Another newspaper folds on Colorado's Eastern Plains

The news behind the news in Colorado

👋 Welcome. Glad you’re here. I’m Corey Hutchins, a journalist and educator, and you’re reading “Inside the News in Colorado,” a weekly inbox newsletter. Learn more here.

Image created with an online image-generating tool

Another newspaper on Colorado’s rural Eastern Plains has announced plans to fold up shop.

“The Leader is closing its doors by the end of the year,” read a statement from the Limon Leader, which serves Lincoln County and the small towns of Arriba, Genoa, Hugo, Karval, and Limon.

Catherine Thurston, who operates the newspaper, said she is retiring. She said she would sell the paper, which is making money, but it’s been hard to find anyone willing to buy it in the sparsely populated area about an hour and a half southeast of Denver.

“There’s nobody to replace me,” she said over the phone on Wednesday. “We’ve been trying to find people to write for us for years, and there’s nobody.”

Locally, some folks have told her they would help cover meetings or with other things, but didn’t follow through, she said. She added that she has also struggled to obtain tangible help or resources from outside the local community. For someone who runs the business while publishing, editing, and managing the paper, it’s been tiring.

Elsewhere on the Eastern Plains, the newspaper body count has been rising.

Last summer, five newspapers out there announced they were closing. (One of them bounced back with a different owner — though he later shut down a separate one; another newspaper decided it might hang on.)

In 2022, the closure of the Range Ledger turned the Eastern Plains county of Cheyenne into perhaps the state’s first real news desert.

Now, with the Leader’s demise, the county of Lincoln, population 5,600, is another entire county without a dedicated newspaper serving it. That’s according to the Colorado News Mapping Project, where I help maintain the database at Colorado College.

Asked where she thinks Lincoln County’s residents will now go to learn about what’s going on, Thurston cited social media.

“They think Facebook is everything out here,” she said.

Following the closure of the Range Ledger in Cheyenne County, locals have flocked to a large, active Facebook group. That group now counts more members than the population of the county. People in the group share local information about events, businesses, school sports, and more.

But after the local newspaper stopped printing, no one ran for mayor of Cheyenne Wells. The town canceled its election, according to town officials.

In Lincoln County, a Facebook group called “Lincoln County, Colorado- News Share” only has 130 members. One called “Limon, Colorado in the Know” has around 400. Thurston said she doesn’t know of one big centralized group.

The epidemic of newspaper closures on the Eastern Plains has fueled an accelerating statewide trend line in recent years.

For a 2023 Colorado Media Project report, David Coppini from the University of Denver and I identified 52 newspapers that had closed between 2004 and 2023 statewide. (Nineteen of them had shuttered between 2019 and 2023 alone.)

Since then, I have counted more than a dozen more, with a third of them coming from east of I-25.

Closures since 2023 include the Fort Morgan Times, the Brush News-Tribune, the Plainsman Herald, the Lamar Ledger, the Fowler Tribune, the Flagler News, the Colorado Springs Independent, Pueblo West View, the Four Corners Free Press, Life on Cap Hill, Washington Park Profile, the Eagle Valley Enterprise*, Boulder Weekly, and now the Limon Leader.

Something that Thurston said she found encouraging in Lincoln County is that some nearby schools are teaching classes that include putting out a newspaper.

“I’m hoping that maybe the Limon school might step up and do a school newspaper, too,” she said.

It probably couldn’t hurt.

---

🌿 This week’s newsletter is proudly supported by PR firm Grasslands: A Journalism-Minded Agency™, founded by Ricardo Baca (ex-Denver Post, ex-Rocky Mountain News, and current Colorado Public Radio board of directors). We understand journalists because we were journalists — and we’re here to help. Need expert sources or compelling stories? Our diverse client roster includes beloved Colorado institutions (Naropa University and Illegal Pete’s), innovative wellness brands (Boulder County Farmers Markets, Naturally Colorado, Eden Health Club), bold natural products businesses (Wild Zora, Flatiron Food Factory, Flower Union Brands), and other purpose-driven organizations. As creators of the Colorado Journalist Meet-Up and longtime champions of quality journalism, Grasslands recognizes the essential role reporters play in our communities. Our team is ready to connect you with sources, data, and unique perspectives that elevate your reporting.

Have a story you’re working on? Email Ricardo directly: ricardo@mygrasslands.com. Together, we’re crafting better narratives — one story at a time. 🌿

---

A newspaper history of northeast Colorado

In recent months, Prairie Mountain Media, one of the Colorado newspaper brands financially controlled by an out-of-state hedge fund, quietly let go some journalists across the state.

Jeff Rice was one of them.

A former editor of the Sterling Journal-Advocate in the ‘90s, he had spent the past nine years in what he called a “dream job” back at the paper covering agriculture, water, and other issues.

I reached out to Rice recently and he offered some insightful historical context about the newspaper in his corner of the state. I felt compelled to publish it here in full, breaking it up into sections with subheadings.

Downsizing goes way back

The downsizing of small-town newspapers, especially the Journal-Advocate, goes way back to the 1970s. First, let’s look at a brief but convoluted history.

The Journal-Advocate came into being in 1953 as an amalgamation of a series of newspapers that had been bought and sold, combined and broken up since 1885. Buying and selling of newspapers has been a hobby of the wealthy since the late 19th century. In Sterling, the papers always were locally owned until 1970 when the Pettys family sold the J-A to Eugene Worrell’s newspaper group. In the 1980s, Worrell sold off most of his empire and the J-A was bought by American Publishing, which later was absorbed by Hollinger, Inc. a.k.a. Sun-Times Media Group. The newspaper then was sold to Garden State Newspapers, which merged with MediaNews Group, and you know the rest of the story.

When American Publishing bought the Journal-Advocate, it immediately took a chainsaw to staffing. In one particular case, a long-time veteran of the production crew was let go just two years short of retirement. The last time I saw him he was stocking shelves at the local Ace Hardware. He has since passed on.

The decline of mom-and-pops hurt small-town newspapers, too

I became the editor of the Journal-Advocate in 1990 and spent seven years in that position; during that time we were constantly under pressure to reduce costs. We weren’t the only ones, though. Sterling and northeast Colorado were going through a time of unprecedented shrinkage. Where there once had been seven automobile dealerships, by 1990 there were only four; now there are only two.

In 1966, when my family moved to Sterling, there were five elementary schools; now there are two. Safeway closed its Sterling store and, when Walmart came to town, Main Street retail died. The Walmart “Supercenter” a few years later killed one of two locally-owned supermarkets and a dozen mom-and-pop neighborhood grocery stores. With a declining population, real estate went into free-fall.

As a result of all of this, the Journal-Advocate began losing advertising revenue as its three primary revenue sources — car dealerships, supermarkets and real estate — began to disappear. Supermarkets went from full-page ads to pre-printed inserts at a fraction of the cost. Car dealerships closed or merged, with a corresponding contraction of advertising revenue. Meanwhile, costs of paper, ink and labor constantly rose.

‘A period of chaotic reorganization of local news reporting’

During my tenure as editor (1990-1997) our news staff shrank from nine, including myself, to six.

I got out of newspapering altogether in 1998 and had little to do with it until I rejoined the staff in 2016. During the subsequent nine years we stopped covering local sports altogether (we used a computerized contractor) and lost three positions in the newsroom. By 2020 there were three of us in the news department and a total local staff of six. COVID forced us to close the office, and then there were only four. And, two months ago, I became the latest reduction in payroll.

I have heard stories about why small-town newspapers are disappearing but those decisions are made way above my pay grade. I will say that the people — the human beings — at MediaNews Group and Prairie Mountain Media were good to me. My editor gave me a freedom to work that I’d never experienced before. She and the publishers we had in those nine years brought joy to the work we did. On the morning she informed me of my termination, my editor was visibly upset and had trouble even reading through the prepared statement.

It is clear that the business model that supported local newspapering for nearly two centuries is no longer sustainable, and hasn’t been for some time. I’m afraid we’re in for a period of chaotic reorganization of local news reporting. We will have to start all over building the trust of the public to again become reliable gatekeepers, distinct from the crowd of “influencers” intent on selling their biases and opinions and pretending it’s journalism. If people want reporting they can trust, they will have to pay for it, and it won’t be cheap. What we do takes years of education, training and experience, and we won’t do that for free.

I appreciate that you want to let the public know what’s going on in local media, but remember this isn’t taking place in a vacuum. There is an overarching story of change that began in the 1970s when some guys named Jobs and Gates had some big ideas about small computers. That has changed the course of human history, and changes in news reporting are just a part of that.

A story pitch about a nonexistent Colorado town exposed a writer faking stories with AI?

Another week, another story about publications getting crosswise with artificial intelligence.

This time, multiple national news outlets “removed news features written by a freelance journalist after concerns they are likely AI-generated works of fiction,” Charlotte Tobitt reported last week for the U.K.-based Press Gazette.

From the story:

Freedom of expression non-profit Index on Censorship is also in the process of taking down a magazine article by the same author after concerns were raised by Press Gazette. The publisher has concluded that it “appears to have been written by AI”.

Several other UK and US online publications have published questionable articles by the same person, going by the name of Margaux Blanchard, since April.

Since the Press Gazette story went live, other outlets have written about the saga. How it unraveled had roots in a story about Colorado.

From Jacob Furedi at Dispatch:

A few weeks ago, I received what seemed like the perfect Dispatch pitch.

It concerned a decommissioned mining town in Colorado called Gravemont, supposedly repurposed into one of the world’s most secretive training grounds for death investigation.

“The bodies arrive by night,” the author, Margaux Blanchard, began. “They’re rolled in on stretchers, unzipped, and placed in the mock apartments, classrooms, and bus stations.” By day, she said, scientists and emergency workers would flock there to practise forensics, disaster response, even war-crimes investigation.

“It’s a story that sits right at the edge of the map,” she concluded, “exactly where Dispatch readers like to go.”

It was a cracking story. Except for one problem: it wasn’t true. Gravemont didn’t exist — and neither, it turned out, did Margaux Blanchard.

A quick Google search showed no such town in Colorado. When pressed over email, Blanchard insisted Gravemont “doesn’t advertise itself”, and that she’d uncovered it through a retired forensic pathologist, public records requests and interviews with trainees.

“So, why am I telling you this? Well, there are two reasons,” Furedi went on. “The first is because this isn’t really about one fraudster. It’s about the future of journalism.”

Here’s the latest in the story from a follow-up piece in the Press Gazette.

Meanwhile, AI is helping some Colorado newspapers cover meetings

This week, Suzie Glassman, who writes for the Colorado Trust for Local News*, spoke to reporter Clare Spencer about how she is using AI tools to help her work.

From the story on Medium, headlined How “GenAI Tools are Helping Journalists Monitor Public Meetings”:

Journalists are increasingly using tools which leverage generative AI to help monitor public meetings. These tools have enabled news stories ranging from a school board selling off a multi-million dollar plot of land to a suburb running out of water.

Some unusually dramatic words got Suzie Glassman’s attention in one of the tool’s alerts. “A board member said something like ‘this process has been a disaster’ or ‘this long nightmare is over’”, she told me. “I might have glossed over it if I had just been watching the YouTube video, but when I was reading through the transcript I was like, ‘oh, that’s really interesting’…So I watched the full 20 minutes. And then I thought, okay, that’s a story.” Suzie, a senior education reporter for the Colorado Trust for Local News, went on to write a story for Colorado Community Media about a public school district selling off a big plot of land for $9M after a decade of delays.

Suzie was alerted to the school board meeting via email from SeeGov which shares video highlights of local government meetings. Alex Rosen, the executive director of SeeGov, set up Suzie’s service to send her emails of all the board meetings for five different school boards, which works out to around 10 emails per month. “If I had missed a board meeting last night I just get an email with a link to the recording. It ensures that I never miss one,” she explained.

Glassman told the reporter she wouldn’t have found the story without the AI tool. Read the whole thing at the link above.

🔎 Sponsored | Spotlight: Colorado | Colorado Media Project 🔍

Colorado Media Project believes our democracy works best when the public has transparency into powerful institutions. That’s why accountability journalism is so important to our civic infrastructure. We chose to sponsor this section of Corey’s newsletter to showcase some of the important watchdog work Colorado journalists and their news organizations have been producing recently. Corey chose which ones to spotlight.

Recent Colorado accountability coverage:

• Relying on public records, Colorado Newsline reporter Chase Woodruff exposed on July 22 how Republican U.S. Congressman Gabe Evans has misrepresented his family’s immigration history. “Evans has mischaracterized the story of how his Depression-era ancestors achieved the American dream, and misstated key dates and details in his grandfather’s biography, according to documents obtained by Newsline through archival research and government records requests,” the story reads.

• Colorado Public Radio reporter Allison Sherry illuminated how federal authorities spent weeks tracking young immigrants. “The extraordinary effort,” she wrote in May, “is the latest indicator of how unauthorized immigration, typically a civil offense, has become one of the federal government’s highest law enforcement priorities, even if the cases rarely result in criminal charges.” Immigration advocates and attorneys told Sherry the effort was intimidating to children and caregivers. “They fear it will result in accelerated deportations of kids sent to the U.S. by families hoping they would find a better life,” she reported. “A directive sent to law enforcement partners by ICE explaining what they were to look for lends credence to those concerns.”

• Colorado Sun reporter Jesse Paul reported this spring how former Democratic U.S. Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo’s “behavior last year while serving in Congress and running for reelection was so frightening and traumatizing to staff that aides proposed a safety plan requesting that sharp objects be removed from the Colorado Democrat’s offices.” Caraveo’s team responded to the Sun’s questions for the story “with a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer sent a day before the election, threatening a lawsuit should the Sun proceed with a story,” Paul wrote. The Sun was unable to complete its reporting before Election Day. When Caraveo lost to Evans and stepped out of the public eye, the Sun ceased reporting on the incidents. But in light of Caraveo’s decision to run for Congress again, the Sun resumed the reporting, which led to interviews with the former staffers.”

• Reporters Sandra Fish, Taylor Dolven, and Andrew Graham reported for the Colorado Sun that “Most people arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents between Jan. 20 and June 26 of this year in Colorado and Wyoming did not have any criminal convictions, according to ICE data released over the last few weeks.” The reporters sifted through federal data for the Rocky Mountain region.

To submit a local accountability story for consideration in the future, send me an email. If you or your organization would like to sponsor a recurring newsletter section like this, hit me up.

More Colorado media odds & ends

💰 Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, is offering grants of up to $5,000 to “help small newsrooms invest in urgent safety and resilience needs.” Calling them “rapid-response funds,” they can support liability insurance, digital security tools, encrypted communications, or physical safety upgrades. To receive the application and schedule a brief intake call, contact Liz Blair at elizabeth[at]coloradomediaproject[dot]com.

🗣️ Colorado’s Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, who is running for governor, put out a statement this week that stated he is “reaffirming his commitment to community radio and local journalism.” Community radio, he said in the statement, “connects neighbors, informs the public, and gives voice to local stories that too often go underreported. I’d be grateful for the opportunity to join these conversations and be part of the dialogue that community radio makes possible every day.”

📺 Denver’s 9NEWS TV anchor Kyle Clark is getting national attention again, this time from HuffPost, after calling Republican President Donald Trump’s recent moves authoritarianism. “Vote for him, and your cities won’t be targeted with troop deployments. Vote for him and keep your military installations,” Clark said on air. “If all of this was happening in another nation, we would not hesitate to describe it clearly. If it was Kazakhstan instead of Colorado, Caracas instead of Chicago, we would call it by name — it’s authoritarianism.”

❌ *The email newsletter version of this post stated that Suzie Glassman works for Colorado Community Media. She works for the Colorado Trust for Local News, which is a separate entity. The newspaper that closed was the Eagle Valley Enterprise, not the Vail Valley Enterprise.

🆕 Following a recent “pause” in printing, the Pikes Peak Bulletin nonprofit newspaper based in Manitou Springs has a new publisher. “I am humbled and proud to announce that I am now the publisher of the Pikes Peak Bulletin — a historic paper that’s been serving our community since 1918,” Juaquin Mobley said in a statement in a recent PPB newsletter.

📲 Denver Post reporters Seth Klamann and Nick Coltrain offered an inside look into how Big Tech influenced Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers to back off rewriting legislation that would regulate artificial intelligence during this summer’s special session.

💪 Ari Armstrong wrote for Complete Colorado, the news and commentary arm of the libertarian-leaning nonprofit Independence Institute, that he believes “politicians have no business” getting involved in a sale of Denver’s 9NEWS to Fox31.

📺 Rocky Mountain PBS and Wyoming PBS leaders discussed “media bias” during a virtual Aug. 26 conversation that included Joanna Kail, the CEO of Wyoming PBS, who penned a controversial July column headlined “When PBS Stopped Listening, America Stopped Watching.” Martín Carcasson of CSU’s Center for Public Deliberation facilitated the discussion among Kail, Amanda Mountain, the president and CEO of Rocky Mountain Public Media, and Amber Coté, RMPM’s senior director of statewide civic engagement.

📺 Katie LaSalle, who left Denver7 in July after nine years, has joined the weather impact team at 9NEWS.

⚔️ Lucy Schiller wrote this week for Columbia Journalism Review about “the battle for public notices” that cites this newsletter’s reporting about some newspapers in Colorado.

🗣️ Watch former Denver Post Editor Greg Moore’s speech to the National Association of Black Journalists when they recently inducted him into their organization’s hall of fame.

💻 The Colorado News Collaborative stated its next network Zoom meeting is at 9 a.m. Sept. 11, “where we’ll be talking about the Free Press, Free Country project, how you can participate in the immigration collaboration and sharing tips for reporting on extremism.” Join the conversation here.

🔼 Journalist Jeremy Jojola of 9NEWS learned about a city police program from a Reddit thread. The thread, which he said got tens of thousands of upvotes, led him to do some reporting about it on his Instagram account.

📻 Colorado Public Radio is hiring an executive producer who it will pay $80,500 to $107,300.

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute, advisor to Colorado Media Project, and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Most recently I’ve been contributing to Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab and The Conversation. The nonprofit Colorado Media Project is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter, hit me up.) Follow me on Bluesky, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.