Goodbye, Rocky Mountain News

When I hear of the financial woes of the newspaper industry, I'm usually not too distraught. There are several papers (read: The New York Times) that would do the world a favor by shuttering up their buildings.

But that's not how I feel about the Rocky Mountain News, which published its final edition today.

The Rocky Mountain News (the best-named paper in the country, in my estimation) has been a huge part of Colorado for more than a century. I still remember when my dad first subscribed (via mail service, since he lives a few hundred miles from Denver) so he could get daily news about the Broncos.

It was always fun to grab the enormous rolled-up packet of news print and be the first one to soil its perfect folds, to rummage through the Sports section headlines, to read the comics.

I'm not advocating an auto-bailout style intervention here. The government could dump trillions of our dollars into the country's newspaper companies. When the money ran out, the presses would still cost too much to run and people will have read it all online by the time the paper came out anyway. And the companies would fail — just like the auto companies will fail again, unless they radically alter their obsolete business plans. (We ought not subsidize the old way just because it employs a lot of people.)

Newspapers are nearing obsolescence. Their business model is no longer realistic, and they can't hope to compete with the internet. This is the real world. And innovation has changed things over the last 15 years.

I'd argue that those changes are, mostly, for the better. But when something like the Rocky Mountain News is among the casualties, it's still pretty sad.