Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News

By Ken J. Ward

Last Paper Standing chronicles the history of competition between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News—from both newspapers’ origins to their joint operating agreement in 2001 to the death of the News in 2009—to tell a broader story about the decline of newspaper readership in the United States. The papers fought for dominance in the lucrative Denver newspaper market for more than a century, enduring vigorous competition in pursuit of monopoly control. 
 
This frequently sensational, sometimes outlandish, and occasionally bloody battle spanned numerous eras of journalism, embodying the rise and fall of the newspaper industry during the twentieth century in the lead up to the fall of American newspapering. Drawing on manuscript collections scattered across the United States as well as oral histories with executives, managers, and journalists from the papers, Ken J. Ward investigates the strategies employed in their competition with one another and against other challenges, such as widespread economic uncertainty and the deterioration of the newspaper industry. He follows this competition through the death of the Rocky Mountain News in 2009, which ended the country’s last great newspaper war and marked the close of the golden age of Denver journalism.
 
Fake news runs rampant in the absence of high-quality news sources like the News and the Post of the past. Neither canonizing nor vilifying key characters, Last Paper Standing offers insight into the historical context that led these papers’ managers to their changing strategies over time. It is of interest to media and business historians, as well as anyone interested in the general history of journalism, Denver, and Colorado.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781646425068

Book preview

Cover Page for Last Paper Standing

Last Paper Standing

Last Paper Standing

A Century of Competition between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News

Ken J. Ward

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

Denver

© 2023 by University Press of Colorado

Published by University Press of Colorado

1580 North Logan Street, Suite 660

PMB 39883

Denver, Colorado 80203-1942

All rights reserved

presentation The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Colorado, University of Denver, University of Northern Colorado, University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and Western Colorado University.

ISBN: 978-1-64642-505-1 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64642-506-8 (ebook)

https://doi.org/10.5876/9781646425068

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ward, Ken J., author.

Title: Last paper standing : a century of competition between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News / Ken J. Ward.

Description: Denver : University Press of Colorado, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023020195 (print) | LCCN 2023020196 (ebook) | ISBN 9781646425051 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781646425068 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Denver post—History. | Rocky Mountain news—History. | American newspapers—Colorado—Denver—History.

Classification: LCC PN4899.D45 W37 2023 (print) | LCC PN4899.D45 (ebook) | DDC 071/.8883—dc23/eng/20230706

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020195

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020196

Front-cover illustration © VladisChern/Shutterstock; background illustration © Here/Shutterstock

Contents

Introduction

1. Primacy: 1859–1895

2. Disruption: 1895–1926

3. Stagnation: 1926–1945

4. Profit: 1946–1970

5. Transposition: 1971–1987

6. War: 1987–1999

7. Decay: 2000–2009

8. Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Last Paper Standing

Introduction

It was early afternoon on February 26, 2009, when the staff of the Rocky Mountain News gathered in a thick ring on the fifth floor of the Denver Newspaper Agency (DNA) building. They surrounded the U-shaped news desk, in the center of which stood three men. One of them, News publisher John Temple, was a regular behind the desk. He had been the leader of the News since before it had moved into the DNA building in 2006. As one of the other men spoke, Temple shifted back and forth, sometimes putting his hands to his hips, sometimes leaning on a nearby chair, always moving. Immediately beside him stood Mark Contreras, vice president of the newspaper division of the E. W. Scripps Company. Standing almost completely still, in a dark suit and blazing red necktie, he posed a stark contrast to the restless, jacketless Temple. Turning his body this way and that to address the entirety of the ring surrounding him, the third in the trio, Rich Boehne, was the one doing the talking, delivering the news the staff had expected for weeks but would never be ready to hear.

It’s certainly nothing you did, he told the newsroom. "You all did everything right. But while you were out doing your part, the business model and the economy changed, and the Rocky became a victim of that."¹

The following morning, slipper-clad Coloradans stepped onto their porches to pick up their final copies of the News. Goodbye, Colorado, it read.²

Was Boehne right? Had something changed by 2009 that made operating the Rocky Mountain News, which had been fighting against the Denver Post for survival in the Denver newspaper market for more than a century, untenable? Or was the closure of the News the result of something else, such as changing priorities for the E. W. Scripps Company, the effects of a 2001 joint operating agreement between the News and the Post, strategic decisions made at the Post, or something else entirely? The answers to these questions are paramount to understanding the newspaper industry in the first years of the twenty-first century, as the death of the News was one in a string of newspaper closures and sales typically ascribed to the rise of the internet as a news source.³

This study analyzes the history of the competition between the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, a history that began with the Post’s founding in 1892 and continued until the News’s closure in 2009. It considers the biographies of both publications to compare their responses to competition from one another and from outside forces. Beginning with the birth of the News in 1859, this book explores how the paper’s founders and early managers established their newspaper as the leader in the Denver news market in the face of numerous competitors and environmental forces. Later, it considers the competition between the News and the Denver Post, the latter displacing the News as local leader at the turn of the twentieth century and becoming dominant for several decades. The purchase of the News by Scripps-Howard in 1926, however, brought a new approach to the company’s management, and the post–World War II era ushered in a phase of intense competition. This battle culminated in the newspaper war of the 1980s and 1990s, in which each paper poured resources into efforts to force its rival out of the market. Finally, this book analyzes the apparent peace established by the joint operating agreement signed by the two newspapers in 2001, the effect that agreement had on competition in the first decade of the 2000s, and the factors contributing to the News’s closure in 2009.

The study of these two newspapers, so long latched in vigorous competition with one another, provides a unique opportunity to explore issues of vital importance to media historians and economists, particularly those who seek to understand how competitive media organizations adapt to challenges over time. The News’s early history witnesses a newspaper being built from the ground up, while the Post illustrates how disruptive media technologies—such as those experienced in the newspaper industry in the 1890s—can tear prominent enterprises back down. A study of the two papers through the early and mid-twentieth century exposes the role of management in answering market challenges. Late in the century, the two newspapers act out a wholly unique story of winner-take-all competition in a two-newspaper town—a rarity that late in history. And of course, the experiences of the Post and News in the face of rising and, for the News, insurmountable economic challenges are crucial in finding responses to the recent decline of the newspaper industry. Bits of this story can be told with many newspapers across the country. But the full picture—from a market’s inception through over a century of competition to collapse during the recent cataclysm—can only be told through the News and the Post.

Unlike every other major historical work about the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, this work is not a celebration of either newspaper. Book-length histories cast a rosy light on the publishers, editors, and reporters of both papers, even when their behavior was unquestionably amoral.⁴ News founder William Newton Byers, for example, has been portrayed as a determined pioneer rather than a savvy, risk-taking settler who frequently played on readers’ fears to secure the future of his newspaper. Likewise, Frederick Gilmer Bonfils and Harry Tammen, who transformed the twice-failed Post into the leading newspaper between the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast, are portrayed as rambunctious caricatures of yellow journalism rather than ruthless businessmen who bullied enemies into compliance through editorial sensationalism and, occasionally, physical violence. This book does not seek to canonize or vilify anyone. Instead, it attempts to understand the actions of such men and women in the context of the competition they faced in their own times without applying the worn tropes of the history of the American West. Those running Denver’s newspapers were rational actors seeking to make money and ensure the stability of their businesses. This book treats them as such.

The nature of a project that encompasses over a century of competition requires the use of numerous methods as well as regular shifts in focus. Thus, the character, sources, and style of each chapter in this work are unique from those around them. There was no Denver Post when the News’s wagons first pulled into a young Denver; likewise, the waves of intense competition between the two newspapers were interrupted by long periods of peace or the subjugation of one paper by the other. Sources were alive and able to be interviewed for the last several decades of history reviewed here, while they obviously were not for its early chapters.

This difference in style is most pronounced in chapter 1, which details the founding of the Rocky Mountain News, its ascendance in Denver, and the numerous challenges to its early existence—spanning a period from 1859 to 1895, the longest covered in a single chapter of this book. This chapter explores how newspapers adapt not only to one another but to the context in which they exist—how they respond to emergent news media, external economic forces, and, in the case of the News, the frontier market in which it sought to assert itself.⁵ The economics of frontier newspapering were far different than those of the twentieth-century professional press. Publishers needed to develop subscription and advertising rolls from scratch, find ways to distribute their newspapers in widely dispersed areas that lacked transportation infrastructure, maintain access to distant supplies such as newsprint, and overcome unpredictable disasters—such as fires and floods—to which frontier communities were particularly susceptible. They did so by diversifying their business model and content, often offering job printing and supporting local politicians and parties in exchange for lucrative public printing contracts, political offices, and even cash.⁶

Survival, however, required more than money alone. In particular, three factors contributed to the success or failure of a newspaper: location, with proximity to lasting economic and natural resources and the concentration of competitors being key; management, in terms of decision-making and specifically the ability to collect advertising and subscription fees from customers; and credit, with indebtedness and periods of financial strain increasing the likelihood of failure.⁷ In and near the Rocky Mountains, editors fought desperately to secure stability for their communities and, in turn, themselves by promoting their towns to readers in the East, encouraging the continuing westward flow of settlers and capital.⁸ Their struggles led them into regular conflicts with competing editors. These vitriolic press wars presented entertainment to readers, but the outcome might determine the success or failure of a particular newspaper.⁹ The opening chapter of this book considers how the News navigated this complex and threatening business environment.

Chapter 2 pivots toward the core concern of this work: the competition between the News and the Denver Post. It opens with the 1895 purchase of the Post by Frederick Bonfils and Harry Tammen, two men who successfully challenged the News’s dominance and established the tone of twentieth-century Denver journalism. As the frontier matured, two newspapers—the News and the Post—emerged in competition for control of the Denver newspaper market. The strategies they employed in pursuit of a regional readership of millions—a key concern of this book—were adaptations to the industrial practices and market conditions of the day. Advances in newspaper printing technology led to an explosion in the number of newspapers in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, leading most major cities to have several newspapers vying for a limited readership. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, single newspapers came to dominate most American cities.¹⁰ This occurred in part because advertisers typically purchased space in only one newspaper in a market, usually whichever had the largest circulation. The stronger newspaper could invest the extra advertising revenue to improve the news product, leading to higher circulation to the detriment of the weaker newspaper—the latter suffering from what media economists call a circulation spiral. In time, the weaker newspaper folded, and the high capital required to start a new competing newspaper, combined with the circulation advantage of the survivor, discouraged the entry of a new competitor to the market, resulting in a monopoly for the survivor.¹¹ This pattern, which accelerated as the twentieth century matured, became a fixture of the industry. By the end of the century, on the eve of the rise of the internet as a widely adopted medium for news, 98 percent of all daily US newspapers held monopoly positions in their markets.¹²

This drove the News and the Post to compete vigorously throughout the century to gain superiority over one another in an effort to seize monopoly control of the Denver market, as described in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 begins with the purchase of the News by Scripps-Howard in 1926 and the newspaper war that ensued—a fight that signaled a change in Scripps-Howard’s overall competitive strategy, siphoned away the revenues of both the News and the Post, and, after two years of vigorous competition, drove the papers’ owners to the bargaining table. After examining the subsequent truce between the papers, the chapter reviews the steps both papers took to survive the Great Depression and also reviews the papers’ adaptations, including the News’s shift to a tabloid format, made as a result of World War II. With chapter 4 comes a wave of modernization at the Post beginning in 1946 that, combined with the News’s tabloid format, affected the voices and appearances of the two papers throughout their remaining years of competition. The chapter focuses on the strong management at both papers, which set the News on an upward trajectory and established the Post as a regional newspaper, while taking time to detail the Post’s successful defense against an attempted hostile takeover. It observes the first years in which the two newspapers began cultivating the audiences they ended with—the Post claiming white-collar, upper-class readers and the News a more diverse and working-class readership.

At that point, the history of the two newspapers begins to highlight two stark shifts in the newspaper industry characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century. The first deals with changes in the industry’s profit model, in which the newspaper serves as two distinct products in a single package. One product is the information contained within—the articles, opinions, and advertisements sold to readers by subscription or by the individual copy. The other is the newspaper space and reader attention sold by newspaper firms to advertisers.¹³ Newspapers grew increasingly reliant on the latter as the twentieth century progressed, with 81 percent of their revenue coming from advertising by 2000.¹⁴ Newspaper advertising is typically divided into three categories: national, local (retail), and classified. This three-legged stool was imperiled by television, which took national advertising away from newspapers and increased their reliance on local and classified advertising.¹⁵ Newspapers were thus vulnerable when the internet attacked a second leg of the stool—classified advertising—through sites like Ebay.com and Craigslist.org, leaving papers to survive on what were by the mid-2000s steadily shrinking advertising revenues.¹⁶

A second industry shift reflected in the competition between the Post and the News is the rise of public ownership and increasing media concentration. The years covered by chapter 5, 1971 through 1987, focus on the rapid ascendance of the News to the top of the Denver newspaper market and the fall of the Post under seventeen years of weak management. It centers on the failures of the publicly owned Times Mirror Company, which ended the independent ownership of the Post in 1980 when it bought that paper, as well as the opportunities missed by the News to end the newspaper war by putting the Post out of business.

Newspapers were originally family companies, but greater numbers of them came under public ownership after 1960. Newspaper firms felt pressured to expand their financial resources in the second half of the twentieth century. In part this was a protective strategy—newspapers issued public stock, seeking to reduce indebtedness and prevent the takeover of family firms by capital-rich outsiders.¹⁷ Yet they were also swept up in the wave of consolidations that came to define the industry in the 1980s and 1990s, and the capital provided from public stock allowed them to finance acquisitions of competitors and newspapers in other markets. While editorial operations remained decentralized in the rush to public ownership, which by 1998 had drawn 44 percent of all US newspaper circulation into publicly owned newspaper firms, editorial staffs watched as newsroom budgets were slashed to appeal to shareholders and to buoy short-term profitability.¹⁸

The trends of media consolidation seen in the transition to public ownership were visible in a shift toward chain ownership and conglomeration throughout the century. Ben H. Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly made waves when it first appeared in 1983 by claiming that only fifty corporations controlled the US media.¹⁹ The trend of consolidation continued into the twenty-first century, with 77 percent of all US daily newspapers under chain ownership by 2000.²⁰ By that year, nearly 99 percent of US cities were monopoly markets for daily newspapers—Denver’s newspaper competition was exceptional. Newspaper ownership concentration has only increased since 2000; by 2013, the largest ten chains controlled 50 percent of total US daily newspaper circulation.²¹ Unfortunately, the rise of the internet has done little to increase competition and protect important functions traditionally carried out by newspapers.²²

Media consolidation and the shift toward public ownership were helped along by disruptions in the newspaper industry in the post–World War II period. Newspapers flourished in the late 1940s, but they were then afflicted by economic pressures that intensified through 1965 and continue to this day.²³ The scope of the challenge facing publishers was often difficult for them to see, masked by ever-increasing advertising revenues and circulations.²⁴ But beneath the surface, labor and production costs—led by skyrocketing prices for newsprint—were wreaking havoc on newspaper budgets, with expenses rising faster than revenues by 1965.²⁵ Circulations were growing but not keeping up with the rise in the US population.²⁶ Gross advertising revenue was increasing, but newspapers’ share of advertising revenues against other media was actually falling.²⁷ Americans were beginning to see television as a news source in addition to or in place of newspapers. Broadcasters capitalized on their increasing popularity, stealing away national advertisers in particular. Newspapers failed to react to these challenges as aggressively as was necessary. As noted above, they had begun to focus solely on profitability rather than a hybrid of profitability and public service. Satisfied by increasing advertising revenues, publishers were slow to react to the challenges rushing at them. The shift toward an emphasis on short-term profitability over the long-term viability of a newspaper’s editorial content was among the most influential changes to the industry after 1965.²⁸

New competitors such as cable and the internet joined broadcast television to disrupt the newspaper industry’s business model, further damaging national advertising revenues. The long-term trend of newspaper deaths continued, particularly in American cities, exacerbated by suburbanization. James Brian McPherson notes, As newspaper disappeared, so did readers—especially the working-class readers of afternoon papers, who now could watch ninety minutes of local news in the afternoon and another thirty minutes in the evening before going to bed.²⁹ While publishers were increasingly focusing on profits, rising costs and competition threatened to make running even the most illustrious newspapers difficult. Some have since claimed that newspapers can only survive in the modern media environment if they focus on just the opposite: investing in newsrooms and strengthening their editorial product.³⁰ Few publishers have followed this principle.³¹

Chapter 6 transitions to the late stages of competition between the Post and the News, a period in which these disruptions accelerated. It begins with the purchase of the Post by MediaNews Group, the company led by ascendant newspaper collector Dean Singleton, in 1987 before exploring the changes he made to the paper in returning it to profitability. The chapter’s focus then shifts to the unsuccessful attempts by the News to face the resurgent Post, including the shrinkage of its operating area in Colorado and the penny war of the late 1990s. It concludes following two years of penny newspaper sales and damage to the papers’ profits, when a joint operating agreement (JOA) was offered by Scripps to the Post. The narrative history of the competition between the papers concludes with chapter 7, which covers the brief but defining period between the legal proposal of the Post and the News to enter into a JOA in 2000 through the News’s closure in 2009.

Unlike most other businesses, newspapers in the same market have the option of attempting to enter into noncompetitive contracts called joint operating agreements. JOAs are not mergers but binding agreements in which two newspapers agree to share production, distribution, advertising sales, or other similar resources while remaining separately owned and editorially independent.³² The US Congress passed the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, with encouragement from newspaper publishers, ostensibly to curb the death rate of American newspapers. Designed to preserve a diversity of editorial perspectives in a given city, JOAs are anticompetitive by nature, allowing newspapers to collude legally on matters such as subscription and advertising rates. As such, they are only permissible if one of the two newspapers filing for a JOA is failing, as determined by a distinct disadvantage in its market share, having entered a circulation spiral, or otherwise having irreversible financial losses.³³

Research suggests that JOAs are rarely successful in sustaining high degrees of editorial quality and do little to prevent powerful newspapers from continuing to attempt to push their subordinate partners out of business.³⁴ This book asks whether this is true in the context of the Post and the News, papers that entered into a JOA less than a decade before the cataclysm in the newspaper industry and only after a brutal circulation war that left both of them economically battered. Analysis of the late stages of competition between the papers informs a final core concern of this book, examining the reasons for the News’s closure cited by the E. W. Scripps Company—rising economic pressures accelerating the collapse of the business model on which newspapers relied. As such, chapter 7 alternates between a micro-focus on the Denver newspaper market and a macro-focus on the newspaper industry and the economy at large to contextualize the end of the News in the larger story of the industry’s collapse, observing how the latter drove Scripps away from newspapering toward more profitable ventures.

The book’s final chapter returns to the ideas posed in this introduction and situates this project toward the future. Drawing on the News’s nearly 150-year history in Denver and the 116 years of competition between the News and the Post, chapter 8 offers several suggestions to today’s publishers of both print and digital content. It concludes with a brief reflection on the significance of this research and the fate of Denver’s residents in the wake of the News’s closure.

1

Primacy

1859–1895

There was little reason to believe the Rocky Mountain News would last a year.

When whispers about gold in the mountains at the far western end of Kansas Territory began circulating in the early and mid-1850s, there was much excitement—and much humbugging. News reports were sensational, including an article in a Kansas newspaper reporting plenty of glittering ore upon the surface of the ground.¹ As interest grew, rumors that filtered east were often printed, then exaggerated, then printed again. Even when the reports of gold were proven true by a party of prospectors, prompting a mad rush westward in the spring of 1859, there was no evidence that treasure was to be found in any sizable quantity.² The mine camps built around the gold strikes were tent towns. In most cases, a hoard of optimistic prospectors would rush in, take whatever gold was present, and either rush off to investigate the latest reported find or wander home; there was no reason the camps along Cherry Creek at the place that would later be called Denver would be any different. There was always a chance that a town could establish itself and outlive the inevitable exhaustion of gold in the immediate vicinity—perhaps as an outfitting post like Independence at the start of the Oregon Trail or, if the region proved valuable, as a political center—but such ideas were dreams as farfetched as the hopes of instant riches in the minds of those rushing west.

Yet not all was uncertain when aspiring News publisher William Newton Byers set off for the site of the gold strike, chasing the mad dash of wagons, horses, and pushcarts racing to the mountains. Byers was confident he knew the way, having written a guide describing the route to the mines (without actually having taken the trail himself) in 1858.³ He also knew there was a readership of tens of thousands waiting for him, eager for the arrival of a press.⁴ Those pioneers were hungry for news from the East and hungrier for news related to mining—where luck was being found and where it was not, which outfitters had what kinds of equipment, the locations of lawyers to help stake their claims, assayers to evaluate their gold, and saloons to take their gold away. Land speculators laying out towns were eager to publicize the region’s purported riches to spark further settlement. No one knew how long the Cherry Creek settlements would last, but as long as they did, a newspaper would prosper.

Byers’s Rocky Mountain News, the first newspaper in Colorado, grew with the state. Relying often on its primacy in the embryonic market, Byers and subsequent owners of the News built and maintained the paper as the leading news source in nineteenth-century Denver. In doing so, they stood up to the first challenge faced by Denver newspapers: a hostile frontier.

Publish or Perish

William Newton Byers had a knack for spotting opportunities created by the westward expansion of the American frontier, having grown up in the Midwest before working as a surveyer in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1850s and later in Omaha, Nebraska. There he became an established member of the community, but when persistent rumors of gold in distant sections of the territory proved true, prompting a steady westward flow of prospectors through Omaha in late 1858 and early 1859, Byers sensed new opportunity. Setting his mind to establishing a newspaper at the site of the diggings along Cherry Creek, Byers moved quickly to secure partners and printing machinery. He sent a message to John Lewis Dailey, a lifelong newspaper printer and partner of Byers in an earlier failed newspaper project, inviting him to join the journey west as a partner.⁵ Dailey started for Omaha two days later. In the meantime, Byers convinced a local doctor and publisher of Omaha’s Nebraska Republican, Gilbert C. Monell, to buy into the business. Monell joined, but he brought a printer of his own, Thomas Gibson, into the project as a partner.⁶ Cash in hand, Byers rushed off to purchase the printing press of a nearby failed newspaper.⁷ Dailey, meanwhile, arrived in Omaha to find he had been squeezed out of partnership in the rush to start the newspaper. Yet he was undeterred. On Monday, February 28, just five days after receiving Byers’s letter, Dailey set to preparing the outer pages of the first issue of the prospective newspaper in Omaha, the company wanting to push out the initial run as soon after arriving at Cherry Creek as possible.⁸ Not knowing what town they would be settling in, Dailey listed the location simply as Cherry Creek, Kansas Territory. Across the top of the first page, in large, block letters, he put Rocky Mountain News.

The News founders set out only eight days later, the two wagons carrying their newly purchased press and equipment joining a train of pioneers headed for the diggings.⁹ The team faced a number of challenges along the first half of the trail, including mud and washed-out river crossings resulting from a recent spate of wet weather. The most alarming incident of the trip, however, occurred after the group pulled into Fort Kearney twenty-two days after leaving Omaha. There, Byers was told that a man had passed through the fort only a few days earlier carrying a large quantity of printing type, presumably intending to found a newspaper.¹⁰ Being beaten to the punch at Cherry Creek threatened the viability of Byers’s entire enterprise. But nothing could be done except to press onward and hope the unknown publisher would be slow in putting out his paper. By mid-April, the team was nearing its destination, and Byers rode ahead of the group to scout his fate at Cherry Creek. An evening after his departure, an urgent message arrived at his party’s camp urging it to press on with haste.¹¹ The team set out the next day, reaching Cherry Creek in the afternoon; upon learning of the situation, its members immediately unloaded the press and equipment from the wagons and assembled them in the attic of a combination store/saloon.¹² Work on the News began the following morning.

Byers had spurred his party because he learned when he arrived at Cherry Creek that the man mentioned at Fort Kearney, Jack Merrick, had indeed headed to the diggings intent on establishing the camp’s first newspaper.¹³ Luckily, Byers and his men had something Merrick lacked: focus. Merrick had squandered his advantage, spending his time at the diggings rather than setting up his press and getting to work. When the Byers party pulled into town, Merrick’s equipment still sat where it had been unloaded from its wagon, unassembled and far from producing its first edition.¹⁴ The Rocky Mountain News might have been out of business before pulling into town. Instead, it had a fighting chance.

For the prospectors huddled in drafty shacks along the creek bed, the ensuing race to push out the first newspaper at Cherry Creek was a welcome diversion from the deep snows and frigid cold of a long Colorado winter. They neglected digging and watched as two very different operations, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, arranged type in their presses. On one side of Cherry Creek, in a settlement called Auraria, Byers’s crew labored to prepare a six-column broadsheet similar in size to all but the largest New York dailies. Across the creek in Denver City, Merrick was throwing together a much smaller paper. Only three columns wide, his newspaper required far less content, but his press was small, slow, and capable of registering only one page per impression.¹⁵ Byers had a team working alongside him and a Washington hand press—the press of choice among small newspapers in the American West for decades—which could register two pages per impression.¹⁶ Merrick’s few days wandering Cherry Creek gave him a better understanding of the local news, but Byers had a head start, with most of the News’s two outside