue that it’s mostly for better. … Media is dead, and long live new media.

New media didn’t kill the News. The News, like so many papers, just didn’t adapt. It’s not a contest between bloggers and reporters. That’s a false dichotomy. Great reporting is the thing newspapers still have to sell. It’s their gold. But they haven’t built their businesses around that in ages. It’s the old newspaper business models that have killed the newspaper in the Internet era, and it’s slack editorial norms and practices that have lowered respect for newspaper reporting.

A note: 20 years into the Web and not a single link in Littwin’s column online. Fail.

While he would not give specific numbers, Vail Daily editor Don Rogers, whose paper boasts 90 percent market share in affluent Eagle County and last year reportedly grossed $12 million in a circulation area with a population of 50,000, confirmed the paper has cut staff to 2002 levels.

“The Vail Daily is shrinking in sync with the greater business community,” Rogers said in an e-mail. “We rise with them, and in the past five years or so, we soared with them. Now we’re sharing their pain.”

Rogers denies that a second paper in town, the six-day-a-week Vail Mountaineer, has significantly impacted the bottom line. Instead, he said it’s made the Vail Daily a better paper editorially. Overall, Rogers said community papers are still dealing from a position of strength.

“Community papers have a big opportunity. A lot of what I see with the big boys is that they sunk themselves in big debt, built huge hierarchies and probably need to fall so that some fresh grass can grow. I also believe that yet again our obit as an industry is exaggerated. Someone we’ll figure out that at least at the community level, we’re still the way to get their message out.”

Eagle County real estate sales — a big advertising sector for The Vail Daily — fell to 2004 levels last year, declining 25 percent to $2.2 billion.