Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.When the photo and interactive teams at the
Rocky Mountain News started their final video project, they weren't sure where the story was going or what the deadline was, but they knew the subject intimately: themselves.
"Talk about a day to be running late to work," said Janet Reeves, senior editor for photography and multimedia. "I had all these messages saying, 'Get to the conference room.'" At that meeting on Dec. 4, managers were told what E.W. Scripps executives would shortly announce to the newsroom -- that
the Rocky was up for sale.
Reeves left the meeting and walked back to the photo department. Video journalist Sonya Doctorian was teaching a reporter to edit video. Joe Mahoney, assistant director of multimedia, had just come in, sopping wet, from shooting a video weather feature. "I told them we've got some breaking news, grab your stuff."
Doctorian asked where. "At the news desk," Reeves replied. "Five minutes."
There employees were told that Scripps was putting the paper up for sale. If the company didn't find a buyer in four to six weeks, the paper would close. There was silence in the newsroom. The multimedia staff scrambled to file
video and photos for the Web story.
Doctorian knew she wanted to take the story further and talked to Reeves about going to the press conference about the sale. Afterward, she came back and typed up a proposal to follow the newspaper through the period of transition, whatever it might be.
"It's how a lot of things start at the
Rocky -- someone has a seed," said Reeves. "We started meeting, and it started forming. Sonya saw it as a long documentary, and John [Temple, editor and publisher of the
Rocky] said, 'No, we have to be able to put this up the day they announce what's happening.'"
On Friday, after an all-night edit and the morning after Scripps said it was closing the paper, the
touching 21-minute documentary video went up on the
Rocky Web site. "Final Edition" captures some powerful moments as journalists, in the midst of a typical newsroom routine, catch themselves realizing that they are witnessing the end of their newspaper.
One couple, Broncos writer Jeff Legwold and investigative reporter Laura Frank, has a central role. Frank recounts telling her children that the paper was for sale. Legwold said he had hoped that the
Rocky would be his "forever newspaper. That I would get lots of gray hair, and I would be the crusty guy in the newsroom and people would just say, 'Aw, that's just Legwold, he's been here forever.'"
"I know it sounds like it's a difficult story to do," Reeves said, "but what better way to do a piece on what's happening in newspapers than to do it on yourself?"
A series of meetings fleshed out the story line -- not only what the sale or closing might mean to the newsroom, but what it would mean to the community as well. Interviews were assigned with everyone from the mayor, to people in coffee shops, to the editor himself.
"When you're talking with people in the community ... you think, 'Wow, this means something, this is not just people losing their jobs,'" said Matthew Roberts, who did the final video edit. "This is a blow to the community."
Temple announced the project to the newsroom and told everyone that participation was optional. Five more staff members were brought in to record video.
For Doctorian, it was one of the most difficult things she had ever recorded. "I had my own desire to show what was happening as it happened," she said, "but I had to check it against my respect for my colleagues."
Janet Reeves, senior editor for photography and multimedia at the Rocky: "I know it sounds like it's a difficult story to do, but what better way to do a piece on what's happening in newspapers than to do it on yourself?"She worried that the people in the newsroom would not have any control over when she was around. "I wanted to be very careful not to intrude on them in their most vulnerable times," she said. "Usually when I'm working on a doc, the people have agreed to have me be there at a certain time and they expect me to be there. This time it wasn't true -- I could be there any time with a camera."
They aimed to finish by the mid-January deadline for bids to be submitted to buy the paper. In between were scheduled vacations, Christmas and New Year's holidays, and the daily work of getting out the paper and Web site.
Each week, they gathered more material and restructured the story. Mahoney wonders if the project might have been very different if they had known they had three months. "Probably two weeks before, we were thinking about a major rearrangement of the flow," he said, "and it felt like we were painting the Titanic as it was steaming toward the iceberg."
The final day of shooting was the most difficult for Mahoney, and the easiest. "It's kind of a cliché, but I'm thinking about how dark the area [where the announcement was made] was, rather than things like my career at the
Rocky is over and I'm unemployed."
"I felt like a rat bastard shooting that," he added, "but I feel that way shooting other people in that situation. I was as uncomfortable as I've ever been doing it. You run through the same justification -- that it's part of the impact of the story."
Friday afternoon, as the last business day winded down, KMGH-TV aired the entire piece without commercial interruption. Mahoney felt the full impact of the story for the first time while watching it in the newsroom on television. "It just was really tough," he said. "I think being surrounded by reporters, editors and photographers, with our boxes and the remnants of our careers at the
Rocky around us, it really got to me."
"It had more depth, more breadth, and I think ultimately more meaning because [seven of us] shot this," Doctorian said. "We all agree that it was our best piece ever, alas."
When Reeves saw the final edit, in spite of the many times she had seen it in progress, she got teary-eyed. "I'm so proud of them all. It's sort of the
Rocky way to just push the limits."
Roberts is proud of the work as well, but is concerned that the
Rocky will not be the last to document its own demise. "I don't want to see another video like this, really," he said. "I don't want to have to see another video like this."
CORRECTION: This story originally misidentified the television station that aired the
Rocky's documentary. The story also had an incorrect date by which the newspaper aimed to complete it.
