Denver To Become a One-Newspaper Town This Weekend, Assuming the Post Can Hang On
Even when you know someone has a terminal illness, you still feel the jolt, the pervasive sadness and the lingering melancholy when the final moment arrives.
Such is likely the case in Denver as the Rocky Mountain News closes up shop with tomorrow's edition after 150 years.
Scripps told us in December this would happen if no viable buyer came forward. It's hard to believe many folks at the Rocky actually expected that to happen as the newspaper business withers. You knew it was not a negotiating tactic. The Rocky was bleeding cash big-time, $16 million alone last year.
So, another city becomes a one-newspaper town. But The Denver Post, which had a joint-operating agreement with the Rocky, is hardly in a position to gloat, hard as Dean Singleton might try. Its finances are flaccid at best, and employees have tentatively agreed to double-digit givebacks in wages and benefits to keep the paper afloat.
Rocky employees will still be on the Scripps payroll through April 28. But that hardly reduces the urgency to find a new job. The only problem is here are few to go around for those who want to remain the news business, except for a lucky few scooped up by the Post.
To all those who battled to the finish, it was a great fight. May the next chapter be as compelling as the one that just ended.
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