Tag: News industry

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.

The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's oldest newspaper, will publish its last edition Friday and then shut down, leaving Denver a one-newspaper town, an officials of E.W. Scripps, the paper's owner, announced Thursday at noon. "Today the Rocky Mountain News, long the leading voice in Denver, becomes a victim of changing times in our industry and huge economic challenges," Scripps CEO Rich Boehne said in a statement. Read more inside.

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 number of reporters covering the Colorado Capitol continues to drop as Charles Ashby, Denver bureau chief for The Pueblo Chieftain, received word Tuesday that he would be laid off. Ashby will continue reporting from the statehouse through the legislative session, Chieftain managing editor Steve Henson told the Colorado Independent on Tuesday afternoon. He has covered the Capitol for the Chieftain since 2005 and was the Durango Herald's state legislative reporter for seven sessions before that.

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...

And the print media drumbeat continues... The Gannett Blog, an unofficial online watering hole for Gannett Co. news employees, reports that a company-wide memo informed its staff today of mandatory, one week unpaid furloughs during the current quarter. This news comes after the firm slashed more than 3,400 jobs last year with nearly two-thirds of the cuts occurring in pre-holiday December.

As traditional newspapers transition to an Internet world filled with part-time bloggers, content-sharing Web sites and Google, embedded legislative correspondents have disappeared from the nation's capitals, apparent victims of dwindling newsroom resources and a changing industry.