The Rocky Mountain News today became the largest-circulation daily to close its doors in the newspaper-industry crisis, after publisher E.W. Scripps Co. failed to find a buyer for the 150-year-old Denver paper.
This poignant video on the paper's last days features Jeff Legwold and Laura Frank, who joined the Rocky from The Tennessean.
[Image: Newseum]
This is a tragedy.
ReplyDeleteShame, shame, shame ...
ReplyDeleteMakes you wonder how and why it came to this. Can other news organizations learn from this newspaper's demise?
It makes me feel ill.
Yes this a tragedy because it was the best tabloid style daily paper around.
ReplyDeleteBut the unions there were a lot to deal with. They acted like the UAW which really hurt them in the long run.
I can only nod in agreement, and wonder who will be next. And fear for the good people of Denver.
ReplyDeleteBefore the end of 2009 I can see the Gannett shuttering several papers similar in size and location to the Asheville Citizen Times. Heck, at Asheville they don't even print their own paper anymore. God help us!!
ReplyDeleteThe video is an elegant epitaph to what I thought was an excellent tabloid newspaper.
ReplyDeleteIf I were an employee there, I would be thinking that if I had just worked harder or did something differently, this wouldn't have happened. People will always feel badly about the Rocky's closing.
The Rocky Mountain News did not have to fail....it is poor management that failed the paper, I have never worked there nor been in that city, but looking at the #'s someone could have made it work with creative thinking..any paper of that size can make it with creative thinking..including Gannett papers. Even if I am old it does not mean that old school always rules...this is a new time and if someone were to ask me, I could save the large papers millions of dollar per paper and still keep most of the jobs, each paper should think for themselves and not wait for Gannett to TELL them what to do, their is one paper that I worked at, where a few changes would save them 1.3 mil a year x the other 12 large papers in Gannett or $156,000,000 a year....the sad factor is that it is hiding right in front of each Publishers eyes. Please quit being fat dumb and happy. They need to look at their books and question it on their your own, nobody is going to do it for you other then Big Brother telling you to do so.....so shine now and get it done!
ReplyDeleteI foresee Gannett shuttering some stand alone papers, and combining content for groups already under printing consolidation into single content papers under seperate mastheads for the markets they are delivered to.
ReplyDeleteCirculations will further decline, and what few advertisers remain will end their contracts and take their dollars elsewhere.
This footage is the best of the best........!! Very well done and to the point....
ReplyDeleteVery nice. Touching.
ReplyDeleteI would have put the readers' comments about the loss first up on the video, though.
Why they sound just as teary about themselves as they have about other businesses that have closed over the years.
ReplyDeleteNo wait.
Never mind they tended to not give a cr@p about other workers in their community. Often closings didn't even get a mention in the back pages.
I think there's a bit of a misconception between the potential earnings for newspapers and how newspaper companies are managing their debt. Gannett is in better condition than others, but is still guilty of leveraging large loans against their larger properties, which, by the way, always tended to earn less. Today, those larger newspapers, including the Rocky, are hemorraghing money. Thus, the debt can't be paid off and source for new loan money is gone. So, it's not just about managing the newspaper itself, which may very well be profitable as a standalone, it's about managing long-term debt.
ReplyDeleteYes, newspapers still have a healthy profit margin and by most definitions, are a great investment. But nobody wants to shoulder the huge and outrageous debt burden carried by the likes of the Chicago Tribune and SF Chronicle.
Sorry to sound harsh here, but I couldn't help thinking just how many locals outside that newsroom were losing jobs while all those people were sitting around that conference table apparently planning the news.
ReplyDeleteRIP.
ReplyDeleteA say day for all of us.
To the people with the negative comments. You actually think these people DON'T care about people in other industries losing jobs? Give me a break! That just shows me how biased you are against the "evil" or "liberal," or whatever negative label you care to put on it, press.
ReplyDeleteI've been a journalist for 15 years. I've seen countless results of fatal crashes, seen people in court crying over their murdered sons or daughters, and talked to an unimagineable number of people who've suffered horrible HORRIBLE things. I've cried so many times, I've almost no tears left. But journalists can't let that interfere - EVER! Our job is to get the facts out all the time. I remember some stories so poignant I've had to walk away from the computer to compose myself.
Many others journalists are hit by their tasks just as hard. And over the years, many learn to deal with it. But it never completely goes away. If it does, you should no longer be in this business.
Now their paper is closing and some are jumping on them because "they don't care." Okay. Just think of it this way, the lack of coverage of closings of other businesses that one of you mentioned will NEVER improve now. Sorry about that. Go ask a blogger to get the news for you!
This is really sad.I just sat here and cried .This may well be our own fate !
ReplyDeleteI can see this happening over and over again throughout the Gannett chain, especially now with the stock price in junk status.
ReplyDeletePapers like the Poughkeepsie Journal will be absorbed by the Journal News, not because the Journal News is the better paper but because Dubow and his kind can't see the value of keeping a local paper local.
I managed to make it through almost the entire video without crying but when the names in the end credits faded up and then, time and again, faded out, I lost it.
You're all tougher than me: I lost it during the first interview, where I heard a catch in Laura Frank's voice as she described the arrival of "Corporate" suits in the newsroom from Cincinnati, to tell them the paper was likely closing.
ReplyDeleteI lost it when that guy talked about how an uninformed society breeds social evils. I don't know his name since, unlike was the case with the mayor and staff, it wasn't flashed up on the screen.
ReplyDeleteI've never even had the pleasure of reading the Rocky, yet, I'm sitting here just shedding tears after watching this heartbreaking video. I simply cannot get my brain around what is happening to an industry I have loved so much ... what's next??
ReplyDeleteIt kills me to know so many people out there don't care whether newspapers live or die. They don't know what newspapers do and when the watchdog is gone, they won't even know what they're missing.
ReplyDelete1:32 p.m.
ReplyDeleteThey will find out what they are missing when Rocky and other deceased newspapers take their free Web sites with them. Sorry, get the local news elsewhere, if you can.
And so the Rocky is gone. It wasn't the first, and unfortunately, it won't be the last. See http://herex0.tripod.com/ or click over to http://moorparkmedia.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteWhen I was an editor in Rochester, we recruited Laura Frank from Gannett's W.V. paper (Huntington?). I was given the job of showing her around Rochester and trying to convince her to make the move.
ReplyDeleteShe did come, but only stayed for a year before going to Nashville. She was a very smart young reporter -- clearly a rising star -- and I was a pretty newly minted assitant metro editor. Quite frankly, she was a better reporter than I was an editor, and I think she might have stuck in Rochester longer if she'd had better editing and input from me and others.
Jim has often referred to the experience of being at the Arkansas Gazette when it closed. Obviously this brings back all those bad memories.
If you've never stood in a newsroom and heard the suits tell you your paper is dead, you can't begin to imagine what it's like. But at least in 1991, we had an expectation of finding a job somewhere else.
In 2009 -- not so much.
That was a beautifully done video. God bless the folks at the Rocky Mountain News.
ReplyDeleteI admit I got teary when Jeff said he had always imagined he'd be the old guy in the newsroom...
ReplyDeleteAnd what struck me most on a personal level is how there's no place left to go. I've worked at a Gannett paper for several years always imagining it was just one stop on the way to a good, little paper like the Rocky. That's never going to happen. I'll have spent a short - sometimes okay but often frustrating - reporting career in the last, dark days of Gannett.
4:35: that's when I cried, too. I imagined I would spend my entire working life at my paper or at the very least in newspapers, one day becoming the cranky old reporter who mentors the young-uns. Now I'm a cranky 30-something, mentoring the young-uns, because most of our oldsters are laid off, bought out, dead or retired. I see the Rocky's fate looming near.
ReplyDeleteDid the staff get severence packages?
ReplyDeleteThat video hit home. My heart goes out to those folks. Very moving.
ReplyDeleteTears are running down my face as I write this. That had to be horrific.
ReplyDeleteJim,
ReplyDeleteYour 11:21 comment about losing it over the corporate suits kind of sums up this blog for me. The suits are just that, empty suits. But the Rocky died because of issues outside of Scripps, not inside. Sometimes, things just change. The telephone killed the telegraph, not imcompetent telegraph management. You've got a great forum here. I wish it was focused more on how we could reinvent this business, not try to find blame for everybody's misery. You seem(my opinion) a little too focused on settling some score that has nothing to do with the rest of us in Gannett and the newspaper business.
God Bless all those at The Rocky....
ReplyDeleteI have been a reader since 1958 and
will dearly miss it.
It is too bad the newspaper industry didn't wake up to the fast paced changes coming down the tunnel. The light wasn't the end of the tunnel but a train destined to wreck the industry.
7:31
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Gannett is suffering from the same market dynamics that felled the Rocky - and that we should be thinking about what a viable future in journalism entails. But my sad reaction to the Rocky video was more than just empathy for fellow newspapermen and women. I was envious in a strange way. Granted, I'm sure the Rocky was not a perfect place to work or a perfect newspaper, but there was clear respect for the newspaper in the community and love for the paper in the newsroom. I don't see that at my Gannett paper. I definitely see love and passion for newspapering, but frustration that we are not even striving towards our ideals. I noticed so many gray hairs in the Rocky video. Look around my newsroom and the average age is - I don't know - but there aren't any seasoned people around anymore. We could never in a million years have pulled off that terrific video and last edition, let alone the Rocky's pulitzers. It was heart-wrenching because so many of us would love to work in a place we imagine the Rocky was like, and that failed. We instead work in places that don't seem to prize good journalism - it's sort of a pathetic, second-rate failure on our part.
7:31 pm: You misunderstood my comment; maybe I should have phrased it differently. I was responding to the emotion in Laura Frank's voice -- to what she was saying.
ReplyDeleteVery sad... Did I see clearly, that the Rocky Mountain and the Denver Post are (were) both owned by Scripps? Just wondering... if so why both papers in the same city owned by the same corporation. Weird... but I guess it does not matter now. I feel so bad for all of the Rocky Mountain staff... I feel bad for all of us too. My word verification: worser
ReplyDeleteWhat a great video, obviously a great bunch of journalists. I hate it that this has happened, and all of us probably see ourselves somewhere in that room. I hate it when anybody loses work, and this is an especially painful loss to a community, the silencing of a knowledgeable voice.
ReplyDeleteI think the I-Love-Newspapers bandwagon may get really crowded ... if one by one our papers fade to black. And I hope we can all find a way to keep that from happening.
I think the end got me the most.
ReplyDelete"That story is never going to run. It was schedule for Saturday." - the last line in the video.
Very nice video. It's in my imagination that the Gannett newsroom I work in could produce a video like that, have a buzzing staff and have a sharp-looking office to walk into instead of a dim, shabby cave.
ReplyDelete