Ambrose: Demise of Rocky blow to newspapers

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A couple of days after it was announced that Denver's Rocky Mountain News was calling it a day, a friend told me the paper had been working for several months on an investigative series that hadn't quite been finished yet, and I thought to myself, there is what you lose when a paper closes. There is the tragedy.
Not that investigative reports are the most important thing a paper does, but they are emblematic of a larger reality. Newspapers look and listen for us. They disclose what they find. And we're then in a better position to make political judgments as citizens and -- hardly insignificant -- to live our lives more amply, securely and knowledgably.
No one does it better, certainly not television. News outlets on local TV have a fraction of newspapers' manpower and on anything other than their ludicrous coverage of the crime of the day, look to the press for instruction. The Internet's news is mostly newspaper news. Cable TV mostly provides headlines, and all those loudmouth commentators out there? We are parasites. We live on the stuff honest reporters give us.
I had great affection for the Rocky. I was a reporter there, then an assistant city editor, then editorial page editor, and after an adventure elsewhere, executive editor and editor. I thought of it as my paper while knowing it was also Scripps Howard's paper, the staff's paper and the community's paper, going back almost 150 years.
It was founded in 1859 by William Byers. In one of the crusades that served the city, he caused a hooligan to take some shots at him, which wasn't nearly so embarrassing as when a mistress later did the same thing. A book quoted in the Rocky's final edition, "The First Hundred Years" notes that Rocky editors -- "pioneers" and "builders" of the city and state -- had been "hanged in effigy" and "founded universities," showing how all were not universally admired even if some did admirable things.
The most recent editor, John Temple, was exceptional, leading his troops to four Pulitzer Prizes while the paper earned a reputation for having some of nation's best photography, a sports section matched by very few, a business section that lit up the skies and writers of such undeniable ability that, when doomsday arrived, the surviving Denver paper, the hated Denver Post, snatched up a number of them.
The Rocky went down in part because the Internet had taken away much of its classified advertising, which once accounted for something like a third of revenue at most papers. Losses amounted to $16 million a year. Don't suppose, however, that the decline of newspapers began yesterday.
Of the four dailies on which I have worked in a 42-year career, three have now gone belly-up, and not because I am poison, but because of social and economic changes that have been affecting the industry for decades. Go back to 1949, and virtually every household in America got at least one paper, and many of them more than one. Household penetration today is little more than half that, competition for advertising and attention has been growing, and papers are expensive to put out -- capital-intensive, labor-intensive, dependent on expensive newsprint and delivered door to door.
Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time, argues that papers can save themselves through a micro-payment system for stories read on the Internet, but I am skeptical, and I am against any subsidies from government as nothing short of an absurdity. My guess is that we will eventually have cities without major dailies, that the industry will shrink to insignificance and that its replacement will be Web news that won't begin to meet our informational needs as well as newspapers.
Then again, some modern-day version of those pioneer journalists may come up with something none of us now envisions.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)

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