Why it doesn’t matter if InDenver Times succeeds or not.

Note: I’ve reposted this on fixjournalism.com.

I don’t care who you are. Whether you’re an experienced journalist, a cynical editor, a skeptical student, a hopeful professor…you stopped to think about what the death of the Rocky Mountain News meant when they announced that their last issue would publish on Feb. 27.

You probably watched their Vimeo (my heart broke a little when I saw the journalist buy a lottery ticket and  vow that he would buy the paper if he won) and downloaded the PDF copy of their front cover.

The day came and it ended. Newspapers closing isn’t a new story in America (see a full list of defunct newspapers here). It was time to move on and predict who was the next to go. The San Francisco Chronicle? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which has since stopped printing and is now online only)?

But part of the Rocky’s staff had a different idea.

They banded together, they found a few business executives who believed in their mission, they put together a makeshift Web site, they held a press conference and voila – InDenver Times was born.

The Las Vegas Sun bubble

If you ever wanted to see how a traditional media outlet can transform itself into the journalism of the future, take a look at the Las Vegas Sun.

As a semi-native of Sin City (lived there from ages 6 to 18), I grew up with both the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Sun. Neither paricularly caught my eye when I was younger. I vaguely remember questioning why the Sun was being distributed as a section of the R-J, when that change happened in 2005.

But during the last couple years, the Sun unveiled a new Web site that set a high standard for online journalism. It brought Internet nerd Rob Curley and his crew on board, and the site has grown exponentially since then.