Rocky Mountain Postmortem

Bob Kravitz, a sports columnist for the Indianapolis Star, wrote a column that touched a few nerves yesterday.

For 10 years, Kravitz worked for the Rocky Mountain News, which went out of business last week. He came to Indianapolis in 2000. "I lost a dear old friend this week," the headline on his column said. And I could relate to many of his points.

I don't know how old Kravitz is or whether he majored in journalism in college. But I gather that we're about the same age and, yes, he probably did study journalism, just as I did.

Kravitz spent 10 years in Denver, working for a paper that was in the midst of an old-fashioned newspaper war. I've had some experience with that. In the 1980s, I worked on the sports copy desk at the Arkansas Gazette, which, at the time, was the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River.

I grew up reading the Gazette. It chronicled all the major news stories of my childhood years — the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the space race and the first landing on the moon, Watergate, Vietnam. In college, I read about the Camp David Accords and the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the pages of the Gazette. And, from the time I learned to read, I followed the Arkansas Razorbacks in the writings of Orville Henry, the longtime sports editor of the Gazette.

For a long time, the Gazette was virtually the only newspaper serving the state — until I was in college, when Little Rock's other (and, at the time, significantly smaller, in terms of circulation) newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat, made a commitment to challenging the Gazette for supremacy in the Little Rock and statewide markets.

The Gazette challenged some of the Democrat's business practices in federal court but ultimately lost that fight — and, eventually, the war itself, even though the paper was sold to the Gannett Co. in 1986. But Gannett, in spite of its financial resources, was unable to keep the Gazette competitive — not unlike the Rocky Mountain News, which also was owned by a large company, E.W. Scripps, for more than half of its 150-year existence.

I left Little Rock in 1988, after nearly five years of working for the Gazette so I wasn't there when the paper went out of business in 1991. But many of my friends and former colleagues were still there, and I felt the same sadness from a distance that Kravitz is feeling today.

"I am grief stricken today," Kravitz says. "My old newspaper is dead now, and I feel like a small part of me died with it."

A couple of months after the Gazette folded, the newspaper war here in Dallas came to an end. I wasn't living in the city at the time — I was living about 35 miles north of it — but I read the paper that became the casualty of that war, the Dallas Times-Herald. Although I was not personally employed by it, I mourned its demise because it meant that one more American city had no option, no balance in its local news coverage.

Little Rock was too small to support two newspapers. But even Dallas, one of the 10 largest cities in the nation, was too small, and the survivor of the newspaper war here, the Dallas Morning News, is having to resort to personnel cuts and other unpleasant business decisions to remain solvent.

So it should be no surprise that Denver, the 26th-largest city in America, was unable to support two daily newspapers. But that didn't keep many people from hoping that what happened this week would not come to pass.

Few cities remain where residents can choose which local newspaper they want to read. And, before long, many cities in America may be no-newspaper towns. Denver, as Kravitz observes, may be one of those towns. The survivor of the newspaper war there, the Denver Post, "is in almost as much financial distress as the now-defunct Rocky," Kravitz points out.

"I find myself grieving for the people there, good and decent people, great newspaper people who fought one of the country's last, true newspaper wars with energy, passion and pride," Kravitz writes.

And he acknowledges a fact that I and my former colleagues in Little Rock ultimately had to accept as well. "[O]ur performance never really made the difference in who survived and who didn't. The corporate suits and bean counters made that call."

Kravitz confesses to not knowing what to tell young people who are interested in journalism. I still believe what I have always believed, that it is a noble calling. But its existence is threatened.

"When a newspaper goes silent, a voice is lost," Kravitz writes. "In our democracy, in this marketplace of ideas, the more voices we have, the better."

Many people have a blind faith in the reliability of the internet and cable TV as news providers, based (I suppose) on the assumption that any technological change is an improvement. That is not necessarily the case. Is speed the same thing as quality or accuracy?

But, like many things these days, that, I fear, is a lesson we may have to pay a terrible price to learn — a price that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.