The Rocky Mountain News was two months short of its 150th birthday Thursday when Scripps CEO Rich Boehne announced to the newsroom that Friday's edition of the newspaper would be the last.
Several other newspapers are expected to fold in the coming months, including the Tucson Citizen and the San Francisco Chronicle. Many others are fighting for their lives.
Last Sunday, the holding company of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A day earlier, Journal Register Company, which owns 20 small dailies in the Philadelphia and Cleveland areas as well as in Michigan, filed for bankruptcy.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune filed in January and the Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, filed in December.
Were newspapers slow to react to this thing called the Internet? Not at all. Newspapers were actually among the early adopters to the Internet age. Check out the video below from a 1981 newscast on KRON in San Francisco.
It's tough to say good-bye. The best to our many friends at the Rocky.
Update: The Columbia Journalism Review asked staffers to share their thoughts and reflections. Here is what sports columnist Dave Krieger had to say:
"Honestly? The corporate suits come in and cry their crocodile tears, then whiz on home to continue collecting their seven-figure salaries, pleased to have rid their shareholders of the albatross that was a helluva newspaper. Scripps is in the best financial shape of any newspaper company in America, save the Washington Post Co. Dean Singleton, who survives in Denver, is in far worse financial shape, in much deeper debt, but he fought for the market and Scripps didn't. Scripps turns tail and runs because it is as committed to the public service of journalism as teenagers to this spring's fashions. It has learned it can make more money in niche cable television channels. It has every right to make that call. It's a free country. But the question is whether everybody left in the journalism business is simply in it to make a buck. Certainly, for a while there, it was a really good buck.
"Gannett taught everyone how to make margins that were out of sight. But now that it's a struggle, is there anybody left with the heart of a journalist? Or are they all just profiteers, happy to move on to more profitable schemes when the going gets tough? Journalism has a constitutionally protected role in our Republic. We need people in charge of it who are more than profiteers. Yes, I know. Times are tough. The old model doesn't work. I get all that. Nevertheless. We need publishers with vision and conviction and courage and it's beginning to look like all we have are profiteers born on third base."
Good, the photographers at the Rocky are very unprofessional and as far as myself and many other vendors we are glad to see them go!!!
Posted by: Tom Simes | February 27, 2009 at 07:19 AM