No villains here, just sadness.

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The Rocky Mountain News is dead, and I mourn it. It would have been 150 years old on April 23, and it didn't deserve to die. It was a great paper, and a great place to work.

When I joined the staff in 1997, three people wrote editorials: editorial page editor Vincent Carroll, Peter Blake, and me. We also had an all-purpose copy/letters/op-ed editor, a staff cartoonist, and a commentary clerk.

Because all three of us also wrote columns, the edit writing staff was closer to two full-time equivalents. I know that sounds impossibly luxurious to those of you working insane jobs in one-person shops, but it was very thin for a paper that size. At the time, The Denver Post had seven writers.

Later we added a fourth writer, but Blake took a buyout and I retired in 2007, and we weren't replaced, except for a few months during the 2008 election season.

The two papers were in a ferocious circulation war, with hawkers haunting the median strips of Denver's arterials and penny-a-day subscription tables in seemingly every supermarket. I don't have to tell you that subscriptions in this business are often a kind of "loss leader"--circulation revenue doesn't cover the costs of printing and delivering papers--but the idea is that revenue in our real business, selling readers' attention to advertisers, will make up for that loss, and bring in enough more to support the newsroom and yield a decent profit for the owners.

But even then, it wasn't quite working. Not only were both papers practically offering free subscriptions, they were competing for advertising as well, so ad rates were a fraction of what they were in one-newspaper cities. The corporate parents, Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co. for the Rocky and Dean Singletons MediaNews Group Inc. for the Post, negotiated a Joint Operating Agreement that came into effect in 2001.

And for a while, matters improved. The penny-a-day people dropped away, distribution costs fell, and ad rates began to climb, though against considerable resistance. The JOA partners were optimistic enough to build a stunning new building in a prime location, at the 0-0 corner of Denver's street-numbering system and kitty-corner from the state capitol. The Rocky had one whole floor, the Post another, and the rest was home to the JOA's business operation and MediaNews corporate headquarters.

The partners also invested more than $150 million in consolidating and upgrading the papers' printing facilities, leaving the agency with $130 million in bank debt.

But optimism wasn't enough to survive the flight of advertising to the Internet and the recession. John Temple, the Rocky's editor since 1998 who was named publisher in 2001, said in his final column February 27, "In Denver, the steep decline in classified advertising alone has meant the loss of more than $100 million in highly profitable categories like help wanted and real estate?

To have two newspapers, Temple said, "the economics have to work. They don't anymore."

Scripps has owned the Rocky since the 1920s. In negotiations for the JOA, it agreed to pay $60 million to assure a 50/50 split in agency distributions. The problem is, there haven't been any recently.

In January, Rocky business reporter David Milstead reported that Scripps had not received any distributions from the agency since July. In a recent interview with Denver's alt-weekly Westword, Milstead said agency revenues had dropped from $400 million in 2006 to $300 million in two years.

Some common theories proffered as reasons for newspapers' financial difficulties don't apply to the Rocky, or at least no more so than to the Post. The Rocky was not slow to recognize the impact of changing technology. We had a partnership with a television station, and the newsroom in the new building had a set for television broadcasts. The Rocky launched an online citizen-journalism site called YourHub.com in May 2005 (now in seven states) with a weekly print tie-in to attract advertising at the local and neighborhood level.

Liberal bias? Our franchise was local and regional, and our national and international news came from wire services, as it does for almost every paper that isn't also a wire service itself. Local reporting tends not to be overtly political, but to whatever extent it was, there didn't seem to be much to distinguish the two papers. On the opinion side, the Rocky leaned center-right, and the Post center-left; not very far, in either direction.

In short, I don't see any villains here. Just great cause for sadness.

Editorial writer Linda Seebach retired from the Rocky Mountain News in July 2007. Email linsee@plethora.net

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