Corey Hutchins’ year in review: The news behind the news in Colorado’s media world in 2025

For this column last year, I suggested a future media historian might one day look at 2024 as a hinge year for Colorado’s small-town newspapers. This year, the hinge might have snapped — or at least it’s hanging by a screw. 

Following a colony collapse of newspapers on the rural Eastern Plains, even more of them closed across the state throughout 2025. This fall, when the Limon Leader in Lincoln County folded up shop, it created Colorado’s second news desert — meaning a county that does not have a dedicated newspaper serving it. 

Within the past two years alone, I’ve counted at least 14 newspapers closing in Colorado. We also witnessed the messy meltdown of the alternative weekly newspapers that had served Colorado Springs and Boulder for more than 30 years in 2025. This November, after Rocky Mountain PBS aired a report about the Limon Leader’s final day, journalists from Japan and Germany arranged to travel here so they could report stories about what happens when U.S. newspapers die. 

This year was also a bruiser for the small community radio stations that dot our state.

Republican congressional cuts to public media at President Donald Trump’s behest battered the budgets of these vital local news outlets. Observers worry that some of the smaller ones might have to hang up their call letters. When the HBO satirist John Oliver delivered the monologue for this year’s season finale of his popular show “Last Week Tonight,” he put the impacts on Colorado square in the national spotlight. 

Another destabilizing effect on our state’s local media also had origins in the Trump administration. As the president politicized the country’s regulatory environment, the owners of some TV stations seemed to kneel before him as they sought his approval for mergers and acquisitions amid a wave of proposed consolidation. 

In Denver, if a deal by Nexstar to take over Tegna goes through, the staggering result would be Fox31 replacing 9NEWS. That would mean an outlet little known for its watchdog reporting would subsume a leader in accountability journalism on commercial TV. 

Throughout the year, as artificial intelligence tools became cheaper and easier to use, they put pressure on legit local news outlets. 

In positive news, higher-education institutions in Colorado linked up to assist local newsrooms. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled newspapers are “citizens” under our state’s open-records law. Organizations like Colorado Media Project, the Colorado News Collaborative, Colorado Health Foundation, Press Forward and others continue to inject money, support, and innovation into our state’s media ecosystem. 

Throughout the year, Colorado news outlets produced stellar journalism that moved the needle and provided residents with the information they need to make decisions in their lives. They won national awards and earned accolades for 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 2026, 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, 2023 and 2024 with a roundup of the news behind the news in Colorado across the calendar of 2025. It’s certainly not comprehensive, but here were some high- and lowlights:

January kicked off the year on a negative note with bad news bookending the state. On the Eastern Plains, the Flagler News folded, and on the Western Slope a young, nonwhite TV journalist was on paid leave after he said he’d been followed, tackled, and choked by someone who shouted “This is Trump’s America now.” In Southern Colorado, two radio stations blinked out, and the Eagle Valley Enterprise went out of business. Under the dome of the state Capitol in Denver, Democratic lawmakers were roasted for their secrecy. When a journalist exposed a national network of seemingly local AI-generated newsletters based in New York City, it included several in Colorado. As for some good news, when the American Press Institute highlighted five “bright spots” in the nation where journalists are collaborating with researchers “with an eye toward depolarization,” they found one in Colorado. In the department of some personal news, Tina Griego left COLab to become a senior editor at ProPublica and Charity Huff took over 5280 magazine. Michelle P. Fulcher retired from Colorado Public Radio and Jeff Bieri retired from KRCC after 35 years. Complete Colorado, the news and commentary arm of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute think tank, got a new website. Showing that an artificial intelligence bubble had yet to burst, OpenAI announced it was funding Axios Local’s expansion into Boulder as part of a broader “content-sharing and technology deal.” On the media consolidation front, as meteorologists feared losing their jobs if a large broadcaster outsourced its local coverage to a hub in Atlanta, Colorado’s weathercasters explained the importance of living where they report. And as our state’s news deserts spread, a story in Rocky Mountain PBS pondered if Facebook groups could fill gaps when newspapers close.

In February, Colorado’s public media outlets were on alert — with good reason. Brendan Carr, Trump’s choice to lead the Federal Communications Commission, had ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS. The move would presage a major lawsuit that had key Colorado connections. A new organization called ColoRadio launched as a monthly speaker series “uplifting Coloradans who are using audio to tell stories.” In the newspaper and philanthropy world, the National Trust for Local News unveiled its nonprofit Trust Press. Backed by private philanthropy, the Trust had purchased it a year prior to try to bring down the cost of newspaper printing. Not long after, the National Trust closed two of its Denver papers and came under intense scrutiny. Reports indicated an operating structure that appeared strained at the bottom and wobbly at the top, and some in Colorado worried about the future of a once-promising endeavor to keep local newspapers in local hands. While gatekeeping in journalism continued to erode, Rocky Mountain PBS reported on three Coloradans who might not have a background in journalism but run or work for local newspapers. In a very uniquely Colorado development, after the state decriminalized magic mushrooms, ads for them in some newspapers became truly something to behold. Elsewhere in the world of print, the spinning blade of budget cuts came forOutside magazine, which laid off eight people in Colorado. On TV, Denver7 profiled Sandra Dillard, who was the Denver Post’s first Black female journalist. “At that time, as far as I know, I was the only Black female journalist in the state,” Dillard, who helped found the National Association of Black Journalists, said. Colorado Media Project, which underwrites “Inside the News in Colorado,” got a new director in Kimberly Spencer. During a lecture at the University of Denver, Laura Frank, who runs the Colorado News Collaborative, a.k.a COLab, offered a cure for the “fried and frozen” newsroom. Five Colorado foundations announced their involvement in Press Forward, a nationwide philanthropic campaign to “catalyze a local news renaissance over the next five years and re-center local journalism as a force for community cohesion, civic participation, and government accountability.”

March found Colorado Public Radio launching a new daily podcast called “Colorado Today.” Meanwhile, across the mountains, Aspen Public Radiolaunched what it called the station’s first “Women’s Desk.” In TV land, layoffs at national owner E.W. Scripps hit the Colorado Springs market but missed Denver. On the Western Slope, an anticapitalist newspaper called The Revolutionist was seeing its audience grow following the election of Donald Trump. In southern Colorado, Trump’s tariffs were impacting a small newspaper. When nearly a dozen newsrooms across the country announced they were linking up to form the Climate News Task Force,two of them had connections to Colorado. In Lake City, Grant Houston was trying to retire andlooking for someone to take over his Lake City World newspaper. (And I believe he still is.) During Sunshine Week, there was “far more to be concerned about than to celebrate” in Colorado, said the state’s preeminent open-government advocate. More than 60 daily newspapers owned by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund, including in Colorado, published editorials crusading against Google and OpenAI.

In April, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, who is running for governor, helped lead a group of senators on a resolution that designated April 2025 as “Preserving and Protecting Local News Month.” The same month, two wealthy businessmen and developers in Colorado Springs who had bought the Indy alternative weekly newspaper decided it was too much of a headache and abruptly laid off the entire staff and shut it down. (The owners seemed to find they couldn’t effectively communicate their message through the newspaper; go figure.) Meanwhile, when Axios Denver ranked Colorado’s “wealthiest billionaires,” they found at least five of them had ties to media. The Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, of which I’m a board member, held the SPJ’s regional conference titled “Fundamentals and the Future” in Denver. There, the Denver Post’s top editor explained the paper’s AI policy on a panel (the policy takes up half of a printed page). Speaking on NPR about his new book “Murder the Truth,” author David Enrich said, “one of my favorite examples in the book involves a newspaper in Colorado.” The Denver Post’s Sam Tabachnik won the SPJ award for Journalist of the Year and Rachael Johnson won its First Amendment award. Juan Espinosa, a Chicano journalist in Pueblo, reminded people that “journalism defends democracy.” 

May found three Colorado public radio stations becoming the tip of the spear for local public media when they signed on to a lawsuit by NPR against President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, as the White House dropped the hammer on public media, Walker Stapleton, a former Republican candidate for governor, stuck up for it. One of the biggest storylines in America localized in Colorado Springs when federal authorities launched a late-night raid and detained some 100 people they suspected of being in the country without the necessary documentation. News outlets, however, debated language over who was targeted. America’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, which owns the Fort Collins Coloradoan and the Pueblo Chieftain newspapers that bookend Colorado’s Front Range, said it would “no longer publish demographic and diversity data about its workforce” and “revamped its corporate site to remove mentions of diversity.” (The newspaper company cited an executive order from Trump as the reason.) Elsewhere in the print world, the Denver Post shut down its longstanding YourHub community journalism vertical and suffered its first layoffs in five years. The nonprofit National Trust for Local News, which launched in 2020 as an organization to keep local newspapers in local hands, stunned observers when it abruptly offloaded 21 of its Colorado papers to a for-profit Arizona-based company. A project called The Local that seeks to reinvent local TV news in the streaming era decided on Colorado as the state to launch its pilot. The Colorado Association of Black Journalists held its annual gala in the Mile High City. A Colorado Springs school district partnered with a conservative media program to teach “journalism ethics.” Master Plan, a podcast about how the United States legalized corruption, created by Denver journalist David Sirota and his team at The Lever, won the 2025 National Press Club Award. Students at Colorado College reported that after the town of Cheyenne Wells lost its newspaper in 2022, no one ran for mayor and the town canceled its election. The Southern Colorado Press Club shut down, citing “a decline in participation as the media landscape in Pueblo has shifted.” The Collaborative Journalism Summit chose Denver as the city to host its annual conference. I published a piece for The Conversation making the case that more college professors should consistently track local media developments in their own states. 

In June, Colorado became the center of national news when police and witnesses said a man shouting the words “Palestine” and “free” firebombed a crowd in Boulder who were demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Some journalists “compounded” pain in their coverage of it, Boulder Reporting Lab found. The small town of Bennett pulled its municipal advertising from two weekly newspapers because board members “did not like” a front-page article. A staff writer for Denver’s 5280 magazine took a very Colorado approach to a midlife crisis by micro-dosing magic mushrooms while he reported a story about psilocybin research and how Colorado scientists and entrepreneurs “are looking to bring psychedelic mushrooms to the masses.” Sifting through the rubble of the Colorado Springs Indy alt-weekly, the owner of SoCo Insider made a business decision to not cover politics. The conservative Colorado radio station KNUS apologized for promoting unsubstantiated election rigging claims. A digital media startup said it would launch in Telluride and use “customizable AI-driven personas.” 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark led a sustained crusade of advocacy journalism against a proposed pet bridge project by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis. “I don’t know if this monument to government waste can be stopped,” Clark said. “But we ought to try.” (Polis later scrapped the proposal.) Problems with the U.S. Postal Service, particularly in rural areas, were impacting small local newspapers. The Postal Service “has struggled to deliver mail in a consistent and timely fashion,” one publisher told readers, adding that some subscribers who live in town and get the paper by mail sometimes don’t get their copy for a week. The Intermountain Jewish News won eight Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.

July was the month Boulder Weekly utterly collapsed. For the first time in 32 years, no papers filled newspaper racks around the county. Meanwhile, five weekly newspapers in the sprawling San Luis Valley stopped publishing separately, instead rolling up into one weekly subscriber-based paper. In Colorado Springs, TV consolidation came for the state’s second-largest city when E.W. Scripps said it would own half of the channels there. When a national report found a “severe” shortage of journalists across the country, I wrote about it for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. (The lead researcher had a Colorado connection.) In the public media sphere, Rocky Mountain PBS joined in the legal fray when it “actively participated” in two amicus briefs filed in the NPR lawsuit against Donald Trump. After creating its first Women’s Desk, Aspen Public Radio created a climate desk. Colorado Public Radio host Ryan Warner became the “first male professional member” of the Denver Women’s Press Club. Congressional Republican cuts to public media had trickled down to Colorado. The Estes Valley Voice digital outlet celebrated its first birthday. A panel of journalists publicly discussed a “free press under fire” in Colorado Springs to a packed house. The Denver Post won the Colorado Press Association’s inaugural A-Mark Prize for Responsive Journalism for exposing how Pueblo “weaponizes contempt of court to inflate jail time for minor crimes.” Colorado journalist Julian Rubinstein’s documentary “The Holly” took home a national Emmy Award.” It was the first time a film supported by the Colorado film commission won such an award, and it was “believed to be the first film produced and set in Denver to have ever won an Emmy.”

In August, a pro-journalism campaign called “Free Press, Free Country” rolled out over the commercial TV airwaves aimed at educating viewers about the importance of a free and independent press. KUSA 9NEWS in Denver aired the project each Thursday for several weeks. But the station also found itself in the crosshairs of a media consolidation deal that, if successful, would see Denver’s KDVR Fox31 taking over 9NEWS. Top Democrats in Colorado said the deal would be bad, with Attorney General Phil Weiser saying he would review it to determine whether it would “harm Coloradans.” Not long after, Weiser, who is running for governor, spoke at the annual Colorado Press Association convention and said he is open to “creative ideas” to sustain local journalism. In the small southern Colorado town of Westcliffe, a bitter newspaper war seemed to finally end when one of the papersshut down. The nonprofit Pikes Peak Bulletin newspaper released the Epstein Files. (Not really.) A national outlet found the digital statewide Colorado Sun newsroom is one of the top 2020 nonprofit news sites in the nation by traffic. A newspaper publisher in Douglas County had a novel idea: ask the local government for $350,000 to help the county spread “good news.” (It didn’t go anywhere.) Some TV stations in the state were starting to use AI to convert on-air stories to the web. The Denver Post sparked a major conversation about citizen journalism, anonymity, and journalistic ethics when it unmasked three contributors to the controversial social media account DoBetterDNVR. The Trump administration shredding federal contracts had negative impacts on a law-related publication in Denver. When Gov. Polis brought lawmakers back for a special session, the Big Tech lobby steamrolled them on attempts to regulate artificial intelligence. Former Denver Post Editor Greg Moore was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. Colorado Media Project announced it had awarded $405,000 to 17 Colorado newsrooms. 

September was not the best month for the local news industry in Colorado. Layoffs rocked KUNC, and the Limon Leader became the latest newspaper on the rural Eastern Plains to announce it would close up shop. It wasn’t for financial reasons. “There’s nobody to replace me,” the retiring publisher said. “We’ve been trying to find people to write for us for years, and there’s nobody.” (The development created another news desert in Colorado.) In Denver, the Associated Press packed up and moved out of its office at COLab in the Buell Public Media Center. (A spokesperson did not respond when asked to what extent it had to do with cutting costs.) Colorado Public Radio canceled its years-long partnership with Denver7 on its Real Talk program, tracking a national trend of DEI efforts in newsrooms on the decline. The Knight Foundation tapped Coloradan Amalie Nash as its vice president of journalism. El Comercio de Colorado became one of “seven of the leading Spanish-language publishers” in the United States to collaborate on a project called LatidoBeat. Wayne Laugesen, who helped shape conservative opinion in the MAGA era as the Trump-endorsing editorial page editor of the Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs, quietly left the paper to focus on an independent podcast. Jon Allsop wrote for Columbia Journalism Review that he was surprised at the scant mentions of the 1984 assassination of Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg following the Utah campus killing of Charlie Kirk. PHNX Sports, which is part of the Denver-based ALLCITY Network, fired a popular Phoenix Suns beat reporter over social media comments he made about Kirk’s death. Celebrating the Denver Gazette’s fifth anniversary as a digital rival to the Denver Post, executive editor Vince Bzdek wrote, “Our publications now have more than 150 journalists and columnists contributing to Colorado’s media ecosystem.” A story pitch about a nonexistent Colorado town exposed a writer for apparently faking stories with AI. Celebrating its seventh birthday, The Colorado Sun said it “has more than doubled in size since our launch in 2018 and continues to evolve as a nonprofit.” The Colorado Broadcasters Association launched the CBA Hall of Fame, and the National Federation of Press Women chose to hold its annual conference in Golden. A Denver news anchor earned national attention for describing Trump’s actions as authoritarianism. “If all of this was happening in another nation,” he soberly said on air, “we would not hesitate to describe it clearly.”

In October, the state of Colorado’s version of the FBI set off an explosion of headlines when the agency said it would review the 2005 death of journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson in his Aspen-area home. In Denver, I helped organize a panel on behalf of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter at the Denver Press Club to talk about citizen journalism. Public funding for Colorado public media broadcasters officially dried up. O’Rourke Media Group bought the Gunnison Country Times. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that our state’s newspapers are “citizens” under the state’s Open Meetings Law. It appeared $65,000 was the going rate in 2025 for local Colorado governments to settle accusations of violating someone’s First Amendment rights. The editor of the Coloradoan newspaper said he found stories that came with AI summaries had “slightly longer engagement times.” A reporter on the Eastern Plains wondered if he’d been “canceled.” In southern Colorado, the Ag Journal stopped publishing. Journalists at the Denver Post found themselves in an uncomfortable situation when their owner quit paying rent to the city as the paper reported on Denver’s budget woes. A Colorado journalist and author urged his contemporaries not to settle with an AI company over copyright claims. Former New York Times journalist Charles Blow, who produced documentary-style videos for Press Forward to help “inspire investment in a local news revival,” focused one of them on Colorado Media Project, which underwrites the “Inside the News in Colorado” newsletter. Denver played host to the National Student Media Convention. Rick Goldsmith’s documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink,” which focused a lot on Colorado, began airing on PBS.

November was for demystifying how local Colorado journalists across the state do their work as a new documentary called “Truth be Told” aired on commercial TV. Meanwhile, traditional journalists were facing off against a rise of murky social media “influencers,” including one who got caught asking for up to $2,000 to promote a candidate for Colorado governor. CBS Colorado joined Westword and the Gazette in choosing to keep secret the identity of a woman who says she is behind the DoBetterDNVR social media account. A student identifying as a journalist said the University of Colorado banned the student from the Boulder campus after the student reported on a protest. The Colorado Matters statewide show on Colorado Public Radio published “Trust Matters: A conversation about record-low levels of trust in the media,” which included a panel discussion among host Ryan Warner, former Denver Post Editor Greg Moore, Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition Director Jeff Roberts and me. Coloradans had major influence in John Oliver’s monologue about the vital role of public media for the season finale of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight.” Editor & Publisher named Chris Reen, the president and CEO of Clarity Media Group, which owns Colorado Politics and the Gazette in Denver and Colorado Springs, the magazine’s “publisher of the year.” The Denver Press Club, the oldest of its kind in the nation, celebrated its building’s 100th anniversary. The community-owned weekly Sentinel newspaper in Aurora earned national attention for an editorial that called for Trump’s impeachment. 

In December, a remarkable thing happened. The editor of perhaps the largest mainstream news operation in Colorado that Republicans tend to read and respect came out in favor of taxpayer support for local news. More than 1,500 miles away in a Washington, D.C. courtroom, three Colorado public radio stations made their case to a federal judge in their lawsuit against Trump. (The judge appeared skeptical of the government’s arguments in response.) In the commercial TV world, the giant conservative broadcaster Sinclair made a hostile bid to take over E.W. Scripps, which owns multiple stations in Colorado. (Scripps fought back and rejected it.) The Axios Local team expanded from Denver to Boulder, and then got an AI partner and sought to expand into the Springs. 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark stood alone amongst his MSM colleagues in spotlighting extremism when a well-connected Douglas County podcaster called for the execution of state politicians. (The podcaster later decided to run for governor.) Another Colorado town had to cough up money to a local newspaper after retaliating against it by pulling legal notices. A Florida billionaire bought the Aspen Daily News, ending the newspaper’s local ownership that stretched back to 1978. The move turned Aspen, one of the few towns left in the country that have two competing daily newspapers, into a town with two out-of-state newspaper owners that both happen to own major sports teams in Pittsburgh. As the lid slowly closed on 2025, I rounded up the Top 10 Colorado media stories of the year based on how many subscribers to “Inside the News in Colorado” opened the weekly email.