John Temple, former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, has a pretty interesting take on why the paper is shutting down with the final issue today. One thing that stood out was Temple’s focus on the “joint operating agreement” the paper entered with the Denver Post to try to cut costs and save both titles. An excerpt:

Just as they subsidized circulation rates during the newspaper war, the owners contributed to the commercial vitality of Denver by offering advertising at prices much cheaper than in comparable markets.
After the JOA went into effect, the agency tried to raise the rates. Some of you who were here at the time might remember how devoid of advertising those early papers were. Businesses resisted. And although rates ultimately were hiked, sometimes many times over their initial levels, once again the owners weren’t able to get their charges to the levels of other cities.
In addition, in other markets newspapers diversified their revenue streams more successfully by adding specialty publications and growing their online businesses more rapidly.
Am I placing the blame for our failure on not being able to extract the circulation and advertising revenue this community should produce if it mirrored other markets? Yes, and no.
There’s no question that the agency’s inability to produce revenue at the levels of its peers was an important factor in the ultimate inability of the papers to succeed.
But there’s plenty of fault to go around. It costs more to produce two newspapers than one, because you have to pay for two newsrooms. Also, producing two newspapers introduces more complexity to the daily operations of the agency and adds more costs to its operations. That might have been OK at a time when newspapers typically were highly profitable, but became an enormous challenge when they were not.
A JOA is an unwieldy bureaucratic structure not suited to success in today’s rapidly changing media environment. A JOA has been a way for Congress to keep two voices alive in a community. For newspaper owners, historically JOAs have been the equivalent of annuities. They calmed a competitive situation and spun off cash on a predictable basis.
But not anymore.

Shocking. Political meddling with the free market doesn’t work?