DENVER -- Rocky Mountain News staffers are considering creating of a Web site to rally readers who want to show their support for the newspaper, which is being sold.

John Ensslin, a reporter and group spokesman, said the site would allow people to show what the newspaper means to their community.

E.W. Scripps Co. announced last week it was putting its flagship newspaper up for sale. It expects it to lose $15 million this year. Scripps said it may close the newspaper if there is no buyer by mid-January.

About 30 staffers met Saturday and Ensslin said the talks will continue.

The Denver Post and the News have a joint operating agreement. The Denver Newspaper Agency handles their business and production operations, while both maintain competing newsrooms.

Editor Holds Out Hope

Rocky Mountain News Editor John Temple said he hopes someone can find a commercially viable way for at least the paper's name to survive.

"The media landscape is going to be dramatically different," Temple said Friday. "I think we're going to see wrenching change."

Over the next five years, Temple sees the Colorado media landscape as far more digital, with consumers demanding more content delivered electronically and with more specialty publications targeting subsets of readers valuable to advertisers.

"As to whether there's going to be a Rocky Mountain News or The Denver Post, I can understand why people generally today are skeptical at best that the Rocky Mountain News would be here or that we'd have two newspapers in five years," Temple said. Still, he noted that the future of the New York Post was in doubt in 1993 but that the paper has been resurrected.

"We can't think of ourselves as newspapers first. We have to think of ourselves as news sources, information sources and community connections," Temple said. "The idea of a daily newspaper that has a full complement of all the content every day is probably not what newspapers will look like down the road."

Cincinnati-based Scripps put the News up for sale on Thursday, citing losses that could reach $15 million this year. Scripps, which has owned the News since 1926, said it may close the paper if a buyer isn't found. It plans to accept offers until mid-January.

"Major metropolitan-area newspapers are very expensive to produce and they have huge cost structures. So when they have revenue literally evaporating, the system it was built on is not sustainable," Temple said.

Temple's newsroom is still promoting hard-edged, enterprise reporting, but no long-term projects are planned. He said he is still planning coverage of the presidential inauguration, the new legislative session, the National Western Stock Show and baseball spring training. All except spring training take place in January. Spring training starts in February.

The News, Colorado's oldest newspaper, fought a protracted and draining newspaper war with The Denver Post until 2001, when Scripps entered a joint operating agreement with The Post's parent, Denver-based MediaNews Group Inc.