by ME Sprengelmeyer - Former Washington correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News
(Photo by Mark Holm)I shed tears twice this year.
On Feb. 26, 2009, there wasn't a dry eye in the Rocky Mountain News newsroom after we got word that we'd be working on the paper's final deadline – just weeks short of its 150th birthday.
It meant the loss of Colorado's oldest business and oldest friend. And for a couple hundred great journalists, it meant the end of something really special. The Rocky was not your typical big-city paper. It had a soul.
John might not like this, but I always thought the alternative weekly Westword absolutely nailed it with a May 25, 2006, description of the two Denver papers.
"Based on front pages from twelve days in May, the paper seems like a slightly off-kilter relative who's prone to the occasional rant but is seldom boring, whereas the Post comes across as a steadier, more solid member of the community, albeit one apt to drone on drearily at cocktail parties."
I'll take that juxtaposition, especially when you consider the four Pulitzer Prizes the paper won under the off-kilter relative's leadership, and the innovative coverage we tried (sometimes with success, sometimes not) day in and day out.
But it wasn't just an institution that died in February. Hundreds of veteran reporters, editors, artists, photographers and support staff lost their vocations. Diving into the current job market is like going head-first into a kiddie pool in the middle of a drought.
I knew that long before the Rocky's closure.
I saw the handwriting on the wall a couple years ago. As the Washington correspondent via Scripps Howard News Service, I watched corporate chain after corporate chain drain the talent pool at the national bureaus, which started being referred to as "cost centers" in corporate lingo. I watched "paper cuts" inflicted in newsrooms all over the country. It was clear, even two years ago, that if I ever lost my dream job in the D.C. bureau – the one that had led me to Iraq and Afghanistan and too many adventures to count – then I would be hard-pressed to find anything nearly as satisfying…anywhere.
So a few years ago, I hatched a harebrained plot.
I've known John Temple for years. He was my city editor when I was a stringer at the dearly-departed Albuquerque Tribune. And he became my big-boss editor for ten years at the Rocky. But here's something even he doesn't know.
In early 2007, after Denver was awarded the Democratic National Convention, I pitched a radical idea to pack up the D.C. bureau, move it to Des Moines, Iowa, and go start-to-finish following all the presidential candidates of both parties – including the one who would eventually be the star of our show in Denver. It was a bold, multimedia plan, and I'm proud of the hundreds of thousands of words that made it into the paper, into the "Back Roads to the White House" blog and my memory banks for political coverage after that.
But I had a quirky ulterior motive, too. I knew that the back roads would take me to little dots on the map where little weekly papers have been standing for just about as long as the Rocky Mountain News. I had the fantasy – and a whole lot of reporters I know have had the fantasy – of one day being a one-man newsroom at a tiny little paper like the one in "The Milagro Beanfield War" and so much great literature.
I landed in Iowa in April 2007 and would have to chase the candidates to places you've never heard about. As a reporter, one of the best ways to understand a candidate and a message she or he is spinning in that area is to wander into the local newspaper and get the lay of the land from the editor, publisher and staff (if there is a staff). So I'd rush ahead of the candidates, pop into little newsrooms and get the lay of the land. And, heck, while I was there, I'd always sneak in a few questions about the state of small town journalism.
How's it going? Are the ads still flowing? What about the Internet? Is it much of a threat out in the sticks? How many people does it take to put out a quality product? What if you made some strategic investments in quality content here and there? Would your franchise do any better, or had it already maximized the local potential?
I didn't always find healthy newspapers. But invariably, I saw potential, because if you look very closely, the small-town newspaper's business model does and always has resembled a miniature version of the direction the big-city papers will eventually reach.
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