Lessons from the death of a great paper

John Temple was the editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News which closed down a little over a year ago after almost 150 years in business. You may recognise him from Matt Robert's excellent 'Final Edition' video which I blogged on last week.

Under his leadership, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence; despite this, and despite the prospect of the paper being profit-making in the future, the publicly-quoted owners, EW Scripps (worth about $6 billion) shut the paper down.

John gave a talk at the UC Berkley (Go Bears!) Media Technology Summit at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California on September 30th, 2009. You can read the text of the talk here, or you can watch the slideshow and listen to the talk in the video below.

I don't agree with all of John's observations, but he is extremely honest about the mistakes that he made as well as those made by the owners of the paper.

Managing Directors and Managing Editors of newspapers on this side of the Atlantic would be wise to listen to what he has to say. Before too long, they may find themselves in the same position that 'my Rocky' was in 2009.