Sobering news for this week’s edition of Journalism Friday. Today marks the final edition of one of the one of the two daily papers in Denver, Colorado, The Rocky Mountain News. After almost 150 years in business, the paper is being shut down. I’ve never been a reader of this particular paper, but I have seen some great multimedia pieces come from their newsroom. Knowing that makes it frustrating to see this closure — they were making the changes necessary to adapt to new media, but somehow not fast enough to save the paper.
There is a great lovely and sad video on their website about the final edition that I urge you to watch: www.rockymountainnews.com. The video does a great job of pointing out some of the business concerns for newspapers today that is well-explained. A recent editorial also pretty clearly explains the challenges of having two newspapers in a single city.
There were some great stories and reflections in the video, but this quote from editor and publisher John Temple stood out to me as a stellar statement of what journalism and newspapers can be:
I believe that a newspaper is an experience, and that we should think of it that way — what kind of experience are we providing people? And that experience should touch people, it should make people feel, and good storytelling does that…
And that’s why I want to be a journalist.
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I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard this in the morning…this is a travesty…and I heard that the San Fran Chronicle may be next.
This is just tragic. I really rely on local news. But lately it seems like I’ve been watching the two Twin Cities newspapers go seriously downhill. In terms of quality, depth of articles, and having websites of any quality, neither one has been very impressive lately. And that was before the recession!
I hope that local newspapers stay around because frankly the internet isn’t ready to step in and completely take over the news.