On the day Denver lost one of its major metro newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News, there are signs that even small-town community newspapers in Colorado — once believed to be relatively bulletproof — are starting to struggle.
My first paid byline was in the Rocky Mountain News in 1988 – a college football story that was a minor scoop on the Denver Post.
Six months after Tweeting the funeral of a 3-year-old — a decision that caused some controversy — the Rocky Mountain News Twitter feed covered the death of the Rocky itself.
“Scripps CEO Rich Boehne just announced the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News will be tomorrow, Feb. 27,” the Rocky’s newsroom Twitter announced at noon from the meeting where employees learned their fate.
Rocky Mountain News employees continue to search for glimmers of hope from its owner E. W. Scripps, Co., about the future of the paper. As the staff continues to twist in the wind while the suits in Cincinnati silently decide their fate the media conglomerate can’t say it wasn’t warned about the online barbarians at the gate … in 1981.
Call it the Newspaper Preservation Act of 2009.
Act now, and you can shell out more than six times the cover price for a souvenir bundle of five inauguration-day copies of The Denver Post or Rocky Mountain News. That’s right, if you call before — well, before they run out — the Denver Post Inauguration Keepsake Pack including FIVE Jan. 21, 2009, editions can be yours at the low, low — I mean, horrendously inflated — price of $15.50. That’s for a set of five 50-cent newspapers, which would’ve cost ya a cool $2.50 at the 7-Eleven on Wednesday .
The prospects of Scripps Howard finding a buyer for The Rocky Mountain News by the Jan. 16 deadline are fading fast.
Our colleague Tracy Dingman at the New Mexico Independent offers some been-there, done-that reminiscing of the closing…
Rocky Mountain News contributor Jason Salzman wrote in a column for the newspaper last week that “putting the Rocky on the market for one month over the holidays looks like it’s not a good-faith effort to find a buyer for the newspaper.” But the observation didn’t appear in the Rocky because editor and publisher John Temple rejected the column, Salzman says in a blog post Tuesday. It’s the first time in more than four years the Rocky has refused one of his biweekly “On the Media” columns, Salzman writes.
A Web site aimed at keeping the Rocky Mountain News alive launched Sunday night as part of a campaign by the newspaper’s staff to rally public support a week after E.W. Scripps Co. put the Denver daily up for sale and said it could cease publication if no buyer emerges. The IWantMyRocky.com site urges readers to share memories and propose methods to keep the 149-year-old newspaper — Colorado’s oldest business — from closing. “We meet in this strange place in a noble effort to save the Rocky Mountain News,” Rocky columnist Mike Littwin writes. “And if we can’t save the Rocky, we can, at minimum, make some noise before we go.”
Two things jump to mind when thinking about the outcome of the Colorado vote:
1. Rep. Doug Lamborn — two years ago a freshman trying to find the Capitol bathroom — is now the Dean of Colorado’s Republican delegation in Washington.
2. Dick Wadhams’ threat to shove a bunch of 30-second ads up Democrat Mark Udall’s ass over a missed vote might just have marked the Macaca moment of his failed effort to get his old pal Bob Schaffer elected to the United States Senate. Such trashy talk underscores what went so utterly wrong for Republicans in Colorado on Tuesday.
No criminal charges. No witnesses. A classic “he said, she said.” Leadership would not corroborate. What is the difference between The Rocky Mountain News’ approach to stories involving anonymous sexual harassment charges against Rep. Michael Garcia and Rep. Douglas Bruce?…
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