Back in May 2018, Chuck Plunkett, the editorial page editor of The Denver Post, resigned after sparking an uproar with an editorial that called on the newspaper’s new owner, Digital First Media, to sell the Post to someone who cared about something other than maximum profits.
Digital First had cut the newsroom staff — once numbering 300 reporters and editors — down to a skeleton crew of about 60. (On Friday, New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which owns Digital First Media, won shareholder approval for its $633 million bid to acquire Tribune Publishing — publisher of the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, and major metro papers from Hartford, Conn., to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)
Mr. Plunkett’s resignation came one week after Dave Krieger, the editorial page editor of another Digital First Media newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera, was fired after self-publishing an editorial critical of DFM’s management practices.
The demolition of the Denver Post newsroom, following the Alden Global purchase, is one of the key Colorado stories within a new documentary film, “News Matters”. The film is being streamed, free of charge, on Rocky Mountain PBS website this week. You can view it here.
From the University of Colorado Boulder website:
Colorado filmmaker Brian Malone was wrapping up final edits to his documentary about the dying local news industry when, on January 6, 2021, he flipped on the TV and watched in disbelief as an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. Amid shots of protesters scaling walls and busting out windows, one image hit him particularly hard: the one of crowds tearing down and stomping on news cameras.
It was, he says, a lightbulb moment.
“The thing that brought all of these people to the Capitol to engage in this historically violent act was misinformation,” said Malone, who returned to the editing bay that day to reframe the film. “Everything I had been talking about in the film — about the loss of newspapers and trusted information and the dangerous consequences — connected directly to what was happening.”
While watching Mr. Malone’s documentary, I was struck by the earnest reporters and editors referring to The Denver Post as a “hometown newspaper.”
I shamelessly consider Pagosa Springs to be my “hometown”… and it strikes me, for some reason, as incongruous to apply that same term — “hometown” — to a metropolitan area of 2.9 million people. Wouldn’t “homecity” be a more appropriate term? Or maybe “homemegalopolis”?
Nevertheless, local coverage — stories covering local government decision-making, schools, policing, development, real estate, sports, local business — is presumably just an important to a “hometown” like Denver as it is to a “hometown” like Pagosa Springs.
The clash between print news and TV news — trusted by many among our older generations — and Facebook/Twitter/Online News and all the internet media sources more likely to appeal to younger adults, is both a financial battle and an intellectual battle.
In 2009, the Rocky Mountain News — Denver’s other “hometown” newspaper — published its final edition. Rich Boehne, president of E.W.Scripps Company, announced to the staff that the February 7 edition of the Rocky Mountain News would the final one:
“One thing I want to make sure and say. It’s certainly not [due to anything the staff did]. You all did everything right. But while you were out, doing your part, the business model and the economy changed, and the Rocky became a victim of that… let me just as straight as I can. Denver can’t support two newspapers any longer. It just can’t happen…”
At one point in the film, former Rocky Mountain News reporter Mike Littwin explains that about one-third of the revenue generated by a major metropolitan newspaper comes from classified ads. With the arrival of Craig’s List and dozens of category-specific online advertising websites, newspaper classifieds in larger cities are no longer generating the revenue necessary to support newsrooms of 300 reporters and editors.
Nor is display advertising bringing in the money it was 20 years ago. In the film, we hear from the former owner of the Denver Post, Dean Singleton, who lost his ownership of the paper to Alden Global as the result of an unmanageable debt burden:
“Newspapers are a business. The first thing to go was employment advertising. And that was followed by real estate advertising. And that was followed by automotive advertising. Local retail started to go. Department stores started to go. There’s no real advertising content in the newspaper. So you’re only getting those [subscribers] who want the newspaper for ‘news’.
“And with all the revenue declining like that, you didn’t have the money to spend on news…
Mr. Singleton also noted that about 57% of newspaper readers buy a newspaper, not for the news, but mainly for the ads. I suppose that includes classified ads?
The internet is now offering a range of “classified ads” free of charge. I visited Craig’s List this morning, and found four homes for rent in zip code 81147, priced at between $2,600 and $3,800 per month. When I looked in our local newspaper, (which will cost me $1 a week, starting next week) I found just two specific listings for rentals ($1,500 and $1,900) and one listing for a roommate wanted ($700).
As Mr. Singleton states in the film: “… When a business is dying, those that really understand it, don’t want to be there to conduct the funeral. Somebody is going to have to turn out the lights on all of these newspapers. And I don’t want to be the one who did it…”
These issues are concerning to me… even though the Pagosa Daily Post itself is basically a ‘non-profit’ effort, published only on the internet, and might be considered — by some folks who graduated from college with a degree in journalism — to be part of the problem.
Or is ‘digital news’ part of the solution… but we haven’t quite figured out the business model yet?
The film ends with a segment about the ten former Denver Post reporters who started the online-only Colorado Sun. You can read it for free. You can also subscribe and support the effort.
Is ‘non-profit’ the future, for news coverage? For our democracy?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.