The Rocky Mountain News, a E.W. Scripps newspaper, is closing this week, just shy of its 150th anniversary. Here’s a bit from the paper’s own coverage:
Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Scripps, broke the news to the Rocky staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper’s future. He called the paper a victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.
The New York Times paints a bleak picture as well:
The Rocky is one of several big-city newspapers that lost tens of millions of dollars in the last few years. Those papers now face a precarious future. Hearst, for example, said last week that it was considering selling or closing The San Francisco Chronicle, and it plans to close The Seattle Post-Intelligencer if it finds no buyer for that paper.
Changing readership habits and increasing competition from the Internet have hit the newspaper industry especially hard, cutting overall circulation sharply over the last decade. Those forces, and the severe economic downturn, have significantly eroded advertising, the primary revenue source for newspapers.
It is a bad time for newspapers, without a doubt: a failing economy means companies are reigning in their advertising dollars, readers are finding cheaper (and mostly free) news online, and the costs of paper, ink, and trucks to move newspapers around town are rising.