Silicon Valley CEO and “Newsosaur” Alan Mutter offers this clear-eyed but still devastating commentary on the failure of the Rocky Mountain Independent, the second failed attempt since April by my former colleagues at the Rocky Mountain News to launch an online-only news site.
I feel for my friends there, many of whom still haven’t found work nearly eight months after the paper closed. But Mutter concludes that the ex-Rocky folks hoped to make a seamless transition from a publication with nearly 150 years of history and business acumen (not to mention a professional advertising sales staff) to a publication that produced much of the same materials on the Web … without the revenues, reputation, or marketing machine.
There was a lot of passion and experience but not much entrepreneurial talent — or, as Mutter puts it:
People felt the universe would reward them for doing what they wanted
to do, instead of doing what they needed to do to earn the patronage of
readers and advertisers.
Turns out that I’ll be discussing this as part of a talk at the Shaftesbury Society luncheon here at JLF Monday, Oct. 19. Be there.
