Fate of Rocky Mountain News to be announced

On places where electronics nerds hang out, there was some.

 

Yeah, even I heard some chortling about Circuit City.

 

Wish I could say there's a special kind of Perdition waiting for those pieces of slime who gloat over people's lives being ruined.
Assholes, every one of them.

To the folks in Denver, in Seattle and other endangered spots: You have my fondest thoughts and hopes for making the best of a completely gut-wrenching situation.

Wish I had something more constructive to say :'(

 

God bless everyone in the Mile High City

 

Because blaming the media for fill-in-the-blank is the crutch of the unintelligent.

Fenian, as usual, plowed the shit out of it with his take.

 

Willie, next time make sure Michael Phelps doesn't screw up my birthday cake.

 

And yet, at a lot of our shops, driving clicks from these jackasses is what determines the value of our coverage decisions and even our personnel. The blogs that don't generate big numbers of comments, as well as traffic, somehow fail in the eyes of some bosses and marketing folks.

As for the RMNers who found shelter at the Post, congratulations on that. But frankly, I'm amazed that a Singleton paper would do something like that. If folks in Denver couldn't read guys like Littwin or Kreiger in the RMN, where were they going to turn to read them? Gotta think those guys are pulling in solid six-figure salaries, plus benefits, so then the question becomes: Can they possibly bring along enough new readers to the Post to justify their expense? How much would circulation have to increase to make that a smart financial deal for Singleton? And if it isnt a smart financial deal, since when did Dean Singleton do anything to actually improve the quality and depth of his journalism?

As I said, good for the 10 crossovers or however many, but I'd love to see how the numbers will work on that.

 

Don't think for a minute the guys moving from RMN to Singleton are going to get paid anymore near what they were making. Singleton gobbled up desperate journalists and offered them table scraps to continue their craft, I am guessing.

 

This says it better than I could (as much as I am for developing online content, my heartaches for the newspaper industry):

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/26/EDFU164VIO.DTL&hw=Debra+Saunders&sn=001&sc=1000

And I hear this from people who say they care about news. They look to the site-rich Internet for salvation, unaware that the decline of newspapers means that those shiny new Web sites are linking to fewer real news stories. What looks like more choice isn't. It's more doors leading to fewer rooms.

When a newspaper dies, you don't get a comprehensive periodical to fill the void. You get an informational vacant lot into which passers-by can throw their junk.

 

Friend and college buddy of mine is now a big-time politician in Denver, and he grew up reading the News. He would bring back copies when he would go home for breaks and I would read them for days. I never saw a Denver Post until I went to visit him about 10 years later.

 

Solid, solid work. Fenian's, too.