Goodbye to the Rocky

When we first moved to Denver in 1997, we were able to subcribe to both papers The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News for a ridiculous price of about $4 for 3 months each. So I did, just to see which one we liked better. The Denver Post had a more traditional broadsheet format (folds from top to bottom) and the Rocky Mountain News was a tabloid style (folds like a book).

The papers at that time were in a battle for subscribers and thus had the price wars for as low as a penny a paper at times. The battle continued until a joint venture for advertising and subscriptions between the two newspapers was started in 2001. Under the agreement, both papers would publish Monday through Friday, with the Rocky publishing a broadsheet edition on Saturday and the Post publishing the Sunday Edition. This amounted to reading essentially reading three different papers, and I've never really liked it. And the subscription rates skyrocketed to over $100 a year.

Somewhere along the line my wife and I got attached to the Rocky as it is called in Denver. We were used to the broadsheet papers from back east, but somehow over the years we got used to the smaller pages and sections of the tabloid style.

Today the Rocky Mountain News published for the last time. According to the joint venture the rest of my subscription will be filled out by the Denver Post. My subscription (which now costs $70 a year) runs out in September, at which time I probably will not renew, because we just don't like the Denver Post and probably won't read much of it. But maybe we'll get used to it as at least now we will only have to read one newspaper format all week instead of three different ones.

Defintely disgruntled about the news, but I've been expecting it for some time. It seems to be a trend in the newspaper business, especially those cities with more than one paper. It also probably not good news that the joint venture (which now absorbs the Post) had to renegotiate a $150 million dollar loan yesterday.

Farewell to the Rocky!