July/August 2000 | Contents

 

PEACE COMES TO DENVER

The Great Newspaper War Wasn't All That Great for Readers. What Will the Truce Bring?

BY ALAN PRENDERGAST

Until a fateful Thursday in May of this year, the staff of the Denver Rocky Mountain News had no clue that they were working for a failing enterprise. In fact, by the usual indicators reporters use to keep score on such matters, they were clearly winning their battle with The Denver Post, in one of the last great newspaper wars in the country.

Last year the News, owned by E.W. Scripps Company, regained the daily circulation lead for the first time since 1997, thanks to absurdly cheap subscription rates that made the tabloid the fastest-growing paper in the country. Advertising revenues had climbed nearly 25 percent over the past five years, and the paper has routinely crushed the Post, owned by MediaNews Group, in statewide journalism contests. This spring the News picked up a Pulitzer Prize, its first in 141 years of operation, for its spot news photography of the mass killings at Columbine High School. True, the Post's Columbine coverage won a Pulitzer, too, for breaking news, but the News stalwarts had every reason to feel good about themselves. Almost every week, it seemed, there was another party in the office to celebrate some circulation milestone or editorial coup. The sheetcakes kept coming.

But while the troops savored the well-frosted spoils of victory, their corporate generals at Scripps were secretly suing for peace. On May 11 editor John Temple gathered the faithful and made a stunning announcement: Scripps had agreed to pay $60 million to place the News in a fifty-year Joint Operating Agreement with the Post. The business operations of both papers would be combined, and the parent companies would share equally in the profits. Scripps chairman William R. Burleigh called the deal "even-steven."

Still, the arrangement, subject to Justice Department approval, calls for both papers to continue to publish daily, but the News would abandon its Sunday edition and produce the only Saturday paper. The war was over, and the News had lost.

Indeed, if you believe the JOA application, the paper's wildly successful circulation strategy was a death-spiral that could only end in merger or extinction. Neither Scripps nor MediaNews had previously divulged the finances of either paper, and reporters were stunned to learn that the News had suffered $123 million in operating losses over the past ten years while the Post claimed $200 million in profits.

The News tried to put a hopeful spin on the story. news-post truce, read the next morning's headline. But the Post couldn't resist a little gloating: rocky seeks truce, post agrees to joint operation with failing paper. The tone of the broadsheet's coverage -- which portrayed MediaNews chairman William Dean Singleton as a superhero streaking to the rescue of two independent, daily editorial voices in Denver -- so rankled News editor Temple that he responded in an unusual editorial. "They stuck a thumb in the eye of their new partner, instead of extending a hand," he wrote. "The clear difference in approach of the two newspapers is among the reasons that I am so confident you'll continue to be loyal to the News."

Many readers might take issue with Temple's assertion that there's a clear difference between the two papers, other than their size. Fixated on chasing each other as much as the news, the Denver dailies tend to mirror each other, like twins at a mime convention. Thus, among the many questions raised by any JOA proposal -- fears of diminished coverage, declining quality, rising costs to consumers and advertisers, and the like -- there is an additional perplexity in Denver. Given the sameness of the products, is the kind of journalistic competition practiced here truly worth preserving?

For the past twenty years analysts have predicted the imminent demise of one newspaper or the other in Denver, only to be shamed into silence when first the Post and then the News staged astonishing comebacks. Pulitzers aside, their survival may have less to do with enduring editorial excellence than the blazing Colorado economy over the past seven years or so. But it's also true that every time one of these softhearted palookas has had the other on the ropes, the knockout punch has been wanting. In recent years each side attempted to stay the course, woo the suburbs, and offend no one.

Some enthusiasts predict that a grandly profitable joint operation will allow both papers to devote more resources to newsgathering. Others are skeptical. "Competition doesn't necessarily guarantee great newspapers," notes Neil Westergaard, a former executive editor of the Post, now editor of the Denver Business Journal. "But with a JOA, the consequences of not doing your job are somewhat removed from the equation. You make money whether you put out a great product or not."

The recent potshots over the "truce" are a far cry from the ferocious rivalry the two papers once enjoyed. A century ago the Post was the plaything of Harry Tammen and Frederick Bonfils, hustlers with a flair for promotional stunts, lurid crime stories, and headlines dripping in red ink. (One classic front-page offering posed the question, does it hurt to be born?) The upstart enterprise was so successful that the News -- the older, establishment newspaper -- accused the Post, "that blackmailing, blackguarding, nauseous sheet which stinks to high heaven," of extorting contracts from advertisers in exchange for suppressing unflattering stories. Shortly after Bonfils was lampooned in the competition as Captain Kidd, he sucker-punched News editor Thomas Patterson in broad daylight on a public street. "Mr. Patterson received a well-merited thrashing," Bonfils wrote on his editorial page the next day.

That was in 1907. Bonfils's feud with the News lasted another twenty-six years. He was pursuing a libel suit against the paper when he abruptly dropped dead; an ear infection had "worked its way into the brain," according to his front-page obituary. With his passing, respectability descended on the Post like a shroud.

After World War II, the paper emerged as the premier daily in the intermountain West, "the Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire," guided by its high-minded editor, Palmer Hoyt. For decades the News was content to play the also-ran while the Post built its regional appeal -- beefing up staff, courting subscribers in several states, and watching its profit margins shrink.

The race began to change character in the 1970s, as legions of young professionals moved to Denver and found they preferred the feisty morning tabloid to the graying afternoon giant. By 1980 the News had regained the daily circulation lead, and the cash-strapped Post was on the auction block.

Times Mirror came to the rescue in 1980, importing a group of savvy executives to rejuvenate the Post. They switched from afternoon to morning delivery -- and lost readers. They introduced a brand of in-your-face investigative journalism Denver had never seen before -- and lost more readers. They dispatched gifted feature writers across the West for months at a time, to assemble epic reports on such subjects as the Mormon Church or the Colorado River -- and, well, you get the idea. Meanwhile the News focused on building the best comics page known to man and solidified its lead.

After seven years of fruitless tinkering, Times Mirror decided it had had enough. The company sold the Post to MediaNews for $95 million, the same price Times Mirror had paid, and threw in a new printing plant to seal the deal. When news of the sale leaked out, many staffers figured the Post was doomed. MediaNews president Dean Singleton wasn't known for tossing good money after bad; soon after picking up the Post, in fact, he pulled the plug on failing papers in Dallas and Houston.

But Singleton surprised everyone. He brought in a stable management team; a charismatic editor, Gil Spencer, formerly of the New York Daily News; and pushed for mundane but essential improvements in printing and delivery. The Post rode out a nasty recession that claimed some of its biggest advertisers and embarked on a decade of steady circulation growth.

At the same time the Rocky Mountain News, stumbling with production and pricing problems, seemed ill-prepared to snag the hundreds of thousands of new residents who flooded into the Denver metro area as the economy bounced back.

Three years ago the Post reclaimed the daily lead, and the protracted struggle entered its latest phase. Weary of chasing its rival across the state, the News decided to redefine the battlefield. The paper ended its home delivery (and, for the most part, its distribution) in fifty of Colorado's sixty-three counties, reasoning that the outlying readership was simply too expensive to maintain. Instead, the war would be waged in the cities along the Front Range. To underscore the point, the tabloid added the word "Denver" to its name.

The Front Range strategy hinged on the deep discounts the News offered new subscribers in order to saturate Denver's booming suburbs. In effect, the paper resurrected a time-honored Scripps tradition: the penny press. For as little as four or five bucks a year -- less for canny negotiators -- a couple in the right Zip code could have the News delivered every day, right to their SUV-studded driveway.

Publicly, Post publisher Jerry Grilly deplored the cheap subscription deals, saying that they "devalued" the product. Privately, the Post's circulation wizards did their best to match them. Before long, telemarketers were begging demographically desirable readers to scoop up the papers at almost any price. The deals allowed the News to snatch the daily lead again -- and break out those sheetcakes. According to the latest figures, the paper gained a whopping 90,000 readers over the same audit period a year earlier. Thanks to the steady influx of flatlanders flocking to the state, the Post has continued to build numbers, too. Yet throughout it all, the News was losing money, while the Post, which apparently did not slash ad rates with the zest of its rival, continued to be profitable.

Prevailing wisdom aside, pyrrhic competition rarely makes for good journalism. In Denver, the rush to hit the streets with the latest twist in the big "talk" stories of the day produced a rash of half-formed exclusives that would have benefited from more reporting time. The mania for such stories tied up resources and may have actually discouraged more ambitious projects dealing with topics that nobody was talking about -- yet. When the driving force is the fear of getting beat, everybody ends up with much of the same stuff.

In recent years Denver has been awash in high-profile stories -- the Oklahoma City bombing trials, the JonBenet Ramsey case, Columbine. Yet the local response has been, in large measure, a litany of missed opportunities. Every possible development in the JonBenet story, including the most trivial, received ample play; but then, the Ramseys are large targets, and neither paper risked anything by tussling over reported sperm traces and tearjerker headlines. (The News won that contest: little miss christmas is put to rest in georgia.)

When the story struck closer to home, a curious circumspection set in. Determined to skirt sensationalism and mindful of their "obligations to the community" (a code phrase, perhaps, for hypersensitivity to advertisers, circulation figures, and access to sources), the editors overseeing the Big Story coverage have embarked on a course that is tasteful, often maudlin, and sometimes downright soporific.

The Columbine coverage is a case in point. In the days following the massacre, both sides mobilized with alacrity, wading through a morass of grief and horror, trying to sort out a flood of rumors about the killers' backgrounds and confused accounts from hysterical eyewitnesses. But as the months dragged on, and as the papers focused increasingly on inspirational stories about how the survivors were coping with the tragedy, some of the more uncomfortable questions about the event were raised elsewhere. In Time magazine, for instance, which revealed the virulent contents of the videotapes made by the killers. And in the online magazine Salon, which correctly challenged a legend about one shooting victim, who, it turns out, was not the one who said "yes" when the killers asked her if she believed in God, despite a book and numerous Web sites that say she was. The Denver papers prepared voluminous, predictable "hope and healing" packages for the one-year anniversary of the shootings, but failed to adequately anticipate a legitimate news story that threatened to, and did, emerge at the last minute: the filing of lawsuits by victims' families, alleging that the police emergency response was inadequate and may have contributed to more deaths.

That's not to say that enterprise reporting is dead at either paper. Recently the Post had a corker about nepotism in the Denver Civil Service Commission that prompted the resignation of the agency's director. A few days later, the Sunday News ran a lengthy report on a gold mine called Summitville, an environmental disaster in southern Colorado caused by poor mining regulation. These days, for the tabloid to devote eight pages to a story that has no reference to Columbine is not just an aberration; it's a miracle.

Perhaps such stories are a sign of things to come, but don't count on it. Reporters at the News complain of being chronically understaffed, a situation that may ease somewhat under a JOA, with no Sunday paper to produce. But then, there won't be any showcase for eight-page specials, either. Singleton has promised to add bodies to the Post newsroom, but since the retirement of Gil Spencer a few years ago, the Post has endured numerous editorial shakeups and a disturbing exodus of veteran talent. Spencer's successor, Dennis Britton, former Chicago Sun-Times editor, pushed "positive news" and winnowed staff. He quickly became the target of newsroom wags and an anonymous Web site that campaigned relentlessly for his removal, the "Dennis Britton Go Home! Page." Britton finally took the site's advice last fall, when he was let go. The paper's current editor, its ninth in twenty years, is Glenn Guzzo, former managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, who's earned high marks from staff for calming the waters and boosting morale.

Even without the merger, Denver's rapid growth has effected a suburban retooling of both papers that has stripped them of much of the individual quirkiness they once had. As a Denver native, I miss the sprawling regional coverage of the old Post and the former edginess of the News -- which, in my youth, was so contrarian as to campaign successfully to keep the Winter Olympics out of Colorado. Both shops are now populated with fresh faces who are still struggling to adapt to the quirks of their adopted home, just like the immaculately coiffed folks on local TV trying, and failing, to pronounce the city's unique Spanish and Native American street names.

What passes for an institutional memory at the News resides in the revered personage of Gene Amole, a former broadcaster whose career in the local media spans six decades; his nostalgic column appears too infrequently to suit me. Over at the Post, the geezer role is filled by Chuck Green, a former editor and longtime fixture of the paper who's written dozens of tissue-thin meditations on the Ramsey case, Columbine, or nothing at all. (One recent column was headlined, an expert at filling this space, and proceeded to show how easy it is to fill twelve inches of newsprint with drivel.) Every few months Green writes a cornball hymn to the beauty of Colorado and urges readers to take a stroll in the mountains, echoing the Post's old slogan, "'Tis a privilege to live in Colorado."

Maybe it still is a privilege. But for whom? The single most neglected story in both Denver dailies has been the saga of Colorado's phenomenal population growth over the past decade and the changes it has wrought. Business stories about new housing starts and hi-tech start-ups are plentiful, but issues such as environmental degradation, soulless subdivisions, snarled traffic, shoddy homebuilders, strapped school districts, overcrowded prisons and the like haven't received quite the same attention.

Perhaps the neglect of such matters is how newspapers at war express their sensitivity to the community. But now that peace has broken out, can we dare to hope for an end to the boosterism?

Call me skeptical. The frenzied growth is what kept Denver's dailies going for so long; it made the News the most successful failing paper in recent memory. If they weren't willing to bite that hand when they were fighting for their lives, it seems unlikely that they'll do so when there's nothing at stake but professional pride. In a way, the two papers have already been serving the same master for a long, long time. *

Alan Prendergast is a staff writer for the Denver weekly Westword and teaches journalism at The Colorado College.