Boulder Weekly implodes. 'The newsroom is gone,' fired editor says. Paper's future uncertain

The news behind the news in Colorado

This week, as the nation’s annual conference for alternative weekly newspapers was convening in Madison, Wisconsin, one of its Colorado members was imploding.

Shay Castle, who had been editor of Boulder Weekly for just under two years, said on July 2 that the paper’s owner, Stewart Sallo, had fired her.

A week later, things utterly collapsed at the free alt-weekly that has served the city since 1993. “The newsroom is gone,” Castle said over the phone this Tuesday. “All four of us are gone.”

While the paper typically comes out on Thursdays and populates news racks around Boulder County, this week those racks are empty for the first time in 32 years. No Big Goodbye, no final issue.

“I’m not sure exactly when we’ll be back in publication,” Sallo said in an interview Wednesday. He is planning to take the summer to reassess the viability of print media and his own role in it as someone who is past retirement age.

The reporting for this newsletter is informed by interviews with staff and ownership and from reviewing emails, memos, and at least one audio recording.

What led to the sudden fall of Boulder Weekly?

It wasn’t all that sudden for those who lived through it.

For staff, the meltdown wasn’t because of one thing, but a confluence of things that eventually boiled over. The loss of Publisher Fran Zankowski in January had left the newsroom exposed directly to its ownership in a way that it had not been before — and staff recoiled at things the owner did or tried to do.

The big ones were Sallo proposing layoffs (and uncertainty about when or if they might come), reduced hours for staff, seeking to cut health insurance, wanting to review any coverage of Israel and Palestine, and issues involving a plan for the newsroom to try and become an employee-owned company.

The pandemic had been particularly hard on Boulder Weekly’s bottom line and recovering from it had been slow. Sallo, who runs the business with his wife, Mari Nevar, said in an interview that while he tried hard not to, he realized he might need to cut staff in order to keep the paper alive. He involved the newsroom in conversations about it.

In early April, when told the company would stop paying a portion of health insurance premiums for employees, Castle sent an email that included this:

“At this point, we are hanging on only with the hopes of taking over the paper. But it is becoming increasingly untenable, both mentally/emotionally and financially, and we have our own difficult decisions to make about the viability of remaining at this company.”

More recently, though, toward the end of June, the staff sent a memo to Sallo and Nevar suggesting, among other things, that ownership invest money from the previous sale of an office building, cut or forego their own salary, or offer a loan that could be transferred to new owners.

“You must make the decision you feel is right,” it read. “As must we.”

Why no paper this week? Or … maybe ever?

During a meeting after dismissing the paper’s editor, Sallo and Nevar told those remaining that the reason was largely because of personal differences, not the editor’s work.

They said they didn’t feel respected or welcome in their own company and didn’t have a solid understanding about why. Sallo said it no longer felt like a family-type working environment where people could work out their differences as it had back in the day.

“A publisher and editor cannot work together when there’s that thick of a wall and that kind of antipathy,” he told them at one point. He also acknowledged that he understood the staff were close and believed that if he ever let Castle go, the rest might walk out the door. The owners said they hoped they could work out a plan to keep the paper together.

Later, Sallo asked the arts and culture editor, Jezy Gray, if he would step in as editor.

Gray says he declined in part because of a lack of trust in ownership over a variety of reasons, including an insistence on reviewing certain articles prior to publication. So he quit this Monday after three years at the paper.

Reporters Kaylee Harter, who had been there for nearly two years, and Tyler Hickman, who had been there about a year, were let go shortly after. They didn’t feel equipped or prepared to put out an entire paper, including multiple editor duties, on their own with such short notice. Oversight of coverage was also an issue.

No staff, no paper. As for the future, Sallo isn’t sure.

“I’ve got some hurdles and obstacles ahead of me that I need to figure out, and I will tell you that I think this is probably a good time for us to take a little summer vacation and take a break and reassess the nature of print media and where we fit into it and whether print media is really viable any longer,” Sallo said in an interview. “It’s a tough business. And do I want to be part of it any longer is a question I need to answer.”

What is the former staff and owner saying?

Former members of the newsroom agree that the editorial team was a tight-knit group. They felt they were doing impactful, fulfilling work and would have wanted to continue doing more of it, but there was too much chaos involving ownership and the long-term outlook wasn’t clear.

“This staff was the most impressive and thoughtful group of journalists I’ve ever worked with,” Gray said. “We really had something special in this paper, and Shay’s leadership as editor was a huge part of that. It’s a big loss for all of us who wanted to continue doing good work together, but it’s an even bigger loss for the community we served week in and week out.”

Zankowski, who is now working with Colorado Media Group, called Castle, whom he’d recruited for the job, an “exceptional” editor and manager of staff. He added that as a publisher he is used to pushback from editors. “They don’t like you getting involved in things,” he said.

The Alternative Newsweekly Foundation is hosting a fundraiser Castle created to help “all impacted employees, with priority being given to the lowest-earning.”

For their parts, Castle and Sallo agree that their relationship was not good. Castle saw him as immediately overreactive to situations that wound up causing problems. Sallo felt that his editor was angry with him simply because he was the owner.

“One of us needed to leave, and I’m the owner — and unfortunately that meant that she had to go, and I felt bad about that,” Sallo said. “But it was necessary in my estimation, and it’s unfortunate that things worked out that way.”

Beyond the memo offering suggestions about revenue generation, another recent point of contention was the owner pushing for closer proximity to the editorial process following the June 1 firebombing of demonstrators in Boulder who were rallying for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Sallo, who has described himself to staff as a member of the local Jewish community who had been ashamed of past items in the paper, wanted Castle to brief him about coverage of the attack and potentially let him see it. He told her he worried about something winding up in Boulder Weekly that might be “inconsistent with what I feel comfortable publishing.”

Castle told her boss in an email that she was not comfortable with oversight of editorial decisions, regardless of the topic. “We will follow the same process we do for all other content,” she told him.

“It’s up to me as owner to decide what kind of culture I want to have in my company,” Sallo told this newsletter. “And the culture I tried to create was almost exclusive editorial control on the part of the editorial staff — but that they would be aware of things that we might be on the verge of publishing that might be a concern to me and to bring those to my attention prior to publication.”

In a meeting with some of the remaining editorial staff on the day he fired Castle, Sallo said one of his top 10 reasons for making the decision was a worry about the paper publishing something that embarrassed him.

What about the employee ownership campaign at Boulder Weekly?

Beyond there being no newsroom employees left to buy it, that ship seems to have sailed. And it had been on a rocky voyage.

About seven months ago, Boulder Weekly staffers were raising money to buy the paper from Sallo and turn it into an employee-owned newspaper.

The paper had always been profitable, Zankowski, the former publisher, said at the time, and he had considered buying it himself. But he left to become publisher of the Colorado Springs Independent after two wealthy businessmen and developers brought it back to life. (They abruptly shut it down 14 months later after apparently realizing what a headache owning a newspaper can be. Go figure.)

In Boulder, throughout the process of working with an entity called the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center, which helps companies become employee-owned, staff was hopeful.

But Sallo sidelined them from the process, Castle said, which frustrated staff. “He cut us out completely after we raised the money,” she said.

Sallo says there was confidential financial information involved that he wasn’t going to make available to everyone. “It is our company,” he said in an interview. “We were the one engaged with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center, and we had every right to manage that engagement at our discretion.”

But he acknowledges that he eventually did lose interest in the idea.

“One of the problems with the employee-ownership option is that typically businesses — not just newspapers but all businesses — are staffed by people who do not have the financial wherewithal to become owners,” he said. “Therefore, it’s beholden upon the owner to finance the deal. And that was the thing that caused me to lose interest along the way.”

It turns out, even now, that this is new information to Castle and some of the former staff.

Is Boulder Weekly for sale?

Yes, though it hasn’t been listed.

“If anyone out there wants to send someone my way to talk about that, I’d be more than happy to have that conversation,” Sallo says.

What‘s next?

It’s hard to say.

Castle, who had previously worked at the Boulder Daily Camera before starting her own site Boulder Beat prior to joining the weekly in 2023, says she’s taking some time off to decide what her future will be in the journalism world. She said she doesn’t plan to bring back Boulder Beat.

Sallo floated the idea of some kind of merger between Boulder Weekly and the nonprofit digital Boulder Reporting Lab, but said he had not spoken to founder Stacy Feldman specifically about that.

In an interview, Feldman said, “Nothing is currently happening on that front. It’s not the right time. Who knows what will be in the future.”

---

Now, a message from Gary Community Ventures…

✍️ Request for Grant Proposals to Fund Reporting on Child Care

Colorado’s child care system faces an inflection point. On average, the Denver Post reports, parents pay $13,000 to $20,000 a year per child on child care. And despite charging some of the nation’s highest tuition rates, the Colorado Sun has reported many of our state’s child care providers struggle to remain open due to increasing operational costs.

We’ve seen great reporting on how this dilemma impacts rural communities, grandparents, businesses and even our military. Yet many Coloradans remain unaware about how our state’s child care issues directly impact them.

This is why Gary Community Ventures, alongside the Colorado Media Project, seeks to fund journalism projects capable of reaching Colorado audiences frequently left out of the child care conversation. Learn more and apply by Aug. 3. ✍️

---

More Colorado media odds & ends

📺 Consolidation in the local TV industry has come to Colorado Springs where two of the four stations there will now have the same owner. E.W. Scripps, which owns the local NBC affiliate KOAA News5, will gobble up KKTV, the Gray TV-owned Springs CBS affiliate. KOAA journalist Aidan Hulting straight-up called the merger a “duopoly” in his own coverage of it. Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Alexander Edwards questioned the shape of this new deal. “At first glance, the swap agreement appears to violate certain Federal Communication Commission rules that place limits on TV station ownership in specific markets,” he wrote. Scripps, however, is seeking waivers to rules it calls “outdated” and “antiquated.”

👻 A groundbreaking new report out this week from the nonprofit Rebuild Local News and the Muck Rack tech platform seeks to show for the first time how many local journalists are in each U.S. county. I wrote a piece about the details in Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab this week. Scott Yates, a former journalist and startup founder in Colorado who initially came up with the idea, did much of the leg work on the report. I hope to have more about the Colorado angle to this in a future newsletter.

🎙 Former Boulder Weekly Editor Shay Castle appeared on KGNU on Friday, July 11 to talk about the implosion of the alt-weekly paper where she talked about what the paper had been able to do with coverage in recent years.

---

This week’s newsletter is supported in part by the Regional Air Quality Council, the Front Range’s lead air quality planning organization. The RAQC collaborates with state governments, organizations, and individuals to improve air quality and protect Colorado’s health and environment through planning, policy development, and program implementation. The RAQC’s current priority is ground-level ozone, the Front Range’s most pressing air quality issue. For more information, please visit RAQC.org.

To learn more about ground-level ozone, what individuals can do to protect their health, and how to help improve our summer air quality, please visit SimpleStepsBetterAir.org. You can also sign up for timely text or email alerts to know when it matters most.

---

📺 Responding to CBS and ABC settling lawsuits with Republican President Donald Trump, Denver’s 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark said decisions by news companies to stand behind their reporting usually happen quietly. He told viewers about times in which his management has had his back. “We have seen lawsuits, we have seen threats of public boycotts, demands to take down online reports, and pressure campaigns to get rid of a pesky journalist,” Clark said on air. “In public and in private, in courtrooms and in conference rooms, our leadership and our station owner Tegna have stood behind our journalism.”

🔥 Denver’s alternative weekly Westword has “partnered with one of Denver’s best cultivations and hash operations to create a package of infused joints filled with Meraki flower and Mighty Melts bubble hash,” Thomas Mitchell reported for the paper. “Before they hit dispensaries, members can roast one of these bones on August 7 at RiNo cannabis venue Tetra Lounge.”

🆕 Colorado Public Radio host Ryan Warner has become the “first male professional member” of the Denver Women’s Press Club. His only stipulation was that the vote be unanimous, he said on social media. In 2024, the club opened its membership to “all gender identities,” the club stated.

---

🌿 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. 🌿

---

🆕 The Sky-Hi News in Grand County welcomed its new contributor, Lorelei Smillie, to readers this week. “She holds a B.A. in political science from Colorado College in Colorado Springs, with minors in journalism and French. Since graduating in May, she has been covering Winter Park Town Council meetings for Sky-Hi News for the summer.”

🪦 Dennis Georgatos, “a longtime sports writer for The Associated Press who spent 17 years covering Colorado teams,” has died at age 70. “Georgatos died June 25 following a battle with brain cancer, his family said. He spent his final weeks at his vineyard near Lodi, California, as he visited with family and friends,” the AP reported.

➡️ The 39th annual Colorado Black Arts Festival “kicks off this Friday and runs through Sunday in Denver's City Park West,” Chandra Thomas Whitfield reported for Denverite.

🪦 Dennis M. Herzog, a retired executive editor of the Daily Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction, who was also a “Vietnam veteran, husband, father, grandfather and a lover of dogs,” has died at 76.

🚪 Chase Slesinger-Hall, a rising senior from Aspen described the Emerging Journalists Program at Elon University in North Carolina as “a once-in-a-lifetime experience” that “opened doors to so many new potential career paths.”

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. 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.