Who Really Killed Rocky Mountain News?

Who Really Killed the Rocky Mountain News?

By Bob Diddlebock

"We are just deeply sorry."

That's all E.W. Scripps Co.'s Cincinnati, Ohio–based executives could mumble last week in closing Colorado's oldest company, the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News.

In shuttering an operation sprung in 1859 from a gold-mining camp just blocks from its downtown Denver home, Scripps directly or obliquely blamed everything — the economy, the Internet, demographics — and everybody — Denver Post panjandrum William Dean Singleton, ignorant consumers, bloggers — for the diminished tabloid's demise. They certainly were factors. (See the top 10 financial collapses of 2008.)

But the black hats in this sad Western tale are the suits: the Scripps' newspaper executives whose ineptitude over the past 25 years fumbled away a prime market to a competitor they should have killed off two decades ago.

When MediaNews Group boss Singleton rode into town to buy the scarred and limping Denver Post from Times Mirror Co. for next to nothing in 1987, the Rocky was riding high, thanks to the fevered legacy of former editor Michael Balfe Howard and a band of savvy local marketers.

A wild-and-crazy guy whose grandfather had co-founded Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Howard recruited smart, aggressive talent throughout the 1970s and let it loose to dig up dirt, badger Denver's cowboy-booted establishment and raise journalistic hell. Occasional newsroom gunplay and rampant staff drug use aside, those Hunter Thompson–like efforts paid off: the Rocky topped the Post's circulation in 1980. (Read "How to Save Your Newspaper.")

But Howard's cocaine-fueled rocket fizzled, and the suits in Cincy, tired of his crazed professional and personal ways, bounced him in 1980. Though circulation climbed, eventually hitting 447,000, and advertising continued to grow, Scripps coasted.

Cincinnati got complacent, refusing or declining, for example, to administer a kill shot to the Post, such as buying it before Singleton did, while parading faceless, small-thinking editors through the newsroom and importing ad execs who couldn't or wouldn't think local.

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