5280 Magazine

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 12:45pm on Friday, May 29th, 2009

Mangling the tag line of the New York Times, 5280 magazine writer Maximillian Potter argues that the Rocky Mountain News didn't have to die, in the story "All the News that's Fit to be Killed" published in the June 2009 edition:

"On February 27, 2009, just 55 days shy of the paper's 150th anniversary, the Rocky went under, swallowed into the abyss of America's failing newspaper industry. Scripps executives again came to town. They provided answers to the Five Ws of the closure, and the Rocky reporters wrote it all down, a final assignment for a final edition. The paper had been hemorrhaging millions of dollars, the executives said. They said they'd had a "strategy," but then the "ground shifted beneath our feet"—the U.S. economy's plunge and the increasingly devastating power of the Internet—and it simply became too much to overcome. "We did all we could," the suits said. "It's nobody's fault." As a headline in the final edition put it: "Dismal economy, changing world halt Rocky's near 150-year run."

As first drafts of history go, it wasn't bad, as it had just enough of the facts. As corporate spin goes, however, it was flawless, as it omitted just enough of the unpleasant truths. The Scripps party line avoided the fact that this once-great newspaper company long ago had begun turning away from print; that it was casting aside yet another journalistic institution like an emptied piggy bank."

The full article:
http://www.5280.com/issues/2009/0906/feature.php?pageID=1740