It’s been a long day and a long night. It is too early to say what’s next, but please stick with us as we regroup here in the coming days. Some of our friends and colleagues are moving on to the Denver Post, but it’s 10 people out of a newsroom of almost 250. Those moving on are not the only people responsible for bringing you the news nor the only people you’ve come to trust for the news. There is a group of copy editors, designers, reporters and web producers who want to do tomorrow what they were doing yesterday. We’ll see what shape that takes in the coming days, so stay tuned.

After nearly 150 years, the Rocky Mountain News will publish its last newspaper on Friday.

From all of us at I Want My Rocky, thank you doesn’t seem to say everything you, our readers, mean to us. We will treasure all the kind words sent in to us via this Web site and the support you’ve given us by making the Rocky your newspaper of choice in Denver.

We are truly sorry for the outcome.

Please keep watching this Web site for further announcements on where you can find your favorite writers.

The rumor: This one, spreading wildly through the Rocky newsroom and spilling out into the general public, has the Rocky Mountain News pulling back its writers and photographers from Rockies spring training in Tucson, Ariz., in preparation of some pending announcement about the fate of the newspaper.

The truth: It’s completely false. Baseball writer Tracy Ringolsby has been at spring training since early February and remains there, covering the Rockies. (Proof: here.) Columnist Dave Kreiger spent a week in Tucson covering the Rockies and returned to Denver on Monday — as scheduled. Photographer Chris Schneider has been in Tucson since mid-February and will return this weekend — as scheduled. Baseball writer Jack Etkin is arriving at spring training today — as scheduled. Nothing has changed.

At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, unions representing more than 1,000 employees of the Denver Newspaper Agency reached a tentative agreement on wage and benefit cuts.

Editor & Publisher has posted a story about Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group’s possible interest in the San Francisco Chronicle, whose owner Hearst “said late Tuesday it would close or sell the paper if it could not get deep concessions from unions and reduce other expenses.”

“We’ll just watch it play out,” Singleton, who is CEO and vice-chair of MediaNews Group, told E&P Wednesday. “I am not going to speculate on what could happen. It would be futile to speculate on the future.”

But with his Bay Area News Group papers successfully implementing many consolidation programs, from news coverage to centralized business operations, Singleton’s chain is poised to takeover the Chronicle easily from an operational standpoint.

But, from a financial standpoint, he may be in no better shape than many other newspaper companies, and perhaps worse. MediaNews remains highly leveraged, with Hearst holding a substantial amount of MediaNews debt.

Alan Mutter on his Newsosaur blog speculates the San Francisco Chronicle, whose parent company Hearst announced Tuesday it would seek large short-term cuts or have to close or sell the newspaper, would need to cut 47 percent of its staff to wipe out its losses. The real staff cuts would be less than that because savings can be found in places other than payroll, but the theoretical number is rather jarring.

Later in the blog Mutter wonders if MediaNews, owner of the Denver Post, could be a potential buyer for the Chronicle given the company’s heavy interests in Northern California and partnership with Hearst that emerged from the 2006 purchase of area Knight Ridder papers.

San Francisco Chronicle owner Hearst — also the owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — announced Tuesday it will seek significant cuts from union and non-union employees, according to a report by sfgate.com, the newspaper’s Web site. Without the cuts, the company said it will look for a buyer for the newspaper — the largest in Northern California — or close it. Read more about it here.

Hearst in January put the Seattle P-I up for sale and announced it would close the paper or become Web-only if a buyer was not found.

By the time I attended the University of Denver, I’d accepted my mother’s notions that cartooning was not a decent way to make a living, and decided to study graphic design instead. A funny thing happened, though. My design teacher, the late Bill Sanderson, became a fan of the cartoons I was drawing for the campus newspaper, and made it his mission to convince me that my true calling was cartooning. It took him a while, but by the time I graduated, I wanted only to give Pat Oliphant, then the resident editorial cartoonist at the Denver Post, some competition.