Part of Denver’s Past, The Rocky Says Goodbye

(c) The New York Times

February 27, 2009

DENVER — This was a wild city once, a frontier of the Western imagination full of brawling, dueling, nakedly self-interested fortune-seekers and empire-builders — and The Rocky Mountain News carried their torch.

The rise of Colorado’s capital city and the rise of The Rocky, as it affectionately or scornfully became known, were intertwined from the beginning. The city was founded in late 1858, The Rocky the following April, as gold strikes were making the place a destination.

“Without The Rocky, Denver would not be the city it is today,” said Tom Noel, a professor of history at the University of Colorado in Denver.

On Friday, ashes were mostly all that was left of that legacy as copies of the paper’s final edition, published Friday morning, lay strewn about its newsroom and upon the consciousness of the city. The Rocky’s owner, the E. W. Scripps Company, announced on Thursday that the paper, which had been up for sale, had attracted no credible buyers and that its losses — $16 million in 2008 — could not be sustained.

“The shock has passed, the anger is below the surface, and there’s more gallows humor today,” said David Milstead, a reporter in the business section who was packing his desk and responding to e-mail condolences. He said he had hoped the paper would make it to Saturday, his 37th birthday, but it was not to be.

In many ways, Rocky stories and Denver stories are synonymous, partly because the paper’s unabashed mission, especially in its early days, was to help Denver grow and prosper, sometimes even at the expense of the facts.

The first owner and publisher, William Byers, who founded the paper on the second floor of a saloon, decided early on, for example, that Eastern moneyed investors would want Denver to have good steamboat access — a profoundly unrealistic prospect here on the High Plains. So he simply invented it. Shipping news, complete with the made-up names of arriving and departing vessels, heading out on the South Platte River, bound east with made-up loads of freight, became a fictional staple.

When the Union Pacific Railroad bypassed Denver in the 1860s, taking the coast-to-coast route through Cheyenne, Wyo., 100 miles north, The Rocky led the drive to build a rail spur line connecting Denver to the transcontinental system.

The raw shout of The Rocky also meant never avoiding a scoop, even sometimes at the expense of the paper’s dignity and reputation. In April 1876, for example, a woman named Hattie Sancomb, a long-time mistress of the paper’s editor, angrily faced down her lover in the street with a pearl-handled revolver, aiming for revenge.

She missed her shot, but The Rocky got the story anyway. In the next edition, The Rocky published Ms. Sancomb’s poison-pen love letters, under the headline, “Sample Sentences from Spicy Correspondence.” (The front page that day also carried a headline to make a tabloid of any era proud: “A woman swallows a snake!”)

That spirit of enterprise, sometimes in good taste, other times not, continued unabated, right down to last fall, when the paper outraged many people in Denver by covering the funeral of a 3-year-old boy with blogs from the graveside.

“Coffin lowered into ground,” read one breathless dispatch.

Some readers said on Friday that they thought the paper had lost its way as it faced the desperate struggle, common to newspapers everywhere these days, of keeping readers and advertisers.

“A lot of people are very upset, but I saw this coming,” said Larry Britton, a 61-year-old electrician who grew up reading The Rocky but found it less relevant and distinctive in recent years. “You could swap writers around and not see the difference,” Mr. Britton said.

The Rocky, originally a full-size broadsheet that went to tabloid size in the 1940s, was never a tabloid in the imprint of say, papers in New York or Chicago, where fierce competition for readers of the penny press drove a frenzy of outlandish stunts and chicanery.

Until 1892 and the founding of The Denver Post, The Rocky enjoyed more than three decades of dominance in the Denver market. But the competition between the papers immediately became fierce, sometimes to the point of physical blows. The Post’s owner, in the midst of a heated newspaper war in 1907 — when The Rocky called The Post’s editor a blackmailer — assaulted The Rocky’s owner in the street.

The Post, which had shared business costs with The Rocky in recent years under a joint operating agreement, survives The Rocky’s passing.

But The Post’s publisher and chairman, William Dean Singleton, said at a news conference on Thursday that it was not a monopoly he was looking forward to.