The Denver Daily News, a free alternative newspaper in Denver, Colorado, has shut down after 10 years. The news is not that it was forced to shut down amid mounting financial pressure, but just a matter of when. We like competition. The Denver Daily News was a good alternative daily voice in the metro area. We are truly sorry for all the hard working people there, now scrambling to find jobs in an ever shrinking news environment. However, they operated like it was the 1990’s by concentrating the majority of their efforts in putting out a daily print publication instead of operating on a platform they could have much more affordably competed in, online.
Their Facebook page is just shy of 500 fans. Their Twitter account is just over 1,100 followers, while in return, they followed only 4 accounts and had sent out a total of 245 tweets. Their website while not exciting, had a good number of inbound links and scored a Google Page Rank of 5. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. The Denver Daily News failed for perhaps a number of reasons. We believe they failed because they didn’t embrace new technologies, new ways of presenting the news, in short, new media.
They published 25,000 newspapers a day, mostly distributed in downtown Denver, with a smattering in the Cherry Creek and Denver Technological Center areas of town as well. Had they truly embraced an ongoing online strategy, their geographic coverage would have been twenty times as great, and so would their readership. Had they provided rapid email news blasts, tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, and online story updates, their sheer size could have out-nimbled the larger established Denver Post and they could have garnered a reputation for being faster and more up to date.
This should be a lesson for other newspapers across the country. News is not just for paper, or television, or even top of the hour updates on radio. News is where you want to find it. Social media is all about delivering the news you want when you want it. News organizations who want to survive need to read that bit of news and follow it.
Thanks to the Denver Post for image
