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To answer one question I've often been asked since Thursday: No, I have no idea what the armistice in the Great Denver Newspaper War means to my columnar career.
To answer another: No, I had no idea that it would happen on May 11, although the announcement was not a total surprise.
Trade gossip had it that the Rocky had been losing money by the carload for years and that nothing had turned the tide of red ink. Then it's a matter of when, not if.
For once, the gossip was true, though tarot cards and Ouija boards remain more reliable than the scuttlebutt among journalists.
In my early years, growing up near Greeley, I was blissfully ignorant of the Denver newspaper war. We got the Rocky in the morning and the Greeley Tribune in the afternoon.
Occasionally we saw a Sunday Post, but not often. My dad hated the Post because he had carried it during his boyhood in Fort Morgan. Afternoon delivery on weekdays was wholesome exercise, but on Sundays the job meant peddling his bicycle to an unheated shack at 4 a.m. on arctic days, then assembling the sections before he could deliver the papers, which were so fat that he had to make several exhausting trips, all before sunrise.
So I didn't pay much attention to the struggle until I
was in college 30 years ago, when the Post was the dominant
paper in the Rocky Mountain Empire.
One issue then illustrates why cities benefit from two newspapers. The hot topic in the early 70s was having Colorado host the 1976 Winter Olympics. This was supported hammer-and-tongs by the entire Colorado establishment, including the Post. The only visible opponent was an obscure state legislator named Dick Lamm.
The Rocky then practiced what journalists are supposed to practice: skepticism.
Rather than parrot the boosters' lines about how Colorado would gain eternal benefits from the Olympics, the Rocky sent a reporter to Squaw Valley, Calif., which had hosted the 1960 winter games.
None of the promised benefits (which sounded just like the promises being made for Colorado) had appeared, and the place was hurting when it was supposed to have been booming. It was honest journalism that raised the question: Why should we believe the Colorado Olympic boosters?
That's the sort of aggressive, feisty reporting that second papers do, and the public benefits.
By the end of the 70s, the Rocky dominated. The Post, scrapping for market share, questioned the conventional wisdom of the 1980s. That led to a Pulitzer prize after Post reporters discovered that few of the missing children pictured on milk cartons had been abducted by strangers; most were pawns in interstate parental custody disputes.
This might have continued indefinitely, but as the Post stayed on course, the Rocky did some stupid things in the '90s. Eliminating out-state circulation to focus on the metro area may have made economic sense; distribution is expensive, and the Rocky needed to cut costs.
But the way the Rocky did it was insulting. It was in effect telling thousands of us that we were worthless, and the Rocky propaganda sent to advertising agencies naturally leaked out -- the Rocky went to real people in the metropolis, while the Post just went to cows. You don't win friends by implying that the customers you just abandoned are so many cattle.
Then came the if you live here, you get it
ads on
TV, making many of us wonder where we lived, since we
didn't get it. And most recently, the change from Rocky
Mountain News to Denver Rocky Mountain News.
Rocky Mountain News had been a fine name since the first
edition of Colorado's first newspaper appeared on April 23,
1859, in Cherry Creek, Kansas Territory.
It is the
second-oldest continuing business in Colorado (the oldest
is the R&R Market in San Luis, which opened in
1855).
In this era when companies spend millions to establish a
brand identity,
the Rocky already had an excellent
one as the pioneer newspaper that had not only survived a
frontal assault from Bonfils and Tammen, but had gone on to
do some great things.
And what did they do with it? Changed it to Denver
Rocky Mountain News,
a self-contradictory mouthful.
Just after that transition, I was chatting with an editor at the Post, to learn whether a column had made it through the ether from Salida. He said he was busy conducting an investigation of the Post's spending.
I haven't found it yet,
he explained, but it's
got to be there. We must be slipping some big money under
the table to Larry Strutton (the publisher of the
Rocky).
I pressed for details, and heard Because every
decision he's made has been to our benefit, not the
Rocky's. It just stands to reason that he must be on our
payroll somewhere.
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