April 23, 2009 09:44 AM UTC

InDenverTimes is no more

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• by: DavidThi808

(Too bad, really – promoted by Colorado Pols)

My guess is they didn’t get much in the way of subscriptions. From the Denver Post

Financial backers of InDenver Times and many of its unpaid employees – former staff members of the Rocky Mountain News – are parting ways after a meeting Wednesday night.

The employees want to go on with the site and will search for new backers, business writer David Milstead said after the meeting.

A site run by the employees and new financiers will not be called InDenver Times, he said.

It’s pretty clear they were looking at unending deficits.

Preblud initially said the site needed 50,000 subscribers by today for the venture to go forward.

Milstead said Wednesday that the investors were not comfortable with several aspects of the business, including the amount of staff, thinking that 30 was too many.

“Obviously the economic climate is very difficult for the media and all types of investments right now,” Milstead said.

I think the root problem may, repeat may be that they were still thinking old-style newspaper in terms of coverage and the staff needed for that coverage. A lot of the news can come from other sources. And a lot that they do produce can be done differently.

Or to put it another way, this is a very hard problem which will require a radically different approach. And many will legitimately scream that the new approaches aren’t as good. And they may not be. But the approaches we end up with will at least be sustainable.

With that said, in new media they’re hitting problems too. From ABC News

MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe will step down soon as the social networking site’s chief executive, amid the site’s stalled user growth and the rapid rise of rival Facebook.

MySpace owner News Corp. said Wednesday the decision was made by mutual agreement with former AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller, who was appointed News Corp.’s chief digital officer April 1.

…

membership appears to have stagnated. It had 70 million users in March, down 4 percent from a year ago, according to tracking firm comScore Inc., despite the launch of the MySpace Music service in September.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s users in the U.S. rose 72 percent in March to 61 million.

The high-tech market is incredibly unforgiving of mistakes and MySpace has made quite a few recently.

ps – Same offer I made to Dean Singleton (his admin turned me down) – I’d be happy to meet with the managers of either group (reporters, investors) if you want to discuss very different approaches. Just shoot me an email.