Denver’s Rocky Mountain News daily paper is being closed by its owners the Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group. The newspaper had a difficult year economically, was put up for sale for a mere one month and this week was told by its owners that the doors were simply going to shut.
It’s a story that we may see more and more often in coming months and years. The newspaper industry is changing radically and in many cases contracting. There are a lot of possible explanations and quite a few likely consequences to consider. Today, instead of discussing those in our blog post – we want to turn the microphone over to the good folks at the Rocky. They’ve produced a very moving 20 minute video about how it feels and what it means to lose their jobs and newspaper. The staff has put that video on the top of their front page, we’ve embedded it below.
We believe the closure of the Rocky is a real loss. The video below puts it much better than we can, though, so check it out. We don’t resent the bad-mouthing of bloggers at 14 minutes, either, there’s some truth to the criticism.
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
We’ll miss the newspapers that disappear for their civic responsibility, their breadth of coverage, their budgets for investigation and their physical form. It’s nice to hold a physical newspaper, it’s nice to visit a news website of general interest and it’s nice to think of the time-honored role of the news reporter with notepad in hand. As part of the world of new media online journalism, we don’t wish newspapers harm at all. We recognize how much we have to learn from the people behind them. We hope that knowledge can live on.
For more on this general topic check out Newspaper Death Watch, Online Journalism Blog and Poynter.org. Thanks to NPR’s Andy Carvin for pointing us to the Rocky’s important video.
