Some day in the future, a media historian might look at 2024 as a hinge year for Colorado’s small-town newspapers.
In the summer, a colony collapse hit the rural Eastern Plains when five newspapers announced they would shut down for financial reasons. While two of them bounced back, others blinked out from the San Luis Valley and Denver to the Four Corners.
The news might have surprised some who watched a June minidocumentary on Denver’s 9News titled “Small town newspapers making a comeback.” But as one paper featured in it later said, “It really did not paint a complete picture of the Plainsman Herald’s dire outlook and many other small papers like it.”
By August, Rocky Mountain PBS was airing its own broadcast about the state of our state’s smaller papers under the headline “Bought-out, priced out, burned out: the individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado.”
But 2024 also showed promise when a national fundraising campaign to support local news, along with other philanthropic initiatives, pumped millions of dollars into Colorado newsrooms to help them thrive and become more sustainable. They clearly needed it. A survey of the state’s local news outlets this year found their funding wasn’t secure, burnout and shortages were affecting staff, and they were struggling to keep up with journalistic best practices while maintaining quality.
Meanwhile, while some of the state’s rural residents were becoming less informed about issues in their communities, Democratic lawmakers at the Capitol in Denver were at work making the business of state government less transparent. In the judiciary, court of appeals justices and the State Supreme Court ruled against news organizations that were trying to shine more sunlight onto our school administrators and police.
On the airwaves, public radio took a hit with layoffs, our state’s unique prison radio network mysteriously went dark, and a university’s student station made history. On TV, a prominent Denver news anchor wondered why his counterparts weren’t reporting more robustly on extremism. Some more new digital news outlets emerged, reporters had an impact when they held those in power accountable, and the Colorado Association of Black Journalists revitalized their organization.
Throughout the year, as artificial intelligence tools became more ubiquitous, newsrooms grappled with how best to use them and how their use by others would affect their work.
Each week, I write an emailed newsletter, underwritten by Colorado Media Project and others, that reports on, comments on and analyzes Colorado’s news scene. It connects local developments to what’s happening nationally and explores what makes the state’s local news ecosystem unique. (To keep up with it in 2025, sign up here.)
What I’ve noticed over the years is that plenty of the challenges facing the local news industry nationwide are exacerbated in Colorado while many of the potential solutions are taking root here as well.
Below follows 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 with a roundup of the news behind the news in Colorado across the calendar of 2024. It’s certainly not comprehensive, but here were some high-and-lowlights:
January brought international attention to a small Western Slope town when an upset reader stole copies of the Ouray County Plaindealer from area newspaper boxes. (He later pleaded guilty to a civil infraction and was fined $150.) The month also marked a burst of newsroom organizing when staffers at High Country News, the venerable Paonia-based magazine, announced their intention to form a “wall-to-wall” labor union. Across the Continental Divide, around 75 staffers at FOX31 and Channel 2 declared their intent to unionize. In the newspaper world, Colorado Community Media launched La Ciudad, a bilingual newsletter for the Commerce City community, and sports writer Mark Kiszla bolted from the Denver Post after 40 years to join the Denver Gazette. On the airwaves, Vic Vela, the popular weekend host and voice behind the award-winning “Back From Broken” podcast, surprisingly departed Colorado Public Radio after nine years, leaving listeners scratching their heads about the circumstances. As the judges on our nation’s highest court came under increased scrutiny for accepting lavish gifts from wealthy Americans who might benefit from their rulings, The Guardian examined Colorado-based U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s ties to billionaire Colorado newspaper owner Philip Anschutz. A new book by Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy called “What Works in Community News” included a chapter about The Colorado Sun. Only two weeks into the new year, the Four Corners Free Press monthly newspaper in Cortez announced it would close up shop after 20 years in business, citing rising printing costs and a loss of advertisers.
In February, newsrooms across Colorado were explaining the ways in which they were using new artificial intelligence tools. Some had initially seemed knee-jerk allergic to AI while others saw it as inevitable. Many were thinking about how to use it ethically. (I showed my audience what happened when I used ChatGPT to create an image for the newsletter.) In Colorado Springs, two high-profile Republican donors and major developers bought the defunct Indy alternative weekly and its sister publication, the Colorado Springs Business Journal. Joining a new national fundraising initiative to help support local news, Colorado created a Press Forward chapter. As newcomers came under increasing scrutiny in Colorado’s capital, news outlets Denverite, Colorado Public Radio and KRCC made changes to their style guides to drop the word “migrant” from news coverage. On TV, some 9NEWS journalists departed from their local TV news brethren by doing a story about why some people thought crime was increasing when data showed it was on the decline. (Surprise: They found “media plays a big role.”) The Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab, joined with the Colorado Press Association to create a joint weekly newsletter. After four years of running the University of Denver campus newspaper as a digital-only product, students there brought back printing physical copies of the Clarion. When billboards for a dubious newspaper popped up around the state, Rocky Mountain PBS wrote how “despite its claims, the Epoch Times is not the most-trusted news outlet by any official measure.” Reporters for the Gazette won the prestigious Polk Award for exposing Colorado’s “dysfunctional and dangerous family court system.” Colorado Media Project announced more than $360,000 would flow to journalism projects at more than two dozen local newsrooms and organizations throughout the year.
March came with a man-bites-dog story when the National Trust for Local News bought a used printing press from Canada and shipped it to Denver. In radio land, Colorado Public Radio joined its newspaper brethren in earning unfortunate headlines about layoffs. (The station let 15 people go, cutting its standalone podcasting unit and attributing the move to financial challenges.) Elsewhere on the airwaves, Colorado’s unique statewide prison radio program mysteriously went dark. At Cableland in Denver, the Colorado Association of Black Journalists rejuvenated the organization with a gala and awards ceremony. One of the state’s most prominent journalists, Kyle Clark, said it was “baffling” to him that in a time when journalists know that a lot of people get their news and information from local TV news, that it can “just be a space where extremism is not discussed in any significant way.” Colorado Springs independent Substack journalist Matthew Schniper, who covers the city’s culinary scene for his Side Dish newsletter, wrote about how he had come up with creative sponsorships in order to “be able to pay myself a real salary this year instead of working full-time-plus hours for barely part-time pay.” Author and journalist Bill Lascher took a deep dive into how a “wash of Walton family funding to news media is creating echo chambers in environmental journalism, and beyond,” and asked whether “editorial firewalls” are “up to the task.” (The Colorado Sun, where you’re reading this, has been a beneficiary.) Brian Porter, the board president of the Colorado Press Association, left his job as publisher of three Denver Post sister papers on the Eastern Plains to become editor and publisher of a new online political news site, Rocky Mountain Voice, which is run by former Republican candidate for governor Heidi Ganahl. (He later resigned from his role at the Press Association.) In student journalism news, Radio 1190 in Boulder, also known as KVCU at the University of Colorado, made history when it took home a pair of awards at a national broadcasting conference. A Republican consultant appeared to have scrapped a local news and commentary site he’d created that relied on artificial intelligence and irked local reporters for copying their work. In a cruel coincidence, potential ignorance, straight-up trolling, or a dull sense of timing, Democratic lawmakers at the Capitol chose of all times Sunshine Week to pass a legislative secrecy law and send it to the governor.
In April, Colorado’s local media scene did something unprecedented for the state and the nation when more than two dozen outlets banded together on a pledge to better cover the November elections with a voter-centric style. Led by COLab, the news organizations took inspiration from NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and his “Citizens Agenda” approach to covering U.S. elections. Rosen called Colorado’s Voter Voices initiative “without precedent in the history of the citizens agenda approach to campaign coverage, which goes back to 1990-92.” Meanwhile, the nonprofit Colorado Sun saw thousands of dollars pour in to support it after the state’s pro-Trump Republican Party chairman had Sun journalist Sandra Fish escorted by police out of the GOP’s state assembly in Pueblo. (The incident made national news.) In Colorado Springs, a KKTV anchor boasted that the local CBS affiliate there had “the most advanced broadcast facility in the region.” I conducted the research, analysis, and writing for a Colorado Media Project report about workforce pathways for local journalism in Colorado with a focus on higher-ed internships. One of Colorado’s most veteran newspaper publishers threw some shade at a trend involving newspapers in the state shifting to the nonprofit model. “What may be left are newspapers funded by foundations with whatever mission they may possess from their donors and founders,” he wrote. “Not all bad, but we sing for our supper, so to speak, and if we don’t perform and produce an interesting newspaper under the free enterprise form of capitalism, we should fail.” A rare local media feud erupted in Colorado Springs between the Gazette newspaper and the KRDO TV station over who was right in their vastly different coverage about the extent to which the state’s second-largest city deserves the title of “Olympic City USA.”
May was the month Colorado became the first state in the nation with a law regulating the AI industry. Around the same time, The Denver Post joined a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the entities of “purloining millions of the Publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment” in order to train AI chatbots. Ballantine Communications, which owns the Durango Herald and the Journal in southwestern Colorado, bought a newspaper in northern New Mexico. A rural Colorado newspaper publisher in Westcliffe said he faced threats and harassment as his town lurched into the paranoid style of extremist right-wing politics. Colorado Community Media bought two Denver newspapers formerly run by David Sabados and Emma Donahue. The national local news podcast founder David Plotz of City Cast said Denver was the company’s largest market. The Colorado Springs Independent officially relaunched under new ownership as a bi-weekly newspaper and tapped Ben Trollinger as editor. A few hours north, the Estes Valley Voice announced it would launch a digital newsroom as a public benefit corporation. Four months after Colorado Public Radio fired him, Vic Vela settled a messy discrimination dispute with his former employer. In Colorado Springs, KOAA News5 said authorities pressured it not to air video it legally obtained from inside a jail — but the TV station did it anyway. (That differed from when police asked KKTV in the Springs to take down video it had obtained and aired, and the station complied.) The Denver Gazette’s John Moore wrote about how fewer journalists covering the arts in Denver is “bad for everyone.”
In June, COLab published a first-of-its-kind expansive report called “State of News: Colorado.” The upshot from it: Funding for Colorado newsrooms wasn’t secure, burnout and shortages were affecting staff, and keeping up with journalistic best practices while maintaining quality was a struggle. Around the same time, Colorado Media Project published a report it commissioned from Impact Architects about CMP’s journalism grant-making over the years that also included an assessment of the local media scene. Many open-ended newsroom responses to a survey “described high levels of burnout, teams that were stretched thin, and difficulty keeping up with the news in their community given the size of their staff.” Meanwhile, Village Media shut down its Longmont Leader site, essentially making Colorado a bust for the Canadian-owned local news company. Writing in Columbia Journalism Review, Maddy Crowell reported how The Lever, the investigative reporting site founded by Denver’s David Sirota, “stands apart” from a cluster of left-leaning media organizations she profiled because “its attention is mainly on corporations and the people who run them.” In the Roaring Fork Valley, the nonprofit Sopris Sun newspaper in Carbondale created a standalone Spanish-language publication called Sol del Valle. The publisher of a weekly newspaper in a rural Colorado county sued another newspaper in hopes of getting legal clarity about an obscure but important aspect of the local print news business. (At issue was what specifically it takes to become a county’s official “newspaper of record.”) Around the 40th anniversary of when neo-Nazis murdered legendary Denver Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg, an account using the name of a former Republican candidate for state office, who The Denver Post once reported had ties to white supremacy movements, chillingly referred to 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark as “alanberg2point0.” Clark called the incident “not subtle” and said “it won’t stop our journalism.” (Speaking of Clark, his innovative show “Next” got a big profile in Westword that month.) As newsrooms kept reporting on fentanyl, a Colorado Newsline reporter had to once again chastise others in local media for getting bamboozled when covering the drug. Prairie Mountain Media, a brand representing a cluster of Colorado newspapers financially controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund, announced that it would shut down its press in Berthoud, once again sending dozens of Colorado newspapers scrambling for a new printer or considering closing shop.
July sent some shine on a handful of Colorado newspapers that, amid a diminished local news landscape, appeared to be “making a comeback.” That was the focus, anyway, of a 20-minute special mini-documentary Gary Shapiro produced for 9News in Denver. The glow wouldn’t last, unfortunately, when a newspaper featured in the show announced it would be one of five — that’s right five — papers on the Eastern Plains to shut down for financial reasons. In TV land, Denver7 planned to move into a new building where the station’s general manager said, “I really think we have built the TV station of the future.” When a would-be assassin’s rifle shots left Donald Trump with a bloody ear at a Pennsylvania rally, The Denver Post and Colorado Springs Gazette carried starkly different front-page headlines. In southeastern Colorado Springs, Juelz Ramirez, the creative director for the media outlet Daily Dose 719, opened Stompin’ Groundz as a coffee shop where she said she hoped to broadcast future podcast episodes. Rocky Mountain PBS, which created a new Reality Check initiative, went on the road with community events for a program it called “Above the Noise.” A news story in the Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction about the misconduct trial of an election-denying former Republican elections clerk, Tina Peters, came with this unusual editor’s note: “WARNING If you have been called in for jury duty on Monday when the process for choosing a jury begins, The Daily Sentinel encourages you NOT to read this article. As in all court cases, potential jurors are told to avoid reading, viewing or discussing any stories related to a case they are to hear.” Colorado journalist Julian Rubinstein’s film “The Holly” won a Heartland Emmy for best documentary. As national news organizations reported on Trump’s increasingly autocratic rhetoric, at least three managers of Colorado news organizations proclaimed they ran openly “pro-democracy” newsrooms.
In August, as more and more people embraced conspiracy theories on social media platforms, a new one emerged in Colorado: questioning whether local news anchors were actually “standing in front of a green screen” to make it look like they’re outside covering wildfires. (One such conspiracist later acknowledged he’d “learned to be more careful regarding those I listen to.”) On the sports pages, prominent University of Colorado football coach Deion Sanders started going after members of the local press corps. (The theme would continue through much of the season.) The Colorado Press Association held its annual convention, this year in Northglenn and keynoted by Jay Rosen. (A member who has been attending conferences for at least three decades said his biggest takeaway was the number of young people there and speaking up). Reflecting a national trend of wealthy newspaper owners and headaches they can cause for their editors, the Colorado Springs Independent inevitably had to confront how its ownership intersects with its news coverage. (One of its owners’ local businesses, a new outdoor music venue, had come under intense scrutiny.) Erin McIntyre and Mike Wiggins, who own the Ouray County Plaindealer, earned the 2024 Jean Otto Friend of Freedom Award from the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. Some Colorado journalists grumbled at seeing the state’s press association give its annual “free press” awards to lawmakers who had exempted themselves from the state’s open-meetings laws. Colorado Chinese News celebrated 30 years in business. (“We’re still hanging in there,” publisher Wendy Chao said of the print publication that collaborates with other members of Colorado’s Asian community.) The Colorado Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists chose “two new co-presidents and a secretary of its board, welcomed new and returning board members (including me), and said thanks and farewell to departing board officers.” Rocky Mountain PBS reporter Chase McCleary examined the state of rural local newspapers in a story headlined “Bought-out, priced out, burned out: the individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado.” The Denver Post took top honors for General Excellence in the state press association awards. In the legal arena, the Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases from Colorado news outlets. Colorado Public Radio won the prestigious 2024 national Edward R. Murrow Award. At the annual Colorado Media Project summit, Kyle Huelsman, an organizer who is working with the CMP, said the nonprofit is working on drawing together a coalition of voices around one fundamental issue — “and that is public funding for [the] local news ecosystem in the state of Colorado.”
September found the city of Aurora as the near center of the media universe when a video went viral showing Spanish-speaking people with guns in the halls of an apartment complex. Reaction to the coverage and commentary around it became a Rorschach test for a political worldview as narratives and framing varied sharply over a storyline that made national news and grabbed the attention of candidate Donald Trump. (At issue was the extent of the influence a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua had in Aurora and the criminal organization’s relationship to the living conditions at a handful of troubled apartment complexes. Trump would later call his planned national mass deportation program “Operation Aurora.”) A new online outlet called the Rocky Mountain Reader, founded by longtime Colorado journalist Kathryn Eastburn, started up with a promise to “highlight the vast and varied literary landscape of Colorado.” In the local news site scene, a marketing agency based in Puerto Rico relaunched the Longmont Leader. In Denver, Colorado’s four journalists who work for the LexisNexis-owned subscription legal news service Law360 joined roughly 250 of their colleagues from around the country to go on strike over what they called “unfair bargaining tactics” and a “refusal to offer fair pay and health care.” (It lasted about a week.) Colorado’s ethos of newsroom collaboration trickled down to the college level when students at the University of Colorado and Colorado State University joined forces for a special publication about their football rivalry. On the Eastern Plains, Tom Bredehoft, a 62-year-old businessman and J-school grad, brought back the Burlington Record newspaper with a pirate approach to a takeover. Dana Coffield ascended to top editor of the nonprofit Colorado Sun as the statewide digital news site approached its sixth anniversary, and Larry Ryckman moved to the business side and became publisher. The Denver Voice, a newspaper founded in 1996 that printed about 3,500 copies a month and promised “news you won’t read anywhere else” with a “direct and personal impact to address the roots of homelessness,” said it would shut down because of financial woes.
In October, KUNC, Rocky Mountain Community Radio Coalition, Rocky Mountain PBS and The Colorado Sun won a nearly $400,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to collaborate and create what they called the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. Elsewhere in TV land, a third journalist in about a year left 9NEWS in Denver for the rival Denver7. Press Forward, the national local news fundraising campaign, gave $100,000 each to nine Colorado news outlets across the state. A week later, The Colorado Sun announced it would haul in $1.4 million from a different funder and planned to eventually create what it called “regional hubs” around the state. After attending a statewide initiative called “Above the Noise” by Rocky Mountain PBS, Colorado Media Project, Colorado Press Association, and the Center for Public Deliberation, Vail Daily’s editor said he would change how his paper handled its opinion section. Pauline Rivera, owner and publisher of La Voz Colorado, Denver’s “first and oldest bilingual newspaper,” was inducted into the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. More than a year had passed since leaders of Colorado Public Radio said the statewide broadcaster had accepted at least $8.3 million to move into a new headquarters with money from a secret donor whose name it had not publicly disclosed. In California, journalists authorized a first-ever open-ended strike at a newspaper owned by the secretive Alden Global Capital hedge fund that also owns The Denver Post and several others in Colorado. The MoodFuel site, run by Renata Hill, published a Colorado mental health voter guide. The Nutgraf national newsletter about student journalism focused an edition on Colorado. A national firm that assesses the health of news and information systems in the states examined Colorado and found its local news ecosystem is “characterized by statewide connection across a variety of organization types and strong support networks.” The Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction moved to printing just two days a week.
November saw another national election in full swing, including “weird” press restrictions from a new Republican congressman on the Western Slope. As political ads clogged up TV screens, Denver7 sought to counterbalance a particularly off-putting ad about abortion by creating “a cute puppy clip” that it called a “15-second political ad break.” Inside Radio reported how in Colorado, local radio was a “key factor” in securing Latino votes. The Trumpy editorial board of the Phil Anschutz-owned Gazette in Colorado Springs and Denver did not endorse Donald Trump for president as it had once done in the past, reflecting a trend of billionaire-owned newspapers taking a notable pass on endorsements in the 2024 contest. On Election Night, one rural Colorado newspaper publisher “got obliterated” (but not in the way that you might think). Meanwhile, Colorado voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots in favor of changing the state’s constitution to create a new board that will hear ethics complaints against state judges, which followed five years of investigative reporting by David Migoya, beginning at The Denver Post and continuing at the Denver Gazette, that exposed a culture of secrecy and unaccountability in the state’s judicial disciplinary system. Regardless of what you thought of the overall results, we could be proud that a Colorado College grad helped create The Associated Press’s Election Results page as a data visualization engineer. Elsewhere in the penultimate month, in rural Saguache County, the monthly nonprofit Crestone Eagle newspaper was hoping to stay afloat and looking for a sustainable future after running out of money and missing out on a big grant. (As of this writing it is still in print and raised nearly $70,000 with a year-end fundraising drive.) The Boulder Daily Camera staff sadly moved out of their Boulder office and into a shared office space a half an hour away in Longmont, tracking with a trend of consolidation and cost-cutting by hedge-fund newspaper owners. Meanwhile, a group called Public Media Company did a deep dive into the state’s local news ecosystem and found “business as usual is not enough.” In northern Colorado, a nonprofit startup called the Fort Collins Report launched after a pair of locals met on Reddit. Following nearly two years of work, the first season of Denver journalist David Sirota’s investigative outlet The Lever’s audio series “Master Plan,” about how the United States legalized corruption, topped podcasting charts and earned awards. On the collaboration front, we learned how the state’s ethnic media outlets were working together through an initiative called the Colorado Ethnic Media Exchange. The award-winning Denver magazine 5280 had to lay off an editor and business manager citing lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the airwaves, Rocky Mountain Community Radio was on the rise, with its former president saying the coalition was “the most robust it’s ever been.” As artificial intelligence tools became more ubiquitous, the Colorado Springs Independent’s editor started using AI detection software and said he was “able to prevent this kind of digital wastewater from weaseling its way into the paper.” A live music company called Venu, owned by that paper’s co-owner, went public on the New York Stock Exchange. On the Western Slope, a newspaper publisher argued that her colleagues should stop running press releases as news. The Denver Gazette launched a statewide freelancer network that was a state-based model of the Washington Post’s national Talent Network. Denver news anchor Kyle Clark said on a panel at DU that “One of our great goals when we launched ‘Next’ eight years ago is that we saw it as a true force for community building. Some people can say that that’s advocacy and that journalists shouldn’t advocate for things. Well, screw that, I live here. I want the community to be better.” The home of the Denver Women’s Press Club celebrated 100 years.
In December, the holiday spirit was shattered when a nonwhite TV reporter in Grand Junction told police a taxi driver who called himself a Marine stalked him back to the station, tackled him to the ground, and choked him after asking if he was a U.S. citizen, demanding to see his ID, and shouting “This is Trump’s America now.” On the eastern side of the Continental Divide, staffers of Boulder Weekly sought to buy their newspaper from its owner and make it employee-owned. In Denver, local entrepreneur Charity Huff bought 5280 magazine from founder Daniel Brogan. Following an exhibit about the Sand Creek Massacre that spotlighted the role of the press in whipping up hatred against Indians, History Colorado installed an exhibit about Denver’s Chinatown that highlighted how the local press in 1880 “fanned the flames of racism, and helped lead to an anti-Chinese riot.” Nearly a year after journalistic scrutiny, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who is from Colorado, decided to recuse himself from a court case that could have benefited the billionaire Colorado newspaper owner Philip Anschutz with whom he was closely connected. The National Trust for Local News cranked up its “path-breaking” printing press in Denver and began printing papers. In the digital space, when roughly 60 Colorado journalists were polled about their thoughts on Twitter/X after Elon Musk became Trump’s right-hand man and turned the platform into what some called a “MAGA megaphone,” half of them said they had left the site and an overwhelming majority said they were only passively monitoring it anymore. Colorado Democratic Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo took to the floor of the U.S. House to honor Mike Nelson, who was retiring from Denver7 as the station’s chief meteorologist. “From his early days at WeatherCentral to pioneering the use of computer-weather graphics, Mike has been a trailblazer in his field,” she said in part. (One thing she didn’t mention is how Nelson used his long career to “take on climate change.”) The progressive Colorado Times Recorder nonprofit site rounded up its impact over the year. Colorado Community Media hired Brooke Warner to transform its business as executive director. A Denver Post journalist referred to her paper as “a tight-knit, hardworking newsroom that values diversity and still packs a punch when it comes to Colorado journalism.” Two radio stations went silent in Cañon City and Pueblo. In the inbox journalism world, the daily newsletter company Axios said it was expanding into Boulder. When the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition rounded up what happened in 2024 on the transparency front, the organization wrote: “Looking back at the past 12 months, there weren’t a lot of wins for the public’s right to know.” In the state’s most southeastern county of Baca, the owner of the Plainsman Herald said he was able to save his paper from shutting down after appealing to the community. But just a few clicks north, the owner of the 133-year-old Flagler News said he had to close the newspaper because of a loss in advertising revenue. And, just as the lid slowly closed on another year, the La Sierra newspaper in the San Luis Valley’s Costilla County told the Colorado Press Association it was “no longer in business.”
Corey Hutchins oversees the Journalism Institute at Colorado College, advises the Colorado Media Project, and sits on the board of the state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He has written for Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, the Center for Public Integrity, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and other outlets. Interested in an insider’s look at the news behind the news in Colorado? Sign up here for his weekly email newsletter.