Rocky Mountain Blues

February 27, 2009

Filed in: The Way We Live Now

The Rocky Mountain News is folding. I know it’s a sign of the times blah blah and the newspaper moguls didn’t do enough fast enough to save themselves (hmm, no bailouts for this flailing industry?), but it’s a shame anyhow.

When D and I took our momentus trip cross country and back in 1985, we got a newspaper every day we could, coast to coast and—more to the point—from one mountain top to the next. We were fanatics for the crossword, which is great for hours in the car, but also, as two editors, we could hardly be without the day’s news.

Some papers we only saw once—the Baltimore Sun, for example. But the Rocky Mountain News, that we read seemingly for weeks. I have no idea what its circulation is, or was, but its geographical reach was huge, and since we drove through Colorado twice—taking the southern route on the way out and nipping the north corner on the way back—we read the RMN for many days running.

I remember that it was a tabloid, which was good for reading in a small car packed with belongings, and that it had Republican comics (Beatle Bailey etc.) but a good crossword, and that it was a pretty well-reported paper. Now it’s a gone paper.