Scripps' Rocky Mountain: A Preview for the Newspaper Industry

It's a bad, bad time to be a money-losing newspaper. E.W. Scripps Co. (SSP) just announced that it will shut down the Rocky Mountain News after failing to find a buyer for the 150-year-old paper.

Scripps said in December that it hoped to sell the Rocky, which is published in a joint operating agreement with MediaNews Group's Denver Post. But no buyer could be found with a serious plan for turning around the paper's losses, which totaled $16 million last year.

The Rocky's demise could be the first in a series for big-city dailies. Hearst is threatening to close the San Francisco Chronicle unless it can sell the paper or force its union into accepting deep cuts. Another Hearst paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was given 60 days to find a buyer or shut down. That deadline arrives early next month.

Comments

[Mad Hedge F...:]

abc Looks like the San Francisco Chronicle may be about to join the dustbin of history. The industry rag, Editor and Publisher, says that the privately owned Hearst Corporation has given the venerable paper an ultimatum to cut costs or close. The 150 year old Chronicle lost $50 million last year. Of course, this may all be a ploy just to beat up one of the last surviving unions, but they have made a similar threat to their paper in Seattle. Ironically, Hearst acquired the Chronicle and dumped the San Francisco Examiner in 2,000, which was then put on a crash diet and made profitable by its new owners. If the Chronicle goes it will join the Philadelphia Enquirer which went under last week, and the soon to be shut Christian Science Monitor. Google has been eating their lunch for years, and classified ads have migrated to Craig's List. It is tough to chop down a forest to make paper, get a union to print it, and manually distribute your product, and then compete against a one man email blast on costs. If the Chronicle goes it will be survived by a much smaller SFGate.com, one of the most successful web based newspaper portals out there. There could be a ninth earning save by a surprise buyer. But moguls willing to hemorrhage money just to promote a political view are a dying breed. Rupert Murdoch has been the only recent buyer of newspapers, and something tells me that a match with the Chronicle would not exactly be one made in Heaven. In five years there will probably be only two mass circulation papers left, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, with the Washington Post as an outlyer. Thousands of small, local, niche publications will take up the slack. As a long time print journalist dating back to the typewriter days myself, I am sad to see newspapers go. But you can’t exactly sit like Denmark’s old King Canute and order the tide to stop rising. Journalism is degrading into an army of guys banging away at the computers at 3:00 AM in their boxer shorts. Trust, accuracy, objectivity, style, and taste will be the victims.

Feb 27 08:39 AM