The Volokh Conspiracy - We'll lose more than a paper:

My farewell column for the Rocky Mountain News:

Unfortunately, the demise of the Rocky is more than a 50 percent diminution in newspaper quality in Denver. There's the direct loss of the stories which the Rocky covered and the Post didn't, or which the Rocky investigated thoroughly and the Post only superficially. But there's also the less visible loss of how competition with the Rocky has made the Post a better paper throughout all of that paper's own venerable history. Having two newspapers is more than twice as good as having just one, because each newspaper spurs the other to better work....

With the Rocky gone tomorrow - and the Post perhaps gone within two years - who is going to report the news in Denver? The TV and radio stations only report a fraction of the number of stories that go into a daily newspaper, and the reporting is much less detailed than what's in the papers.

It's possible to have a republic without newspapers. But we've never done it in America, and there's no guarantee that we'll succeed at doing it.

	[David Kopel, February 27, 2009 at 3:09am] Trackbacks We'll lose more than a paper: My farewell column for the Rocky Mountain News: Unfortunately, the demise of the Rocky is more than a 50 percent diminution in newspaper quality in Denver. There's the direct loss of the stories which the Rocky covered and the Post didn't, or which the Rocky investigated thoroughly and the Post only superficially. But there's also the less visible loss of how competition with the Rocky has made the Post a better paper throughout all of that paper's own venerable history. Having two newspapers is more than twice as good as having just one, because each newspaper spurs the other to better work.... With the Rocky gone tomorrow - and the Post perhaps gone within two years - who is going to report the news in Denver? The TV and radio stations only report a fraction of the number of stories that go into a daily newspaper, and the reporting is much less detailed than what's in the papers. It's possible to have a republic without newspapers. But we've never done it in America, and there's no guarantee that we'll succeed at doing it.