False starts: How INDenverTimes raised our hopes

In the beginning, what appealed to me about the proposal of the Denver Daily Times was certainly not the name. That had to go, and go it did, only to be replaced with a name -- INDenverTimes -- that was hardly better. No, the appeal was that the people proposing it -- three local businessmen with no experience in an industry that was trying to leave its best people behind -- didn’t claim to know the answer to the problem that caused the Rocky Mountain News and later the Seattle P-I to fold. They merely insisted, as I did, that an answer must exist and we have to find it.

A strain of tunnel vision afflicts newspaper people at all levels, from executives who variably have failed to see first the threat and later the vulnerability of Craigslist down to reporters who fight so hard to maintain the two one-way conversations going on with readers rather than engage them in a dialogue. Much of we are facing today is of our own making, but there are smart people who are looking at the declining circulation, the declining ad revenue and the rising costs of production and see the problem realistically but don’t know how to solve it. It is possible, even probable, that the answer to what is crushing newspapers and threatening journalism will come from the outside, a fan rather than a player, but given how quickly this final stage of our existence has emerged, I am suspicious of someone who claims to absolutely know the answer.

There are good reasons for this.

What is happening to newspapers now was likely inevitable, but shouldn’t have happened this soon. The crumbling economy has sped up the erosion of ad revenue and forced newspapers and media companies to make drastic decisions that would have happened gradually over the course of the next two or three years. An answer in this environment is likely going to be based on false assumptions about the future of ad revenue, either assuming that it will return to its previous levels when the economy rebounds or assuming that it will continue to fall. We don’t know what is going to happen with ad revenue for newspapers in the next two to three years simply because we don’t know how many newspapers are going to fall and struggle and what will emerge to take their place and compete for that ad revenue.

Then there are the people who just say eliminate the newsroom and aggregate. To some extent this is a viable solution on a national level. If you want to follow the unfolding drama of the Minnesota Senate race, there are many sources from which to cull that information. But if you want to follow what’s happening at city hall in Denver, the loss of a newspaper and its reporters greatly reduces the amount of news available to aggregate. Even on a national level, however, as more newspapers are threatened and need to cut back or fold altogether or if those organizations fight back against the aggregation as the Associated Press is doing now, the idea of creating a news product without original reporting is becoming less feasible.

But the most important reason to be suspicious of those who claim to know the answer is that few people understand the support system that exists at a newspaper. Several people claimed all we need to do to succeed is eliminate the middlemen -- the copy editors and designers -- and rely strictly on the columnists and reporters who dig up the news. One person who proposed such a scenario was a columnist from the Rocky who claimed to not need a copy editor. Later, that same columnist misquoted Thomas Jefferson in a column, a mistake that was caught by a copy editor. The point is that the workflow of a newspaper has become its support system; it’s cumbersome, costly and in the end is a huge contributor to newspapers’ current situation because it slows down the news and raises to cost to produce it. But it is a reality of the situation and needs an answer: if you want to create a news product eliminating the copy editors, you need to be certain that reporters and columnists are thoroughly checking their facts, not just their grammar. If you want to eliminate the reporters and aggregate news with editors, you need to have an answer for how you cover a story that no one else is covering. Failure to find an answer to that question is the answer itself: if you can’t cover a story unless someone else is covering it first, then why exist?

So, in the beginning it was a lack of an answer, an acknowledgment that someone is missing something but we don’t know what, that appealed to me personally about the proposal of a web site staffed with former Rocky Mountain News reporters and editors. What would become INDenverTimes rose from a vision shared by a group of three dozen former Rocky staff members and three local businessmen – good journalism could be good business. That was their tagline, not ours, but it summed up what we all felt: corporations had neglected the product in favor of production and that once the weight of the overhead was removed, or at least reduced, the quality of the journalism would pay for itself. Beyond that, the answer needed to be discovered, and we -- businessmen and journalists -- were going to work together to find it.

The vision split over the course of the five weeks during which the two groups worked together. It was not about the size of the staff or the amount of money the staff would be paid. In the end it was about how to find the answer.

In the next few weeks, America’s Fish will recount what happened beginning on Dec. 4, when Scripps announced it was putting the Rocky Mountain News up for sale, the efforts of Rocky staff members to delay or avoid the inevitable with the web site IwanymyRocky.com, the eventual closure of the paper, our involvement in INDenverTimes and whatever comes next.

There will be a next. The story isn’t quite over yet.