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Postmortem for a Dead Newspaper

Techdirt points out a great postmortem for the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that ended up shutting down because they couldn't adapt to a world beyond print. While long, the talk (in both video and print) is incredibly candid coming from someone who lived through it and shares at least some portion of the blame. "It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset. ... The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with."

9 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Original Blog Posting by aembleton · · Score: 4, Informative

    Can't we link to the original source in the article summary? http://www.johntemple.net/2009/09/lessons-from-rocky-mountain-news-text.html

    1. Re:Original Blog Posting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      ...and trying to keep the cream cheese off the keyboard.

      Actually, the newspapers were pretty good at letting you read them, eat and not get cream cheese on the keyboard.

  2. Keep in mind, though by Knara · · Score: 4, Informative

    That RMN and Denver Post were essentially owned by the same parent company. Wasn't really a loss, given that neither paper has been particularly good for quite a while now.

  3. Horrible submission by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why on earth is this a link to a tiny summary of the actual article?
    Here's the article http://www.johntemple.net/2009/09/lessons-from-rocky-mountain-news-text.html

    Techdirt doesn't deserve the ad revenue for such pathetic summary spam

  4. Re:BS by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.

    Leaving aside the absurdity of the "liberal media" mantra in general ... the Rocky Mountain News was known as Denver's conservative newspaper. And the more they tried to chase the Fox News crowd, the more their fortunes declined. Take that FWIW.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  5. Re:Papers Still Strong in Canada by kitezh · · Score: 2, Informative
  6. No; patently wrong by WindBourne · · Score: 2, Informative

    RMN and DP had issues years ago, so what happened is that they combined the printing/marketing/ads together. It allowed the news portion to compete while it supposedly lowered their costs (obviously not).

    You will see that they are owned by 2 different companies:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_News

    RMN died because DP outlasted them. DP is in serious trouble as well. Neither of them had a clue about how to make money except on print.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  7. Re:BS by IgnoramusMaximus · · Score: 4, Informative

    The self righteous sanctimony and distain you have of what is CLEARLY more people than ABC/NBC/CBS and probably CNN combined is interesting ...

    Someone already pointed out that this is an argumentum ad populum type of logical fallacy and so I will skip right to this:

    I'd love to compare the literacy of say those that watch what is on those channels to that of what is on Fox News.

    If by "literacy" you mean "knowledge about the current affairs", then ask and you shall receive.

    From there: the 2nd least informed and most confused (about basic geographic, geopolitical and other everyday facts) class of viewers: Fox News Viewers. Beaten only by the Network Morning Shows, of the "How to make Cookies with Martha Stewart and 3 other bimbo celebrities" variety, firmly holding the rather dubious honour of being the dumbest audience ever.

    Conversely, most informed audience: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Oops.

    Somehow I do not think this is what you were looking for.

    And the rest of the drivel you posted goes down hill from here, to the point that it is not even worth responding to.