Paper losses: many regard the newspaper industry's travails as a symptom of media evolution. Newsprint and subscriptions are out. The Internet and ad-supported models are in. But who will pay news gatherers of the future?

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: [Q2] TECH REPORT

Not everyone mourned the Rocky Mountain News' death in February that made Denver a one-daily town. Least of all newly minted U.S. Congressman Jared Polis.

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"Who killed the Rocky Mountain NEWS? Polis asked rhetorically the day after the paper shut down. "We're all part of it, for better or worse, and 1 argue it's mostly for the better. The media is dead, and long live the new media,, which is all of us."

But here's what Polis overlooks. Blogger-led sites, reliant on unpaid citizen journal ists, are rich in opinion and aggregation but woefully short on original reporting. Sure, Web-based citizen journalism is on the rise, but could Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have broken Watergate if" reporting was their after-hours hobby?

In subsequent interviews, Polis softened his stance and sounded a remorseful tone, but his quotes had already spread like wildfire around the blogosphere---but only after they were reported ... by the paid, professional journalists at The Denver Post.

The area of the daily

Before there was the state of Colorado, there was the Rocky Mountain News. Denver founding father William Byers launched the newspaper right in the middle of Cherry Creek in 1859, in order to straddle the not-yet-merged shanty towns of Denver City and Auraria. Many of the early stories in the Rocky covered the Arapaho and the tribe's interactions with the new white communities of gold miners and assorted hanger-ons.

The Arapaho warned Byers it was only a matter of time before a flood would send his printing press floating toward the Platte River. Byers ignored them. By 1864y the press was indeed underwater. Byers decided it was best to move out of the middle of the creek.

In the 21st century, the Rocky again found itself underwater. This time, it did not make it to higher ground. Rocky parent the E.W. Scripps Co. saw its newspaper profits sink by more than 60 percent to $16.5 million in 2008 as newspaper revenue declined by 16 percent. The Rocky lost $16 million on its own, and Scripps put the paper up for sale in December.

A buyer did not emerge, and the paper published its last edition Feb. 27, less than two months before its 150th birthday--and a few days after Amazon began shipping its second-generation Kindle, an electronic device that includes the wireless transmission of newspapers.

Four years after Colorado attained statehood, 1880 was the beginning of the golden age of the daily newspaper. At the time, there were 11,000 daily papers in the country.

The Rocky's longtime adversary began as the Denver Evening Post in 1892, and not unlike many blogs born in the Internet age, it was launched to serve a purely political purpose: getting Democrat Grover Cleveland elected into the West Wing. The task accomplished, the paper folded in 1893, then rose again under new ownership a year later.

By 1920, the average American house-hold received...