If you don’t think the folding of the Rocky Mountain News is a tragedy, a big one, let me recount what happened to my father, Frank Conniff, the editor of the World Journal Tribune, the largest afternoon daily in the country, when it folded in 1967.
He had a stroke. The day the paper folded.
My father never recovered: multiple strokes and a few years later he was dead. I was 17. I told anyone who asked: “He died of the newspaper business.”
It was no joke. My Dad took it personally, and not even a staff that included Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, and Dick Schaap could save the day. The Rocky, the best tabloid I ever read, had a terrific staff and I particularly loved the newspaper on Saturdays when it spread its wings into a weekend broadsheet like a Cinderella at the ball. The Rocky didn’t fold because it wasn’t good enough or even because of the horrible economy.
It folded because newspapers as we know them are dead.
Don’t get me wrong. I love newspapers, love them dearly. I worked for newspapers as hard as I could in San Francisco, Baltimore, Boston, and right here in Aspen. Newspapers, on paper, are a noble thing and a living breathing being. They will survive in some diminished form, but as a dominant, monopolistic, agenda-setting cash cow the Great American Newspaper is a goner. Put a fork in it. I left the Boston Herald American in 1979 because I thought newspapers were dying. I was thirty years early to the wake. The day has come.
Newspapers in St. Louis and Seattle are likely to be next—but what about Aspen, one of the last of the two-newspaper towns in America?
I worked on the Aspen Daily News for eighteen months, long enough to know that the owner, Dave Danforth, who fancies himself a crusading journalist, would no more use his millions to keep a money-losing paper alive than the man in the moon. He’s cheap and flinty in a New England sort of way. (You’ve seen the Red Sox cap he never takes off.) My guess his tolerance for red ink is non-existent. He can’t be faulted for that, though he might be tempted to outlast the Aspen Times and thus become the only paper in town.
As for the Aspen Times, the more corporate Swift company has folded five newspapers in Colorado the last few months, including the Spanish-language La Tribuna and the Valley Journal in Carbondale. I would be shocked if the Post-Independent in Glenwood is able to survive. A corporate owner is even less likely to keep a corpse alive.
The local papers have cut staff and cut their rates but their survival is still in question. Without the fool’s gold of real estate advertising they have become desperate, slashing rates and making deals to keep hope alive. Will they survive? As a competitor with Aspen Post, I hope they go out of business tomorrow, in part because of their tendency to print outright falsehoods about yours truly. But as a man who loves newspapers and all they represent, it makes me want to cry.
Every time a newspaper folds, something inside of me dies too.
It was the summer of 1975 when I moved to Aspen. I lived in a room at the Tyrolean Lodge, paying monthly during what was considered off-season, waiting for the Aspen Times to place the bundles of their weekly edition on the sidewalk at 310 E. Main Street, usually around 2 pm. I was one of about twenty people hanging out, anxious to grab the paper and find the new listings of apartments for rent. Then it was a mad dash to the nearest phone to place a call to the potential new landlord, hoping you were the first to see the place and put down a deposit on it. Back then there wasn’t much to filling out an application or waiting for an approval. If you weren’t too stoned and you had the funds to back up your check, it was pretty much a done deal that you’d have a new place to live in a couple of weeks, or even days. Once you secured your new home sweet home, you had the next seven days to read the rest of the paper.
I never thought Aspen was big enough to need two papers. Hell, Aspen didn’t even have more than one radio station. But I fully understand the desire for competition and the profits to be gained from advertising fees. The Times grew and became a daily paper. The Daily News never did manage to have the competitive edge on the classified ads, but they were bold enough to tell it like it was when shit happens, and quote verbatim with expletives. It was never a matter of loyalty for me towards either paper. I read them both.
Cyberspace is replacing paper. Why place a classified ad in a newspaper and pay to do it when you can instantly advertise anything you want to a worldwide audience for free on craigslist? How can any paper compete with that? When you consider all of the costs involved with running a newspaper business, I’m surprised that they haven’t closed shop yet. Most of them have an online edition, so where is the need or purpose of printing a hard copy anymore?
The city I live in now has one newspaper, published weekly. The city I work in has one paper, published biweekly. Both cities are larger than Aspen, yet they can’t find reason and/or funding for a daily paper.
It might be a sad day for the newspaper industry; sad times we’re in now. But you know the lyrics, Michael. “The times, they are a changin’.
I’m not sure this is so sad (the newspaper demise, not the story about your dad, which is ). In my view, newspapers have become so biased and do such poor reporting, they might as well bite the dust and make way for the web, which is no better than that — but frequently no worse, costs less, and doesn’t use all that paper and ink. Seems like that’s the kind of green you advocate here?
As for the Aspen papers, their tedious way of using letter wars and small town spats to generate readership might as well fragment into a bunch of blogs, no loss there.
See blog about this at wildsnow.com
Funny how almost all the fond memories of newspapers in Aspen seem to go back-back-back to when everyone PAID the paperboy or papergirl for the Aspen Times Weekly. Now those same nostalgia buffs, like you Kit, might hesitate to divulge the necessary coinage for the newsaper that is now FREE. The point being that nostalgia for newspapers in Aspen goes back years and years. Fond memories of recent newspapers around here are hard to find.
Lou, I agree with you about the bias in the reporting. There are so many examples I won’t even try to list them here, but you (like me) have probably felt their sting. Someday someone is all but sure to write a dissertation on the subject of how newspapers went out of business by stinking like fishwrap. Also how the constant refreain of “liberal media bias” cost them customers.
Do they deserve to live? Some do, some don’t. Does the single good reporter have enough virtue to save an enterprise otherwise corrupt? Probably not.
Any way you look at it, newspapers will have to re-invent themselves to survive. While they’re at it, they might think about leaving the bias behind.
Yeah, the bias is sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant. It’s really obvious when you’re part of something that gets reported on, or if you just read critically with some outside knowledge of the subject. And it’s of course both liberal and conservative (though usually more liberal IMHO), as well as politically correct, etc.
My crystal ball says the web will provide (and is already providing) trusted sources, and some of them will make it their business to provide news. Shouldn’t be too difficult for that to take the place of traditional newspapers.