The Rocky Mountain News, a Denver CO paper printed its last copy Feb 27th,2009. The reason that it was a bigger deal than most is that it survived 150 years of good times, bad times and everything in between only to end up folding like too many other newspapers have. Blogs like this are a part of changing times.  There are so many sites online that can distribute bits of knowledge and happenings almost up-to-the-minute for free that companies, even as big as  E.W. Scripps have trouble turning a profit.  But more than just individual company failures, it is a change of an industry.

When I moved in 1968 to the small town where I now reside, there were hundreds of manufacturing  jobs that now no longer exist.  But there was one old company called Ashtabula Bow Socket which has a story which makes my point. Unlike the complaints of many who say “We are sending all our jobs to Mexico” , like the folding up of the newspaper companies, Ashtabula Bow Socket lost their product to history. You see, they started out by manufacturing “bow sockets” which were the attachments several generations earlier for the bows which held up the roof of buggys.  Then as the market changed and shrank, they made the bows for convertible tops on cars. Then during the 60’s to 80’s they made bicycle cranks and frame parts. My point is that no matter how good a job they did at making bow sockets, their doom was written twenty or thirty years before their eventual demise.

And so it is with the changes in the way we get and produce our news today.  You can look on many stories on Fox News, or MSNBC or any of their clone sites and see stories updated “30 minutes ago”, or “2 hours ago”.  So I think we can continue to see newspapers disappear. Even those with 150 years of history behind them. Done in by TV, the Internet  news sites and yes even blogs.

Ray Ott