2025-9-Book-Review-September| Download PDF
Ward, Ken J. Last paper standing: A century of competition between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2023, 278 pp., $51.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-64642-505-1. Reviewed by Michael Humphrey, Johnson County Community College, mhumph18@jccc.edu
Had the 2009 demise of the Rocky Mountain News happened in any other era than it did, the spoils for the victor, The Denver Post, would have been sweet. A decade and a half later, that is not how the story unfolded. One of the most striking passages in Last Paper Standing, which chronicles Denver’s century-long newspaper battle, comes from Lynn Bartels, a former reporter at the News, who wonderedif her paper got lucky. “In a way, maybe it was good that we did die when we did, because we look like John Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe” (p. 202).
There is no implication needed in that comment because the rest of it is blunt. The Post, Denver’s last paper standing, was decimated by revenue collapse, a fire sale, and vulture capitalism in short order. What was once a proud contender has become an emaciated husk of its former self, and “if [the News] were back with as few … reporters as the Post operates on, it would be hated,” Bartels concluded (p. 202).
Understanding how it all came to this seems to be the primary aim of Last Paper Standing. Ward begins with the News’slast day on February 23, 2009 and continues by depicting the making of its first edition on April 23, 1859. What ensues is a story of a newspaper battle that commenced in 1892, when the Post entered the fray, and was marked by occasional bloody beatings and shootings (and that’s just the owners). It ultimately ended when the two sides tried to cooperate in a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA), combing all operations except the newsrooms, which lasted just eight years.
Ward’s decision to organize the book chronologically is both sensible and largely effective. What emerges is a fight sometimes experienced in the ring itself—such as how News founders William N. Byers and John L. Dailey beat a competitor by twenty minutes to become the area’s first newspaper—and most often viewed from the owners’ and publishers’ seats. Taking the leadership perspective is Ward’s conscious choice, and the result is a telling of the broader American newspaper narrative, from pioneering inceptions to the Internet-era struggles.
By following the newspaper war in Denver, readers learn a great deal about the era of yellow journalism, since the Post’s second owners, Harry Tammen and Frederick G. Bonfils, employed its tactics to achieve market dominance at turn of the 20th Century. There are also multiple depictions of endeavors to conglomerate news brands, like when Scripps-Howard bought the Rocky in 1926 and shuttered it in 2009. S.I. Newhouse also tried a takeover of the Post for years, but it was MediaNews Group and a Colorado-loving Texan, Dean Singleton, who in 1987 swooped in to grab a struggling version of the paper from the short-lived ownership of the Times Mirror.
Ward also does the noble and beneficial work of getting into the ledgers and spreadsheets to show the trends of revenue, costs, profits and loss, and circulation statistics throughout the battle. He provides good detail, without tumbling too far down the rabbit hole, of strategies around marketing, distribution, sales, content, and, perhaps most importantly, both paper’s adaptations to new mediums, from radio to television to the Internet. Ward found nuggets another author might miss. Those interested in media leadership, either from an academic or practical perspective, will be well served by Last Paper Standing.
What is often lost in that focus is the newsroom itself. Ward does refer to stories, both older and newer, but they are usually passing mentions. The same is true with the key journalists who passed through or made their longtime homes in Denver. Some of the bigger local names, such as the News columnist Gene Amole and the sportswriter Woody Paige (who wrote for both the News and the Post) get a little more ink. The best section in this regard depicts how the News’ last editor, John Temple, editorially prepared for both the survival and death of the paper. Because there was some warning from Scripps that it would either be sold or shut down, his creative approach made for one of the best final editions the newspaper world will ever see. The Rocky (as most people in Denver media called it) fell just two months short of their 150th anniversary. What is surprisingly missing from the tale is one of the most important editorial hires in the history of the war, and Temple’s counterpart at the Post, Gregory L. Moore, editor during four of the Post’s nine Pulitzer Prizes.
Overall, Last Paper Standing should be lauded for capturing a 150 years of newspaper history in a tidy 202-page tale. Sometimes with remarkable business detail, sometimes with scene-making that provides the punch of what a newspaper, or newspapers, mean to its community, the book remains engaging throughout. We learn that Denver emerged from a rush for gold that often sent prospectors home disappointed. Many times, the same was true for those looking for gold in the city’s media market. By the time a last paper was finally standing, the riches had largely dried up. Ward should be congratulated for restraint in trying to conclude why. What we do know is this: Newspapers like the Rocky and the Post have both been greater victims of changing technologies and social trends than any of the editorial or business blows they tried to land on each other.
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