Rocky Mountain News

Each April the past three years, I have been without steady, secure employment, without an office and wondering just how much longer I have health insurance. But in all three years the outlook has been different.

When I launched InsideTheRockies.com with Tracy Ringolsby and Jack Etkin a little over a year ago after the paper closed, our primary goal was to stay relevant. We hadn't considered the possibility we might actually create the very forum that was lacking in the city: honest, intelligent conversation about baseball.

The answer isn't quite as simple as "Woody Paige," because he is only one of many blowhards pretending to be journalists these days. But he's as good a place as any to start an investigation.

Someone, somewhere, now owns the Rocky Mountain News intellectual property. But because all the archives have been donated to the Denver Public Library, what someone owns is really just a name. What could that person, place or thing really accomplish by trying to raise the dead now? You could rehire the entire staff of the Rocky Mountain News and put it to work on a newspaper called the Rocky Mountain News and even that wouldn't be the Rocky Mountain News.

As much as I have been encouraged by the democratization of news the internet has brought about -- anyone can report on anything at anytime -- I believe in paid content. You get what you pay for. If you want your news for free, you're going to get news of little or no monetary value produced by just anyone at anytime. Free news is good news, but news with a monetary value is better news. What I have said a few times during the past year as I was involved in attempts to create paid online news sites -- and even been quoted a couple times saying it -- is that the great myth of this age of journalism is that newspapers' free online content is actually free. It's not; it's subsidized.

On Dec. 4, Scripps executives announced the company would attempt to sell the Rocky Mountain News, a decision that many rightly believed would lead to the newspaper closing. A week later, staff members of the Rocky met at the Denver Press Club to find a way to stop what felt inevitable, an effort that resulted in IwantmyRocky.com and later to INDenverTimes.com and later to . . . something. This is the story of those few months.

Former Rocky editor/publisher/president John Temple writing on his Temple Talk blog, has some advice that editors everywhere should heed.

Many see what happened here in Denver as the last battle between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. We here at America's Fish regard it as the first domino in a long row of bad things to happen to media and democracy in the country in the next year.

While we here at America's Fish will be the first among those who have made living from them to admit that newspapers have been at times slow to innovate and frustratingly tepid when it comes to covering big issues like politics and the environment, in this culture of job losses and fear of more job losses for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives to champion job losses as partly his doing is just stupid.

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 . . .