DENVER --
Screen shots from the Rocky Mountain News
A couple of years ago, back when those of us who worked at the Rocky Mountain News still thought a redesign would save us, management asked some focus groups to "brand" the newspaper for marketing purposes. For reasons that are still unclear, they came back with automobile metaphors: The Rocky is a Ford. Dependable, solid. The working man's vehicle. The words "blue collar" may have been used. Our arch rival, the Denver Post, was deemed a Buick or a Cadillac, something more refined, more expensive. Sleeker.
Great, I thought, sitting in an auditorium of equally confused journalists who wanted nothing more than to get back to the newsroom. So are we an Escort or an Explorer?
The "brand" results were turned into a campaign in which the Rocky was described as a "Power Tool" for our readers. It was plastered across the sides of a newly acquired black Hummer that occasionally drove around Denver but mostly sat in our parking lot.
Friday, the Rocky, with a daily circulation of 210,000 and 457,000 on Saturdays, became the nation's largest newspaper to cease publication in an economic recession that already has sent the Chicago Tribune and both of Philadelphia's daily papers running for bankruptcy cover, among others, and put a For Sale sign on the Miami Herald. If we were a Ford, we ran out of gas 55 days before our 150th anniversary.
"We had a beautiful thing here," our editor, John Temple, told us as we huddled around the news desk on Thursday, 230 writers, editors and photographers about to be jobless in the worst economy since the Great Depression.
"I am sick we have to be here," said Mark Contreras, whose job for E.W. Scripps Co. is apparently shutting down newspapers.
"Not as sick as we are," said one reporter, sotto voce.
"This was one of the best newspapers in America," Contreras said, and the 'was' made our breakup complete.
"It's not you," said the reporter. "It's me."
Soon after that meeting, along with the TV crews and photographers wandering our newsroom to capture the final moments, a couple of guys began dismantling the lights and sound equipment for television production that most of us had forgotten were there.
The TV equipment was the artifact of yet another failed idea to save the paper called "convergence." "Convergence" meant that print reporters tidied up and reported to our miniature newsroom set and tried to breathe evenly while discussing our stories on-camera with our local TV station "partner."
Convergence came after the Power Tools campaign, but before someone in Scripps decided the Rocky should look like a magazine: Stories stayed on only one page, maybe two, and nothing jumped to the back.
Then we learned to Twitter and Flickr, to use our cellphones to take pictures and video and to carry our computers around so we could drop and blog, wherever we were. When the Democratic National Convention came to town in August, we were told we could wear portable tables that hung from our necks and folded out, like the cigarette girls of old. Unfold the table, fire up the laptop, and type. In other words, we didn't even need to sit down to write.
Despite all of that -- the time-suck of the marketing, the anxiety attached to learning the gimmicks -- the Rocky won four Pulitzer Prizes between 1999 and 2009.
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I remember the day I decided to become a reporter. I was 17 years old and riding a city bus on a sunny afternoon in a Rust Belt factory town in Indiana. I lived on the edge of a neighborhood called Shed Town and I didn't know anybody who didn't work with their hands, if they worked at all.
I had recently read "All the President's Men" and I was enchanted by the idea that knowledge could right wrongs. But I had no interest in presidents. I wanted to write about people like me.
The Rocky gave me that chance for eight years. I spent most of that time covering Denver Public Schools, a poor, majority-minority (55 percent Latino) district with 75,000 kids desperately struggling to halt the downward spiral afflicting most inner-city school systems today. I was lucky to hang out with Julissa when she rapped to the superintendent with the Yale Law degree that he was treating her classmates like animals, and privileged to follow Ricky as he tried to fit into a high school full of kids from homes that didn't look much like his.
I seldom tripped over TV reporters doing the kind of stories I did and I doubt education stories will ever pull the kind of Web hits that sports stories do. Editor John Temple gave us permission to do that work anyway, spending months on projects tracking eighth-graders through graduation and exploring why one in four children in Denver don't attend the city's public schools. Knowledge may not always right wrongs, I found out, but it is the only thing that's got a shot.
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Most of us journalists at the Rocky ignored all the marketing efforts that were meant to save the paper. We shrugged off the "Ford" brand, Convergence and the rest of the gimmicks, even those annoying folding tables. If there is a "brand" that we embraced, it was embodied in the instructions that were once posted in our managing editor's office. Three simple rules, not produced by a focus group: Get the news. Tell the truth. Don't be dull. I'd like to believe we did all three.
Jewelry businesses have been especially hard hit by the recession. Zales is closing stores by the hundreds, and Whitehall has declared Chapter 11. But Fortunoff was more than a blingerie, it was the place to begin a life, to buy a wedding ring or a bridal gift or outfit a starter home. When it died, a piece of old-school white ethnic New York went with it.
Born in Brooklyn in 1922, the regional chain moved, in body and spirit, to the Long Island suburbs, just like the upwardly mobile strivers who bought their jewelry, furniture and housewares there. There was a store on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which proclaimed a different sort of aspiration, the desire to rub shoulders with Tiffany's and the Plaza Hotel, but the store in Westbury, on Long Island, was the flagship and the mother ship. It anchored its own dowdy minimall, called the Mall at the Source, built around it in the 1990s. But the bridge-and-tunnel icon could not survive the tug of Target in one direction and more effete yup-scale retailers in the other, and is now in liquidation.
As with the demise of many 87-year-olds from Long Island, the death of Fortunoff was sad, but not unexpected. In February 2008, the owners who had bought the chain from the Fortunoff family filed for bankruptcy. Lord & Taylor's rescued the brand and its 19 stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, but the second Chapter 11 filing came a year later. On Feb. 12, the company laid off 300 of its 1,800 headquarters staff in Westbury. Liquidators purchased nearly $100 million in inventory not long thereafter, and a chainwide clearance sale began the last week of February.
Clearance shoppers of a certain age interviewed by Long Island's Newsday newspaper, tribune of all that is 516, evinced great nostalgia for the chain. William Friedrich of Queens, 69, was shopping for miniature trains. His wife was shopping for bridal gifts. "Now we'll have to go to Target," said Friedrich. Amalia Kanaras of Long Island, 68, had been shopping at Fortunoff for 40 years. She purchased a pearl necklace. Rosemarie Godfrey, also 68, also of Long Island, and a former Fortunoff employee, said, "I came to mourn."
Did Mervyn's die, or was it murdered?
In 1949 Mervin Morris opened a department store in the unglamorous California town of San Lorenzo. He built Mervyn's into a West Coast institution, where generations of lower-middle-class families bought work pants and school clothes, before selling it to Dayton Hudson for $300 million in 1977. And now that Mervyn's has ceased to be, the 88-year-old Morris says the private-equity firms who wound up owning the chain looted it for cash -- "raped" it, in his words -- and left it to die.
Mervyn's, which at its peak had spread from the Bay Area across the country and totaled 300 stores in 16 states, was the kind of retailer more likely to be found in a strip mall than a galleria, more East Bay than Marin or Palo Alto. Morris was proud of his loyal blue-collar clientele, and claimed to have been the first retailer to offer revolving credit.
But after he sold out in 1977, he began to feel that Dayton Hudson, the precursor to Target, was neglecting his stores. Mervyn's expanded, and then contracted back to the West Coast. In 2003, Kohl's entered the California market, a director competitor in the bargain clothing business.
Target sold out to Cerberus Capital Management and Sun Capital Partners for $1.25 billion in 2004, and the private equity firms quickly proved more interested in Mervyn's real estate than its retail business. They made a healthy profit by selling the real estate and then leasing the buildings back to Mervyn's.
Mervyn's was hit hard by the recession, which arrived early and in full force in California. Anecdotally, there were signs that Latino customers, who had become an important constituency, were not spending on work clothes at the chain because the construction business had faltered. Mervyn's had shrunk to 149 stores by the time it declared bankruptcy in July 2008. It held liquidation sales through the Christmas holidays. There were still 18,000 workers at Mervyn's when it went under; many of them did not receive severance, were stiffed on vacation pay, which has been withheld by the bankruptcy court, and are having trouble collecting on their 401Ks.
Store brands like High Sierra, Hillard and Hanson were snapped up at a bankruptcy sale. But the name of the store may live on. More than three decades after their father left the business, Mervyn's three sons have bought back the trademark and the customer list. They plan to relaunch the chain as an online store. "I think there will be a Mervyn's name on the horizon somewhere there," says Mervin Morris, "just how and when and what the magnitude will be I am not sure. That is going to depend on my boys." Kohl's, meanwhile, has sucked up 31 of the old Mervyn's locations in California.
Flickr/Ed Yourdon
In 1949, at the beginning of the television era, a guy from the Jersey Shore started a little electronics store in downtown Richmond, Va. Sixty years later, the recession, a questionable labor decision and the flat-screen TV teamed up to kill what had become the second largest consumer electronics chain in the United States.
By the time founder Sam Wurtzel died in 1986, Ward's TV had morphed into Circuit City, a big-box retailer. In 1996, the Wurtzel family gave up day-to-day control of Circuit City, which had grown to 400 stores nationally and $7 billion in sales annually, and had launched a side business in used cars called CarMax. America was soon lousy with 20,000-square-foot superstores topped by a bright red-and-white logo. The stores became famous for ugly entranceways designed to look like giant electric plugs.
But in November of 2008, facing its third full year in the red, Circuit City filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It began to close some of its 700 stores in 155 markets. On Jan. 15, unable to find a buyer or refinancing, the chain announced it was done. More than 34,000 people are already unemployed. The going-out-of-business sales will last through March.
What happened? Several years ago, the company opted to end sales commissions and lay off its most experienced, knowledgeable sales personnel. As sales of expensive flat-screen televisions boomed, Circuit City found itself using clueless clerks to sell big-ticket items to people who could just as easily take their business to the next box store down the street -- Wal-Mart. Which they did. Research shows that 72 percent of Circuit City shoppers were also Wal-Mart shoppers.
Analysts gave Circuit City a chance to survive 2008 if the chain had a decent Christmas -- which would depend, in part, on competitors like Wal-Mart showing mercy and not offering deep discounts on flat-screens. You know what happened instead. The chain will be missed by its newly pink-slipped employees and by strip-mall landlords, but maybe not by many others. A random survey of Salon staffers yielded no pleasant memories, only bitter tales of pushy salesmen, plug-ugly store design and dashboard-destroying car-stereo installation worthy of Civil War surgeons.
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