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Q:
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What story were you hoping to tell in “Final Edition”?
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A:
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The idea was to tell the story of what the Rocky meant to the community and to the people who worked there, whether the final outcome was sale, closure, or bankruptcy—which we thought were the three possible outcomes. The documentary had three different titles and endings at one point.
When it was announced that the paper was up for sale, we posted a lot of video on our Web site of the president of Scripps making the announcement. And then we did a number of videos that day. I think as early as the next day, our senior editor for multimedia and photography, Janet Reeves, and video journalist Sonya Doctorian came to me and said, “We think we should do it as a documentary.” It was a great story, and we thought we should cover it ourselves.
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Q:
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Please talk about the decision to use a married couple, Jeff Legwold and Laura Frank, as narrative guides through the video.
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A:
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We were lucky to have such an articulate and profound person as Laura. And early on, Jeff was very angry. He had written an eloquent response to the Scripps decision to sell the Rocky Mountain News.
One lesson from this experience is that the uncertainty extends much farther than just the employees. We don’t realize how many people are affected—really it’s the children, spouses, partners, parents, as well as close relatives and friends. And so we felt that showing a family took the story out of the newsroom and into the home. I thought Jeff was so articulate with the angry point of view that it provides the necessary critique—that we weren’t all going along with what was happening.
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Q:
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What was it like to help put together this story—which is partly your own story—while staying in your role as professionals?
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It was okay. We were okay. The good news is that we did it so early that the stress and strain hadn’t set in as much as it would. You couldn’t help but be affected by the sadness of the story we were working on. But we’d done it before. Columbine was just months like that. And, of course, much, much worse.
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Q:
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Were there any debates about including the anger or distress employees felt in what amounted to the final story on the closure?
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No, we felt that it was very important that this meet our journalistic standards. But that also meant that it had to have balance. Jeff said the company had quit on us. But the video also shows me—I didn’t know what Jeff was going to say—explaining that Scripps had owned the Rocky for more than 82 years. Somebody who spent that much time and effort in a market, it’s hard to say they’re quitters.
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Q:
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Do you see the film as primarily for the paper’s staff, the Denver community, or a larger audience?
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A:
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It wasn’t for the staff. The film was for the community. I had no idea that there would be such national interest. But I did want to make a documentary because I felt it would be more comprehensible and more affecting for a larger audience who didn’t know the Rocky. There are things we did to create a sense of the newspaper as a character in the story.
We had partnered with MediaStorm [a multimedia production studio] during the Democratic convention. Prior to the convention, MediaStorm did some training sessions. We learned a lot from that experience that we could then apply to “Final Edition.” This was the first unique story that we had a special ability to tell [via multimedia] in a way no one else could.
We had a very thought-through Web plan for our final edition. Really, we had a three-pronged approach: print, video, and the Web site. They were all interconnected. We wanted all of them to be of the highest caliber to reflect on the quality and the commitment of the people in the room.
It was a collaborative effort, building on what we had learned so far and pushing to the next level. The paper has always believed that our role was to focus on the local story. We thought it was a very significant local story, and that it deserved our best effort. We’re proud of what we did.
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