Saturday morning I got up and there were two newspapers on the deck, the Miami Herald and the New York Times. But 450,000 people in Denver didn't get their regular paper that day since Friday was the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News, a paper nearly 150 years old.

Subscribers got the Denver Post instead, which is a good enough paper I suppose. Certainly better than it was a few years ago, before Dean Singleton decided to make it the flagship of his Media News Group.

The death of a newspaper, an event that is getting as horribly familiar as seeing baby boomer friends on the obituary page, is sad for the readers and painful for the staff. (Perhaps not hardest hit are the design consultants. Still, the Danilo Black USA team was justifiably proud of the daily magazine format we helped the Rocky implement, and there are big pits in our stomachs. Worse, this is not the first big daily client we have lost: Remember the San Francisco Examiner, El Sol, Rumbo and Novedades!)

The Rocky redesign (actually there were two that we worked on) was led by one of the great American editors, John Temple. In a valedictory column in Friday's paper, Temple tried to explain the failure of the Rocky, without "pointing any fingers”.

He did gesture in the direction of the JOA—the joint operating agreement that combined the business sides of the Post and the Rocky. This preserved “two voices.” Early formulations threw off a lot of cash for the owners, but ultimately these detours around free-market publishing created a local commissariats based on the fading definition of newspapers as permanent institutions. They wasted a lot of money, and the owners put on more and more pressure. In San Francisco, Seattle and Denver, one paper in the JOA had local owners and the other, usually the afternoon paper, was part of a chain. (News Group is a chain of 50 paper, but its headquarters and Singleton's home are in Denver.)Inevitably the local owners spent more time with the managers and dominated the decision process. They began to think that all the money should be theirs, even though the second paper's withdrawal from competition was the reason the cash was piling up.

As the whole business unraveled, JOAs got ugly. Kirk MacDonald had the dubious honor, first, of running the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, and then the Denver Newspaper Agency. He was an assertive and independent executive who pushed revenue, balanced the old rivals on the board, encouraged new products and pushed for digital innovation. (Yourhub.com, the surviving local-local site, built with user-generated-content, was launched on MacDonald's watch.)

MacDonald opted out in 2006 and an old vet, Harry Whipple (not *the* Mr. Whipple) took over. Aggressive plans to reinvent the classified section where thrown out—just as the classifieds fell away. Some would say that Singleton dominated the JOA to benefit the Post, but no one was winning.

Least of all E.W. Scripps, the owner of the Rocky. Last year the company was split off from its cable channels, Food Network and HGTV, now Scripps Networks. I'm not sure I would be in the cable business now, either.)

The old Scripps Howard chain, with its proud lighthouse engraving trademark, took the Hearst model of a paper in every city, and ran with it, becoming a dominant chain in the 1960s. Then it started coming apart. The New York World-Telegram merged into the World Journal Tribune in 1964 and quickly expired. Papers in Houston, Washington, Cleveland, Ft. Worth, Memphis, Columbus and Pittsburgh closed or sold. More recently Scripps shuttered the Birmingham Post-Herald, the Cincinnati Post (in its own headquarters city), the Albuquerque Tribune, and now the Rocky. One asks, are they just winding down the whole business? Do they think the little TV stations will keep the company alive. (Would you even buy A TV station today?)

A better question is, what should they have done? Even with hindsight, is there an obvious business model that would have kept the Rocky afloat. Could they have moved faster?

The lesson for anyone still in the business is that is now time to come up with Plan B. If you believe that newspapers (and news web sites, which also have been suffering from declining ad revenue), are something that people would pay for, ask yourself, what would be the start-up plan? Focus on the readers, not the advertisers. Recruit a minimum staff, and leverage the best talent over multiple platforms. Target distribution, paid for by subscription. Think of advertising as bonus revenue, not the other way around.

Then jettison the old business model and quickly implement the new one. There might be some costly severance payments and a few lawsuits, but you'll have to pay those bills anyway, if you close it down. (There is no guarantee.)

So far Scripps has scrapped papers in markets where they were the Number Two. Maybe they can hold on in San Angelo, Texas, and elsewhere where they're the only daily in town. (Good ranch business report in the Standard Times.) Meanwhile Hearst has been saying that Chronicle, the dominant daily in San Francisco, is in trouble. Since selling William Randolph Hearst's first newspaper, The Examiner, to the Fang family, (which sold it to Philip Anschutz), the Hearst Corporation which has closed more papers than Scripps Howard ever owned, has never implemented a Plan B. Indeed it is not clear they had a Plan A.

* * *

Ironically, Dean Singleton, the perhaps wistful survivor in Denver, may end up merging the San Francisco Chronicle with his Contra Costa Times. Then, who wins?

___________
Related links
Recent Rocky covers: http://cfapp2.rockymountainnews.com/frontpage/
Good wrap-up: http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/hickenlooper_says_rockys_demise_wil...
Sad farewells: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/rocky_mountain_bye.php?page=all
One survivor of the Temple era in Denver: http://denver.yourhub.com/denver