On the last day of the Rocky

It finally hit at about 3:30 Friday morning. Most of Thursday I felt mostly deflated, more irritated than actually angry. I was prepared, more or less. It had been almost three months since the initial announcement that Scripps was going to try to sell the Rocky, and there was ample time to prepare for what we assumed was the inevitable outcome. During those three months I occasionally felt optimistic, maybe hopeful, but nothing could ever fully shake the sense of dread. There were just too many complications in the situation, the economy tanking, the business model failing, the horrible intertwining of two businesses that should have been all out competing . . .

So when the news hit, I was prepared, convinced I was still numb from being laid off at the Sun-Times. It's not the same thing, really, losing a job and losing a newspaper, but for a few hours it seemed that way. Just another bad winter in the lives of journalists.

Then I watched the video and I remembered why I was there. If you haven't seen it and you care all about newspapers or the people who produce them, please watch it below. Maybe it plays better to someone who was there, who knows the people. I don't know. But it hit home with me, because it was my home.

Much of the video was filmed in the glorious conference room, which was also the site of my first prolonged experience at the new building when I returned after two and half years in Chicago. The day I interviewed for my second stint at the newspaper, I sat in on the morning meeting, just as I had when I interviewed the first time at the Rocky seven years earlier. It happens to most interviewees at newspapers, to sit in on a news meeting. I had done so in Chicago when I interviewed at the Sun-Times, and sat around the table much as I did those two times at the Rocky, saying little, hands folded, trying to look as it I was able to follow to the meeting, but in reality each newsroom has its own language, its own shorthand that differs slightly but significantly, like regional dialects. Following a news meeting on these interview days is generally hopeless, and in any case we're usually mostly concerned about where our desk would be and how much vacation we can get. After that news meeting at the Sun-Times, I interacted with maybe two people in that room again, and I guarantee that the only people there who remembered my name after that day were the two people who hired me.

The conference room in the old Rocky building was dark and windowless and cramped, and always left me feeling a little like I was in a focus group. The new conference room was well-lit with a great view of the city, the walls were covered with HD TVs, comfortable chairs, beautiful glass doors that I was always a little scared too open because they pivoted from the center not the side. I preferred to use the simpler side door. In any case, the two conference rooms were about as far removed from one another as any two I have seen in large newspapers, and yet when I sat down in this palace for the morning news meeting, preparing to say little and fold my hands, it felt as if I had been there hundreds of times before.

I knew everyone around the table. A few people had been promoted, a few people had left, but everyone around the table was a friend, someone I had worked with, someone I had once trained on a computer system, or designed a page for, or planned a section for or had a beer with. I spoke their language, their short hand, and some looked at me as if I was returning from nothing more than a two-week vacation. Which is exactly how it felt.

To see those same people on the video in that room, or to see my friend Brian Clark, who I've worked with now at two newspapers and can tell more bad stories about me than nearly anyone in this business, or Melissa Pomponio, who was raised in the same company as Brian and me and came to Rocky as we did by just driving down I-25, to see my family eulogizing and being eulogized from that slight distance, it finally hit me what was lost.

I went to sleep finally around 4 a.m. trying to wrap my head around the magnitude. I'm a child of the West. My grandmother turned 88 on Wednesday. She was born in 1921. When she was born my family had already been in the West for almost 40 years. My family arrived in South Dakota in the 1880s, not far from where we are now, somewhere between plains and mountains. When they arrived in a mostly barren, empty land, the Rocky Mountain News had already been in business for 25 years, providing a connection to the rest of the world for people just like my family. We, the Rocky family, were as far removed from that pre-Civil War Rocky family, as I am removed from my great, great, great (maybe even great again) grandmother. How many generations have passed through the West, passed through Denver, passed through life and death since the day that newspaper was born, how many journalists have put their names in print there, how many people no one every remembers set type, took photographs, ran wires, under the name of the Rocky Mountain News in 150 years, how many baseball, football, basketball and hockey games were played and recorded in those pages, how many parents looked for their child's name in our stories, looked for their faces in our pictures during all those years? That it was around at all after that long is some sort of miracle, but to be there at the end with my friends, those who know me better than anyone in the business, to toast it, to mourn it, to be part of it, to be the Rocky, is the greatest honor I have ever known. And in the end, that's what hurts. It's all past tense now.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.