UPDATE: July 10, 1861. Remains true today.
Original post follows.
Last edition publishes tomorrow. So much for long goodbyes.
We are, well, needless to say.
Colorado’s oldest newspaper will publish its final edition Friday.
The Rocky Mountain News, less than two months away from its 150th anniversary, will be closed after a search for a buyer proved unsuccessful, the E.W. Scripps Co. announced today.
“Today the Rocky Mountain News, long the leading voice in Denver, becomes a victim of changing times in our industry and huge economic challenges,” Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Scripps, said in a prepared statement. “The Rocky is one of America’s very best examples of what local news organizations need to be in the future. Unfortunately, the partnership’s business model is locked in the past.”
The Rocky has been in a joint operating agreement with The Denver Post since 2001. The arrangement approved by the U.S. Justice Department allowed the papers to share all business services, from advertising to printing, in order to preserve two editorial voices in the community.
None of what we said last month has changed:
…the loss that awaits our community is not so much the quantity of reporting that a two-newspaper market generates, or the competition that envigorates that news reporting (though this all is worth noting). We want it noted unmistakably in the record that the loss is qualitative–that the political newsroom at the Rocky Mountain News is the best in the state, and it’s an open question whether the vacuum that will be created when the paper folds will be filled. Or at least filled anywhere near as well.
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🙁
I didn’t renew my Rocky sub because I don’t want the Post.
That comment alone might just fire up the Tanks engine for a run in 2010.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/…
It is gripping. Extremely well done.
I didn’t even turn on CNBC or watch the market until now. Just read the Rocky and marveled at a great wrap on the final edition.
Congrats to the staff for a job very well done.
Good luck. You’re going out with your heads up, knowing you produced a fine newspaper.
The online video tribute was also quite impressive.
Sad to see the Rocky leaving. As a native Pittsburgher, I’ve always lived in a two paper town, and I’m saddened that Denver won’t remain one.
Best of luck to the reporters and staffers who are currently looking for new work.
How many two paper towns won’t be anymore?
Reporting started going downhill in Colorado Springs when the Sun folded many years ago.
The Post says it’s going to pick up the following:
Tina Griego, Penny Parker, Bill Johnson, and Mike Littwin.
Dave Krieger in sports.
Vincent Carroll to join the editorial board and write an editorial page column.
Reporters moving include Lynn Bartels (politics), Burt Hubbard (database reporting specialist), Kevin Vaughan (general assignment) and Gargi Chakrabarty (energy industry).
Good info and I’m glad to see some of the really good folks moving over. Vince Carroll? Oh goodie
And Dave Krieger. I think he’s a terrific reporter, and would be happy to see him leave sports and go to news. His columns after the Darrent Williams shooting were excellent, he put heat on the Broncos and other sports teams to do something to shut down the gang/thug mentality that has permeated sports.
Tina Griego, Penny Parker, and Vince Carroll…not so much.
Farewell Rocky, I will miss you.
The Post comics suck. Will any of the News comics get picked up?
Also glad to see a Rocky Political reporter, Bartels, on that list because the Rocky local political coverage has always been the best. And the comics. Hope a decent chunk of Rocky subscribers follow some of these folks and stay on with the Post.
NO MIKE ROSEN!!!!!! Hooray!
No Tracy Ringolsby???? Wahhh!
I’m betting Fox Sports picks up Tracy. He’ll give them the analysis they often lack.
He’s been Madoffed.
is quite possibly the finest baseball reporter I have ever read. He’s a far better sports writer than our Rockies (god love e’m) deserve.
…so absolutley no good will come of the RMN’s demise.
First off I want to agree that the RMN is the best in-depth news operation in the state. But as McDonalds has demonstrated, good enough can be quite successful.
But this was inevitible and the Post is not that far behind. For two reasons.
First look at the trade press in the computer industry. We used to have this wide set of publications, some published weekly, others monthly. They’re almost all gone now and the few hanging on mostly do so with ads from the very large companies like IBM that are on autopilot with their print ads.
We had a wonderful review of Windward 2 years ago in eWeek. Filled a half page. 10 years ago that would have been gigantic for us. We did not get a single inquiry from it.
And the successful “publications” are not doing the same thing online as they did in print. There are people making money, but it’s not with a web edition of their print product.
.
Second the existing newspapers are still trying to just take their print product and put that on the web. And they will fail in that effort. (They can shoehorn the print onto the web successfully – they will fail at making that profitable.)
The root problem they have is the people working for them do not have the experience or the imagination to product the radically new product that is going to replace newspapers.
We will have a replacement for newspapers (or actually several replacements). But the Post and most of the other papers in the country will go out of business and there will be new startups that replace them.
And one of those replacements could easily be ColoradoPols. Pols is a better bet than the Post at present.
….pundits and technocrati on this site keep predicting the noisy end of newspapers. Maybe those media groups that keep acting stupid and refuse to embrace the future, but it’s not a foregone conclusion.
All of the predictions of bloggers and small websites taking the place of newspapers seem to come from those who have never worked in the media business. Yes, CP does great at it’s niche – but it will never have the investigative juice to bring down Duke Cunningham. Or operate a Baghdad Bureau.
Another fine damn lie er statistic thrown about on the blogoshpere is the 70% (80%/90%/a lot) of folks now get their news from the internets. But where? It’s not from RedState or HuffPost or Army of Dude, but from major news outlets’ websites.
A micropayment or limited subscription model can work for newspapers and their websites. The older generation (self included) will huff and puff how they won’t pay for it, but we’re not the growth sector – the 20-30 sumthins that now pay $16 a month for a WoW account or .99 a pop for a song on the iTunes store will.
David is right in that the papers will have to change what they offer – but it’s not going to be free…
The single best reporting source out of Iraq was Michael Yon. And he’s not the best source in Afghanistan. When I want to know what’s going on over there I read him, a couple of milblogs, and the occasional blog of a reporter over there.
I will agree that the existing media could become successful on the net. The problem is you don’t see anything groundbreaking different in what they do on the web.
Is whether the Post will pick up the Kakuro puzzle. If not, then I just won’t buy that paper.
“The Post also will incorporate all Rocky Mountain News comics and many of its puzzles.”
The Rocky’s comics are vastly superior to the Post’s. I’ve been worried about them.
I’m serious, for what it’s worth.
Many factors brought this industry to this place. God willing they keep their faith, spirit and grow from the value they have provided.
Who knows, maybe some will bring us a real political news site … reading real facts vs party ordered spin would be a change and likely result in less blogging from me.
I’ll write the first check to get this venture started!
and you’re singing…
I’m back in the saddle again
I’m riding, I’m loading up my pistol
I’m riding, I really got a fistful
I’m riding, I’m shining up my saddle
I’m riding, this snake is gonna rattle
I have yet to see any reports that indicate how many people will lose their jobs because of this closing. Anyone seen any numbers?
Assume some sales, admin, production workers at the DNA also will be out of work.
That’s the last figure I saw.
The biggest loss is the public. No more will Post reporters race to blog and file with the urgency all reporters have when there’s competition.
And, no, the televisions are not competition. They have their occasional shining moments, but much of their newscasts are drive-by shootings, feel-good pictures of kids and weather.
The public was the real winner when the Post and Rocky reporters worked to beat the stuffing out of the other.
Best (or worst) yet:
http://whokilledtherocky.com/
Who is going to buy me a t-shirt?
But I will miss Kevin Flynn’s stuff. Glad to see Bartels and Litwin moving to the Post, but Vince Carroll?
The other thing that surprises me is that it didn’t appear that our local gazillionaires were in the hunt for a money-losing platform for their political projects. After all, political parties and political persons USED to create newspapers to advance their views. Why not pick up a daily newspaper for cheap, trim off the Rosen and the Carroll and…?
that Kevin Flynn’s swan song was being pictured in the Denver Post earlier. Not sure that the Rocky photog, or the photog editor recognized that they had Kevin front and center and the most identifiable/visible person in a crowd of seated people. Moreover, he was looking directly at the camera.
Will there be a newspaper on Saturday?
also, worst part about this is not just that we no longer are a 2-newspaper town (and in theory competetive) but that the surviving paper is the poorer publication.
If I can only have one, why can’t it be the Rocky? It is the far superior publication.
Yes, the Post plans to start its 7-day-a-week schedule this Saturday.
…there is a pop-up telling you NOT to fear, the Post is here to give you your News!
This is really bad news for Ritter. Stapleton hates him and has vowed to ensure that he is a one-term Governor. Now the only game in town will fixate on running as much negative as they can, editorial and news.
He’s probably spinning in his grave to hear you say that.
boy did I channel that wrong. Of course I meant Singleton, but what made me type Stapleton (as in Ben) is beyond me.
Must be residual drugs from the 60s
although Stapleton probaly would hate Ritter too.
Tobacco, alcohol, and firearms. That is the advertising trio that kept print media alive. One of the unforeseen consequences of a healthier lifestyle is the collapse of that revenue.
I’ve been following the imminent demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (“the P-I”) for a while, and something I gleaned from that is that Craigslist and other free classified ad sites took a huge bite out of their revenue too. Why pay the paper for the ad?
There is also the Seattle Times, which is still family owned (well, 51% anyway). Hearst owns the P-I.
It was interesting, they had a joint operating agreement similar to the Post’s and News’ deal, but a few years ago the Times sued to break it (it’s in effect til 2050 or some absurdly far off future date like that). They failed to do so but that action (about 5 years ago) heralded the inevitible. Hearst announced they were looking for a buyer, just like Scripps did with the News. The prospects of finding one are just as dim, too.
But the P-I looks like it’s making an effort to go all-online, but with a kind of aggregating tool that links to local blogs and other sources, so a lot of their “news” won’t be written by P-I staff (who will mostly be history). Someone on a Seattle blog compared it to the HuffPo.
Now, that’s not official, but the speculation is based on some changes to their website that came online just this past weekend. I guess no one at the News thought to try that, but the News demise has been much swifter than the P-I’s.
…I’m glad that Seattle won’t be left w/o any major print daily. I wonder if any cities suffer that fate?
I thought I read that the SF Chronicle (also a Hearst paper) was shutting down. Anyone know if that’s true? (I know, I could google it…)
If SF has another major daily I haven’t heard of it. (I don’t think the San Jose Mercury counts.)
it’s not the most hard-hitting and scoop-producing operation but it is such a happy paper!
“significant cuts.” If that doesn’t work, Hearst says they’ll look to sell. We used to have two “major” papers; the Examiner and the Chron, but the Examiner disappeared in 99 or 2000, IIRC. Well, it’s still technically around, but it’s a free tabloid, not a “real newspaper.”
It would reallllly suck if the Merc was the Bay’s only newspaper…
But the Oakland Tribune is a decent paper.
http://www.latimes.com/news/na…
Worth reading the column, if you’re an SF Chronicle fan.
Most of what I wrote was from memory from SLOG postings earlier this week. But The Stranger (which is the alt weekly which runs the SLOG blog) just published this story:
http://www.thestranger.com/sea…
I know the Bud Bowl is no more, but really? I guess I hadn’t noticed.
those page after page of firearms adverts anymore. What has this country come to?
But in mentioning alcohol, tobacco and firearms, I was just interested in how they may have added to the pile on.
It’s auto dealers, airlines and department stores that used to prop up daily newspapers — along with real estate and help wanted (and auto) in the classifieds. Liquor store ads were (and still are) a presence, though not a huge one. Tobacco poured money into magazines. Firearms? Not so much.
I will miss the Rocky. It was the first newspaper I read when I arrived in December 1972 in the pre-dawn morning. ‘course back then the Rocky was the morning paper and the Post was the afternoon paper. But it was the first.
I wonder who will end up owning the name.
Someone at the Republican Party ought to send this to all Republicans. It is exactly the problem with the Republican Party today. All they read is their own BS. They have no idea what is going on in the real world.
Who is around from 1858 or before?
Got me looking for an answer.
The oldest American newspaper is The New Hampshire Gazette, originally founded in 1756.
There are many, many companies that have been around for longer than that even. If you’re talking about a business, and not necessarily a company, the oldest is the Shirley Plantation in Virginia which was founded in 1638.
Some other big companies that have been around since before 1858:
Old Farmer’s Almanac, 1792.
Jim Beam, 1795.
Dupont, 1802.
Colgate, 1805.
Citibank, 1812.
Remington (firearms), 1816.
Brooks Brothers, 1818.
Lord and Taylor, 1826.
Amtrak, 1829.
Philadelphia Enquirer, 1829.
Detroit Free Press, 1831.
Colt (firearms) 1836.
John Deere, 1837.
Tiffany and Co., 1837.
Berkshire Hathaway, 1839.
Associated Press, 1846.
Tribune, 1847.
Pfizer, 1849.
American Express, 1850.
Levi Strauss, 1850.
Macy’s, 1851.
New York Times, 1851.
You think those companies are old?
The Japanese company Kongo Gumi was in operation for over 1,400 years until it was absorbed by another company in 2005.
Hoshi Ryokan, a Japanese inn, was first founded in 717. It’s the oldest continuously run business in the world after Kongo Gumi was taken over.
Weihenstephan brewery in Germany is said to have begun producing potent potables in 1040.
I have no idea why that was on there.
It was the oldest common carrier railroad in America. It is now part of CSX. And Amtrak uses CSX lines.
How many of them will be around next year?
Jim Beam and Colt will be doing a booming business, based on current market trends.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02…