The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper. From humble beginnings as a mining town rag in 1859, The Rocky was forced to stop their presses on February 27th, 2009.
Of the 150 years The Rocky delivered the news to Colorado, there were about as many reasons for why they could no longer do so. After the announcement was made, fingers were pointed by many and at everything from poor management to the paper’s tabloid format; from owners’ cowardice to boring writing.
Declining circulation was not unique for just The Rocky Mountain News. Decreased ad revenue along with The Great Recession resulted in 105 newspapers closing their doors, all in the same year as The Rocky.
Since 2007, Newspaper Deathwatch has been keeping track of America’s dying newspaper industry. By their count, 25 major metropolitan newspapers have closed or radically changed format since 2007.
Papers that have found success have done so byway of implementing hybrid business models with emphasis on going online. The Rocky was online; they launched their website on March 1st, 1996, way ahead of the curve. So why did the Rocky still flounder? John Temple, the editor, publisher and president of The Rocky Mountain News, gave a speech at the UC Berkley Media Technology Summit in 2009 in which he explained why The Rocky’s website failed to save them:
“We knew the Web was a place we needed to be. But we didn’t have a clear strategy. Mission. Or objective. It was a “complement to the paper”.”
The Rocky Mountain News viewed their digital presence as nothing more than an added feature. They understood the web was important and had the wherewithal to create a digital presence, but the management at The Rocky were newspaper men; their focus was on the survival of the newspaper.
Colorado’s oldest newspaper was plagued by other problems as well. For more than a century they had competed against The Denver Post. At one time, circulation between the two papers had reached over 1.1 million. But battling another paper for viewership and revenue in an already small market proved to be the final blow.
By 2001 the withering industry had taken its toll on both The Rocky and The Denver Post. In a last-ditch effort, both papers signed a Joint Operations Agreement to share their printing and manufacturing resources (in order to cut costs) while continuing to compete with one another on the journalism front.
But over the next 8 years, circulation between both Colorado papers continued to decline until Rocky’s owners finally decided to pull out of the market.
The demise of The Rocky Mountain News is a case study for newspapers everywhere. Not only in the obstacles that papers face today in a rapidly changing industry, but as a fair-warning for others what the cost can be if they stand against that change.
Rocky’s subscription prices were among the lowest in the nation but they still lost viewership. They pulled out of smaller markets in Colorado to become less extended. The paper won multiple Pulitzer Prizes. They went online early in 1996. And they still failed.
If The Rocky Mountain News had cut their chains in printing and jumped onto the internet in a genuine way, would it might have been enough to save them? We’ll never know. But of all the changes The Rocky did make to stave off their demise, they failed to make the one that is actually working for other papers in the country: creating a real, online presence, not to supplement print, but so as to have a place to jump when conventional print dies.
Last month, The Denver Post reached 60 million viewers not from their paper, but from their mobile app.
Brian Ireland's 