Rocky Mountain News founder William Byers, despite
a spring snowstorm and leaky roof, beat the competing
Cherry Creek Pioneer by twenty minutes to get the News
onto Denver’s streets in April 1859. The News, Colorado’s
oldest newspaper, has been fiercely competitive ever since.
While in 2001 the News entered into a Joint Operating
Agreement (JOA) with its chief remaining competitor, the
Denver Post, merging circulation, advertising and other
business departments, the newsrooms remained independent and competitive. In his February 26, 2005, column,
News Publisher John Temple said, “the two newsrooms are
still scrapping as if their lives depended on it.”
That competitive spirit has existed ever since the Post
joined the Denver scene in 1892. In fact, the fight even
spilled out into the streets near the State Capitol in 1907
in a Wild West duel, when Post owner Frederick Bonfils
attacked and beat News owner Thomas Patterson, who had
called Bonfils a “blackmailer” in a cartoon. The fierce
newspaper war did in many other newspapers, but in 1926
Scripps-Howard Newspapers bought the News and merged
it with the Express, leaving only the morning News and
afternoon Post. “We believe that a dictatorship of Denver’s newspaper field by the Denver Post would be nothing less than a blight,” said famed newspaper publisher
Roy Howard at the time. Each newspaper tried furiously
to put the other out of business, with the News almost perishing around the time of World War II. It switched to
a tabloid format in 1942. Over the years, the newspapers
offered various gimmicks to try to outdo the other, from
free gasoline in the 1920s to penny-a-day subscriptions
in the 1990s. The newspaper war was costly—in seeking
government approval for the JOA, E.W. Scripps Co. said
the Rocky Mountain News had lost $123 million in the
1990s. But circulation had boomed—both the Post and
News claimed the largest circulation gains in the country
in 2000, when the News had a daily circulation of 426,465
and Sunday circulation of 529,681. But after the JOA, the
News’ daily circulation dropped dramatically, to about
267,000 in 2005. Its Saturday circulation in 2005 was
about 591,000. The two newspapers continue to publish
competing newspapers Monday through Friday mornings,
but the News publishes exclusively on Saturdays and the
Post on Sundays. Both companies agreed to split the profits fifty-fifty under the JOA, but E.W. Scripps Co. and the
News had to pay $60 million to the Post and its owner,
MediaNews, to enter the arrangement.
The news staffs of both newspapers vowed to continue
the journalistic rivalry that has provided more than a century of colorful reporting. In 2000, both newspapers won
Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of shootings at Columbine
High School—the Post for breaking news reporting and the
News for spot new photography. It was the first Pulitzer for
the News, which won its second Pulitzer Prize just three
years later for breaking news photography for its coverage
of Colorado’s raging forest fires. Tabloid in format Monday
through Friday and a broadsheet on Saturday, the News is
admired for a terse, lively writing style, its reporters who
often scoop the competition, and widely read columnists
like Mike Littwin and Bill Johnson who do n0t shy away
from such controversies as police misconduct. Its sports
pages reflect a sports-crazy city that rabidly follows the
likes of the Broncos, Avalanche, Rockies, and Nuggets.
And its conservative editorials are supplemented by a lively
mix of local and national columnists from both the left and
right. Beloved News columnist Gene Amole, who died in
2002, brought the city to tears with his emotional series
of columns chronicling his final battle against illness. The
street in front of the News building was renamed Gene
Amole Way. While Publisher John Temple called Amole
the heart of the Rocky Mountain News, other News journalists hope always to keep in mind his familiar refrain:
“Write to express, not to impress.”
Further Reading
Anton, Mike. “Battle of Wits, Words Made History.” Rocky
Mountain News (May 12, 2000): 5A.
Kreck, Dick. “A 108-Year-Old Street Fight: Newspapers Share a
Long, Colorful History.” The Denver Post (May 12, 2000):
A-16.
Jones, Rebecca, “First with the News: From 1859 to 1999, Denver’s Oldest Paper Tells Epic Saga.” Rocky Mountain News
(May 2, 1999): 2N.
Morton, John, “Life After the War.” American Journalism Review
22, no. 6 (July/August 2000): 88.
Perkin, Robert L. The First Hundred Years: An Informal History
of Denver and the Rocky Mountain News. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1959.
Prendergast, Alan. “Peace Comes to Denver.” Columbia Journalism Review 39, no. 2 (July/August 2000): 16–20.
Rosen, Jill. “A Piece of Denver Dies.” American Journalism
Review 24, no. 5 (June 2002): 16.
Temple, John. “ Newspaper War Lives — Here’s Proof.” Rocky
Mountain News (February 26, 2005): 2A.
Kris Kodrich