Although the intracity rivalry between The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News raged for more than a century, the stakes were ratcheted up a notch after 1980, when the which had just relinquished the circulation lead for the first time in decades, and began pouring considerable resources into the fray.
Suddenly, Denver became a desirable destination for hungry reporters from across the country.
Kevin Flynn, working as city editor for a small newspaper outside of Philadelphia, applied to both papers. The editor who interviewed him at the News asked him why he would want to come west.
“I said, ‘Itap going to be great newspaper war, and I want to be part of it,’ ” he recalls.
He caught on with the News, and reveled in the adrenaline rush, and the anxiety, of competing against The Post. During a stretch covering city hall, Flynn says, each paper had two reporters working the beat out of an on-site press room at the City and County building — plus there were radio and television reporters as well.
And when the broke in 1984, each paper devoted three reporters to the story — often sending them across the country in pursuit of angles related to the white nationalist movement that was behind the killing.
“Every day, we’d travel at the drop of a hat,” Flynn said. “Boise, Seattle, Atlanta, North Carolina. Thatap what makes the adrenaline pump.”
That, and the daily pressure of getting the story and getting it first.
“The Post beat us on a huge story, that the FBI had recovered the MAC-10 machine pistol used in the murder,” he says. “We didn’t have that. But we got even a couple months later, when in rural Virginia. We got a tip on that and had that in the paper in the morning. It was a good way to get even.”
Lynn Bartels, who covered several beats for the News from night cops to the statehouse, says that even when space in the newspaper was tight, there was one surefire strategy for making sure her editors made room for her story — even if it was late and the pages already had been laid out.
“I’d say, ‘The Post has it,’ and they’d rip up a page just to put it in,” says Bartels, who . “We were two worthy adversaries, and the public benefited. It was cutthroat, but there were friendships. In the old days at the Capitol, we were fierce competitors but good friends.”
Flynn remembers the pitched battle over countless stories but also recalls the humorous extracurricular activities that underscored the rivalry’s intensity. He notes that the itch to get an advantage continued even through the days the two papers shared a new building at 101 W. Colfax Ave. during their joint operating agreement — with the News’ newsroom on the fifth floor and The Post’s on the sixth.
“My competitive instinct was so petty that every time I walked through our elevator lobby, I’d push the buttons for both the down and up elevators,” he explains, figuring that if the competition had to make an extra stop at the fifth floor, those lost seconds might give the News an edge. “At the very least, I’m either slowing somebody down getting out to a story, or slowing them down on deadline trying to get to their desk.”
Flynn also confesses to another long-ago prank. A Post reporter developed a habit of parking in a space alongside the Rocky’s building on Delaware Street in a space reserved for News photographers — a practice that irked him.
“I went to our marketing department and got a stack of Rocky Mountain News bumper stickers,” he says. “Every day that car was parked there, it left with Rocky Mountain News bumper sticker on it. Until it stopped.”
One more fond memory: When the papers shared remote offices in the City and County building, Flynn says he and his colleagues would sometimes unscrew the mouthpiece on The Post’s land line telephone, remove the microphone and hide it in a drawer.
“Between that and pushing the elevator buttons,” Flynn says with a laugh, “I don’t know why we didn’t win.”
He worked 27 years for the News before the paper conceded the newspaper war and closed in 2009. Now he’s a Denver city councilman, with a new perspective on the media who cover city government (“I used to cover the bastards. Now I am a bastard”) and what it means to have only one newspaper — and one reporter — serving as the public’s watchdog filtering information vital to civic discourse.
“Things improve through competition and stagnate through monopoly,” Flynn says. “You need diversity of viewpoints. Each of us brought different sources, different opinions on whatap more vital, how to interpret issues. The worst problem isn’t the one gatekeeper, but a news hole that gets smaller and smaller. The opportunity is lost to get the word out.”
After the News ceased publication, The Post hired a handful of its former competitors — including Bartels, whose exhaustive knowledge of state politics instantly made her a valued asset. But perhaps inevitably, she felt awkward at first as she became a fixture in the newsroom where not so long before she had been considered an adversary.
“My life at the News for so long was walking outside and picking up The Post and your heart sinking — “Oh, my god, I got my butt kicked on that.’ If you had a beat, you were always, ‘Oh, gosh. Oh, no…’ In the minds of some of the people there, I was enemy No. 1. I have to tell you this: I was an in-your-face, take-no-prisoners, out-of-control lout, sometimes, to the competition. I knew it would come back to haunt me a little. And it did.”
She felt that her first year was rough. But eventually, she felt comfortable in her new environment, and her departure in 2015 was met with considerable sadness.
“I have no regrets about going to The Post,” Bartels says. “It made me such a better reporter having worked for both papers, and I got to meet such great people. I was grateful that I got to compete in one of the last great newspaper wars ever — and then ended up going to work for the enemy.”
