My Rocky was gone

The first big domino in the newspaper industry's long, brutal tumble fell this week. The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's oldest newspaper, published its final edition on Friday. And while this wasn't unexpected to the industry's observers, it's still no less a shock to the system.

If you're a Romenesko reader, you've been bombarded with awful news about the industry every weekday for the last several years--layoffs, buyouts, sales, bankruptcies, section closings, you name it. But despite all of it, the papers themselves have remained intact; they're probably the most consistent things in America this side of death, taxes and the Postal Service (and maybe not even that last one). The only exceptions were a couple of papers, like the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit News and Free Press, dropping from daily to nondaily print circulation. But even those operations were still producing news, still updating their websites 'round the clock. That changed this week. The Rocky isn't just continuing in a different form; it's done. Like, forever.

This video is long, but well worth your time:



Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Perhaps the video feels a bit too navel-gazing; after all, we don't do 20-minute videos every time an auto-parts plant in our town closes. But as someone who works at a paper that's been sold twice in the last 15 months, I'm still amazed at how many people in our area were not only aware of our sales, but seemed genuinely concerned. They asked me out of the blue at the end of interviews, "What does this mean for you guys? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?"

It's times like those when I'm reminded that maybe a newspaper does mean a bit more to a community than your standard auto-parts plant (unless you're in Detroit). Not only is it the hub, the lifeblood, and all those other cliches, but it's also something people feel an intangible yet strong ownership in. Like the woman on the video said, hundreds of thousands of Coloradans lost not just "the Rocky" but "my Rocky" this week.