After tomorrow, Denver becomes a one-newspaper town for the first time in 150 years. It has been a two newspaper town all my life. The closing of the Rocky Mountain News with one day’s notice to employees, is a historical moment in more ways than one… one for crassness, one for sorrow.
We all hoped it would not happen. We saw her, a big and venerable ship called The Rocky Mountain News, put out into a red sky sea, but she’d weathered storms before.
This time she was allowed to take on a lot of water before anyone called clear alert with instructions to prevent listing to deck rail. Instead, the captains threw crew members overboard to lighten the load, when in fact a ship laid in by fog and storm needs its weight, its gravitas, its storm-experienced captains and crew, to weather through.
Today Scripps, the owner of the Rocky Mountain News, came to the Rocky’s newsroom… the video cams were running as the employees were gathered together and told that their lives as writers for the newspaper most had given their lifetimes to… was over.
Scripps had not found a buyer for the Rocky, though they said they had tried, but Scripps has been trying to shed divisions that just don’t bring the revenues they wanted. But I don’t believe they truly gave the journos the best chance…
I think of how United Artists came about when the actors and actresses were fed up with the studio system, how a major fine arts college recently secured bank loans, and bought themselves back from the university that had purchased them a few years earlier and with whom the college could not reconcile being partners with. Perhaps more could have been done if there’d been far less rumor and far more facts given the employees in a timely way.
One of the oldest maxims of cold-blooded business: if a business begins to sink, abandoning it saves more money than trying to save it. The related maxim: Only fools try to bail water on a sinking ship. Even when it’s a consistently brave and battle-proven ship. Even when it consistently wins Pulitzers.
Sound advice to sink it rather than save it? Maybe. But you cant suddenly blast a ship to Neptune’s cave, without injuring the entire crew. That kind of business model is the only one I know where the captains/owners don’t go down with their ships… just making sure that every last one of the loyal crew goes down, instead.
And this ship, The Rocky, was listing, tis true, but was not sinking. The sinking was done today by Scripps firing massive torpedoes right at the intact hull.
The reps from Scripps said the journos had only tonight to polish their stories for tomorrow. The tone was, Come on let’s put out a top notch last edition! This fingernails-on-blackboard exhortation from Scripps sounded like some kind of Hollywood B movie where someone yells to the townspeople about the child who has been working his tail off all along, taking on more burden than anyone else: “Let the polio boy play at bat and win the day for Scutville. Come on, we can do it.”
In response to the ‘only one edition left because we say so,’ a journo gently asked the Scripps CEO, if the journos couldnt at least do several more editions through Saturday… just to ‘finish the stories we’ve been working on for weeks?’ The answer from Scripps-man: steel hammer ‘No.’
In the video of today’s ‘black Thursday’ at the Rocky, I watched with tears in my eyes, seeing over a dozen good friends I have known for years, many of them now with heads down, some weeping… all of them fine journalists: opinionated, aggressive, intelligent, soulful… often notably eccentric.
It is the end of an era. The word era means “a long and distinct period of history with a particular feature or characteristic.” And the end of the ‘newspaper print-on-paper’ era doesn’t just fall on the Rocky. Looking across the open sea, we see ever so many distinguished vessels bucking on the waves and into the troughs, trying to send signal flares into the night sky, hoping help will come in time.
I’d just want to say to the journos of the Rocky, that the characteristic of the era of print newspapers that stands out the most… is you. Each of you. In your saintly, semi-demonic, incisive, funny, determined, strange and radiant forms… each of you. Regardless of the captain, it’s the crew that makes the ship go.
You could say the Rocky was the owners, I suppose. But, at this point, their lack of far-seeing, their only one-day notice of ‘the end of the Rocky,’ with all journos told to box up and be out of the building tomorrow… would make that debatable. You could say the Rocky was the actual ink and the paper.
But really, the Rocky was an entire ‘mobile village’ flying through the open sea to wherever new sets of stories materialized…
Magical is not too strong a word to characterize a newspaper…. a huge community all the way from the old gang press printers and the lead /hot type setters, to the electronic setters and old keyline and paste-up guys and gals
from the executives today who once, as boys and girls, rose before dawn to deliver the papers in time for morning coffee to people all across the economic spectrum… to the paper-delivering mothers who have currently driven their muffler-dragging station wagons with full payload and beyond– also before dawn– having perfected the perfect thwack! of the paper roll center-driveway-left.
What was the print-on-paper newspaper era? It was the huge number of men and women working all night while we were sleeping, so the paper’d be ready the minute we were awake, meaning every morning a storyteller– in the form of a newspaper –would have sailed ahead full steam so as to show up right at our doors …
What was the newspaper era? an often wicked-funny, interested, intrepid, ever-learning pack of journo-storytellers… the ship’s crew– who filled the sails with pages and pages of their stories
–of failures and victory,
–of human gifts and foibles,
–of mysterious and devious black-hearts,
–of true crime rapscallions and heroines and heroes,
–of ‘can you believe this??’ fool stories,
–of ‘we love your dog’ stories,
–of ‘criminal of the day’ stories,
–of ‘hazards of the day; stories,
–of stories that showed the venerable journalists peering under the curtain, and behind the curtain too, but without hardly ever standing out in front of the curtain taking bows. What a crew.
And then too, part of the era, is us, the readers.
People of the future may speak– of an era long ago– when readers of newspapers literally were mostly ‘all on the same page,’ for we read the same stories every day… and it was a bond ….even though we could have used even more stories, rather than less. For that reason alone–the ocean of stories yet left to tell, we thought newspapers would go on forever.
But, to those of the Rocky: You are writers; it is in the blood, and thus you were born. The venue may change, but your writerly charisms will never change. If you came with the calling, the calling will continue, no matter who or what changes to the lesser rather than to the better.
I distrust the seeming hackneyed idea about when one door closes, another opens. This, instead, is what I know to be true: to writers with ovarios y cojones, when one door closes, we’ll do what’s needed to draw a door on the side of a brick wall, walk through it, and find/create a new world that respects and fits for us….
or we shall ensorcelled a door off its darn hinges… or else work in an atrium that needs no doors… or like a good dog, dig under, leap over, or just sashay around whatever wall anyone puts up to impede us.
As much as I love Dickenson the poet, I am also not strengthened by reducing hard rock hope down to: “Hope is a feathered thing…” as though hope is a little fragile thing.
From experience, too too much experience, I’d say, if hope is ‘a feathered thing’, then my brothers and sisters at the Rocky– let it be inside you a big freeking eagle with a twelve-foot wingspread, a gigantic raptor that does not eat cupcakes, but red meat. Scream like an eagle, fly like an eagle, and take care of your young, your gifts, like an eagle. Remember that though you may feel like a cinder at the moment, the soul ever carries a magnitude that can never die….
I know many of us will keep the light lit on the upper prayer decks as you find your way forward… the way you have kept the mainsail and mast lanterns lit for us, all these many years.
Thank you all so very much, from the world heart.
______________
CODA
with special thanks to Mr. Greg Moody at Denver’s Channel 4/ CBS affiliate, for covering the Rocky Mountain News’ last day, with fierce sincerity and compassion not often seen in media. I’ve also rarely seen fire shoot from a newscaster’s eyes. Perfect for this story.
And special gratitude and recognition for valor and brains to journalists Lynn Bartels, Mike Littwin, Mary Winter, Jean Torkelson, Patti Thorn, Penny Parker, Mike Rosen, the late beloveds, Alan Dumas and Gene Amole … these persons above are ones who have in some significant way helped me in my work.
(At this point, ten journos from the Rocky, including Misses Bartels and Parker, and Mr. Littwin, and a teacup-full of others have been fished out of the drink by the only remaining daily in Denver and will write for what used to be ‘their competitor.’ Nonetheless, Colorado will merit from this.)
And special kudos for meritorious service and nearly pathological loyalty (a gift, not a weakness)… this being the latest staff list I have for the Rocky, which as you can see by many of the last names, was a veritable United Nations type of newsroom, an accomplishment in media in and of itself:
Sam Adams
Jaime Aguilar
Curt Anderson
Armando Arrieta
Tom Auclair
Laressa Bachelor
Josephine Badovinac
Tice Bain
Glen Barber
Chris Barge
Lynn Bartels
Jim Benton (Columnist)
Mike Bialas
Christine Birch Ferrelli
Kathy Bogan
Dean Bonham
John Boogert
Lisa Bornstein (Columnist)
Hereward Bradley
B.G. Brooks (Columnist)
Eric Brown
Mark Brown (Columnist)
Todd Burgess
Amy Burke
Sara Burnett
Tim Burroughs
Bruce Cameron (Columnist)
Paul Campos
Vincent Carroll
Daniel J. Chacon
Gargi Chakrabarty
Chas Chamberlin
Mark Christopher
Brian Clark
Luke Clarke
Maria Cote (Columnist)
Abigail Curtis (Reporter)
Gary Damrell
Joyzelle Davis
Lynn DeBruin
Jay Dedrick
Judy DeHaas (Photojournalist)
Ed Dentry
Sonya Doctorian
Sarah Draheim
Heather Embrey
John C. Ensslin
Jack Etkin (Columnist)
Roger Fillion
Bob Findlay
Dave Flomberg
Kevin Flynn
Tillie Fong
Barry Forbis
Cliff Foster
Steve Foster (Assistant Sports Editor Interactive)
Laura Frank
Tess Furey
Preston Gannaway
Jonathan Garcia
Joseph Garcia
Mindy Garner
Nick Garner
Alan Gathright
Scott Gilbert
Paul Glaviano
Deb Goeken
Kevin Graves
Linda Gregg
Tina Griego (Columnist)
Marie Griffin
Christina Guerrero
Barry Gutierrez
Hector Gutierrez
Steve Haigh
Michael Hall
Rick Henderson
Tracee M. Herbaugh
Angel Hernandez
Barbara Hernandez
Chuck Hickey
Jane Hoback (Columnist)
Nick Hollensbe
Cindy House
Burt Hubbard
Kevin Huhn
Mark Humbert
Kim Humphreys
Tim Hussin
Ann Imse
Timothy Jamiolkowski
Ellen Jaskol
Bill Johnson (Columnist)
Bridget Johnson
Shirl Kasper
Jeff Kass
Sonia Kaur
Joanne Kelley
Lesley Kennedy (Columnist)
Anne Kerwin
Myung Oak Kim
Sarah Kleiner Varble
George Kochaniec Jr.
George Kochaniec Jr.
Dave Kopel
Dean Krakel
Dave Krieger (Columnist)
Caleb Kropf
Clay Latimer
Bruce Leaf
Jay Lee
Jeff Legwold
Brian Lehmann
John Lehndorff (Columnist)
Paula Lentini
Bernie Lincicome (Columnist)
Dean Lindoerfer
Sue Lindsay
Drew Litton (Columnist)
Mike Littwin (Columnist)
Aaron J. Lopez
Richard Lord
Julie Lovell
Joe Mahoney (Assistant Director of Multimedia)
Ivo Majetic
Javier Manzano
Jim Martin
Gary Massaro (Columnist)
Matt McClain
Lizzy McCormick
Katie Kerwin McCrimmon
Gregory McElvain
Darin McGregor
Phillip McPeck
James B. Meadow
Michael Mehle
Marty Meitus (Columnist)
Ellen Miller
Stephen Miller
David Milstead (Columnist)
Nancy Mitchell
David Montero
John Moore
Ivan Moreno
Berny Morson
Joanna Nasar
Liz Nayadley
Alex Neth
Marcia Neville
Mike Noe (Interactive Editor)
Tom Noel
Steve Oelrich (Editorial writer)
Ashleigh Oldland
Taylor Osieczanek (Columnist)
Ken Papaleo
Penny Parker (Columnist)
James Paton (Columnist)
Alan Pearce
Mike Pearson (Columnist)
Jon Perez
Andrew Piper
Heather Pitzel
Anthony Plascencia
Anthony Plascencia
Melissa Pomponio
Wes Pope (Photographer)
Julie Poppen
Carrie Porter
Crystal Preston-Watson
Norman Provizer
Jay Quadracci
Michelle Quintana
Lee Rasizer
Joe Rassenfoss
John Rebchook
Janet Reeves (Director of Multimedia)
Rob Reuteman (Columnist)
Tracy Ringolsby
Matthew Roberts
Randall Roberts
Marilyn Robinson
Scott Robinson (Columnist)
Dianne Rose
Jennifer Rosen
Mike Rosen
Gil Rudawsky (Columnist)
Mike Rudeen (Columnist)
Lisa Ryckman (Columnist)
Rick Sadowski (Columnist)
Jason Salzman (Columnist)
Bill Scanlon
Chris Schmaedeke
Chris Schneider
Dennis Schroeder
Hank Schultz
Judie Schwartz (Columnist)
Ed Sealover
Bob Sheue
Marc Shulgold (Columnist)
Vern Slocum
Jeff Smith
Jerd Smith
John Sopinski
Matt Southard
Amy Speer
M.E. Sprengelmeyer
Ed Stein (Columnist)
Scott Stocker (Columnist)
George Tanner
Duncan Taylor (Assistant Interactive Producer)
Andy Thomas
Kathye Thomas
Patti Thorn (Columnist)
Chris Tomasson
Jean Torkelson (Columnist)
Jim Trotter
Tony Trowbridge
Darlene Trujillo
Tonia Twichell
Evelinda Urman (Columnist)
Gerry Valerio (Columnist)
Kevin Vaughan
Judi Villa
Mary Voelz Chandler (Columnist)
Doug Wagner
Chris Walsh
April M. Washington (Reporter)
Ben Weinberg (Columnist)
Bob Willis
Paul Willis
Mary Winter (Columnist)
Mark Wolf
Karen Ziegler
It ought be noted that although a handful of people listed here will be working for The Denver Post, behind most of the persons named above…. are also fifty or more employees whose names aren’t listed here, who have also been given only one day’s notice that the Rocky will close tomorrow…