The Smallest Type Paid for the Biggest Headlines
It printed for nearly 150 years in a two-paper town. It lost $16 million in 2008 and closed the following February.
Circled in Blue Ink
You pulled the classified section out of the Sunday stack before anyone else could claim it.
It was the thick part. Gray columns, tiny type, no photographs except the little house drawings in real estate.
You spread it across the kitchen table and uncapped a pen.
Apartments first. Two bedrooms, near the bus line, no pets. Then the cars. Ford pickup, runs good, best offer.
Every listing was a phone number and a few words somebody had paid for by the line.
You circled three. Two were already gone by the time you called.
The paper folded small enough to read on the bus, the way it had since the 1940s. The masthead said Rocky Mountain News.
Newmont just paid Barrick $1.95 billion.
On Monday, Newmont wrote its biggest rival a check for $1.95 billion.
They'd fought over the same Nevada ground for years.
It ended in one morning.
Newmont bought permission. Barrick can now split its North American mines into a company worth north of $60 billion.
The two largest gold miners on earth just cleared their decks.
They didn't do it to sit still.
The window shuts September 30th.
The Back Pages Paid for the Front
The paper was older than the state it covered. William Byers printed the first issue on April 23, 1859, in a Denver that was still part of Kansas Territory.
The Scripps newspaper chain bought it in 1926 and kept it for the rest of its life.
Readers thought they were paying for the news. They were paying for very little of it.
A reporter covering city hall cost a salary, a desk and a car. A classified line cost almost nothing to gather. The reader wrote it, phoned it in and paid before it ran.
The front page gave people a reason to pick up the paper. The back pages gave the company a reason to print it.
A city full of strangers needed one place to find each other. The person selling a couch needed buyers. The person hiring needed applicants.
Buyers looked where the sellers were. Sellers paid to be where the buyers looked.
A Penny a Day in a Two-Paper Town
Denver had two big dailies, and they fought for decades.
Circulation mattered because it set the price of every ad. So both papers stopped charging readers much at all.
By the 1990s, a subscription to either paper could cost a penny a day. The copy was nearly free. The listings in the back were not.
Across the country, the arrangement worked about as well as a business could. In 2000, American newspapers took in $19.6 billion from classified ads, roughly 40 percent of their advertising revenue.
Nobody else in town could offer the same thing. A radio station could not print an apartment listing. A television station could not hold a thousand used cars in one Sunday section.
The paper was the marketplace. The news was what the marketplace came wrapped in.
The Meeting Place Moved
In 1995 a man in San Francisco began emailing friends a list of local events. It grew into Craigslist, and most of its listings cost nothing.
Websites for jobs, cars and homes followed. Each one took a single section of the back pages and did it more cheaply. Readers could search, see a dozen photographs and skip the Monday expiration.
None of these rivals covered a city council meeting. They only took the part that paid for it.
In 2001 the two Denver papers combined their business operations under a joint operating agreement. They shared advertising, printing and circulation and kept separate newsrooms.
When the penny subscriptions ended in 2002, daily circulation at each paper fell from more than 420,000 to about 305,000.
By 2009, classified revenue across the industry had fallen roughly 70 percent from its peak.
Goodbye, Colorado
The recession of 2008 took much of the display advertising that remained. The Denver operation lost $16 million that year.
The owners put the paper up for sale in December. One possible buyer came forward, and the deal fell apart, partly because the joint agreement tied the paper to its rival.
The newsroom had won four Pulitzer Prizes since 2000. The quality of the work was never the thing that failed.
The last edition ran on February 27, 2009, fifty-five days short of the paper's 150th birthday.
The front page said "Goodbye, Colorado."
The Fine Print Kept Going
The classified section did not die. It moved, and it stopped charging by the line.
Apartment sites, job boards and neighborhood selling apps do the work the gray columns did. They connect strangers in one city who need each other for an afternoon.
Most of them carry no news at all. They never needed it.
Readers bought the paper for the headlines.
The paper lived on the fine print.
