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AP Denver Post on Rocky Mountain Story |
An attempt by former Rocky Mountain News journalists to launch a subscription-based news service fell terribly flat.
The founders of the new site, InDenverTimes.com, were aiming to sign up 50,000 paid subscribers by yesterday, Thursday. Instead they had just 3,000 paid subscribers. So now the plan of using 30 former Rocky Mountain news staffers is unsustainable and the site's backers are trying to figure out what to do next.
The web venture that rose from the ashes of the Rocky Mountain News was an optimistic attempt to reinvent traditional journalism while retaining objectivity and integrity. The 150-year-old newspaper couldn't sustain the dramatic decline in ad revenue, closing on February 27 and handing pink slips to over 200 journalists. Starting in mid-March, several dozen of them reorganized as the In Denver Times, volunteering to report and edit stories for the website, planning to officially launch May 4. But now it's back to the drawing board. It's not a good sign that not even a revered Pulitzer-prize winning institution like the Rocky Mountain News can make an online subscription service work.
As major city newspapers across the country go out of business and file for bankruptcy, they're all looking for the silver bullet of next-generation journalism. Is it a web-only paper like the Christian Science Monitor? Or like the Seattle-Post Intelligencer should papers rely on local public figures to be bloggers? Or can there be a subscription based solution? While it didn't work for Rocky Mountain veterans many others will surely try to target a narrower niche and convince them to pay for a subscription. Even the Wall Street Journal is looking at developing niche content for just this purpose. For the sake of the future of the news media - and for consumers eager for objective reporting - I hope one of these struggling papers can find a new model.
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