Colorado involved in media conglomeration settlement with Paramount, opts out of provision

The news behind the news in Colorado

This week, a group of state attorneys general who had sued to stop a major media takeover by Paramount of Warner Bros. Discovery dropped their antitrust lawsuit and announced a settlement.

The group of 12 state prosecutors includes Colorado Democrat Phil Weiser who opted out of a key provision in the settlement involving a controversial editorial oversight board for the merged company.

The settlement clears the way for a massive amount of media consolidation between two of the nation’s largest entertainment giants and includes news organizations. Not everyone loved it, and one group has already sought to formally oppose the settlement in court.

This media merger, one of the largest in U.S. history, “will combine Paramount’s film and television studios, CBS and the Paramount+ streamer with Warner’s studios, HBO, CNN and other cable networks,” CNN reported.

CBS Colorado, also known as Channel 4, is based in Denver.

In exchange for voluntarily dropping their antitrust suit, the states secured some commitments from Paramount, Weiser’s office said.

From the Colorado AG’s office:

Today’s settlement, pending approval by the court, includes a five-year court enforceable commitment to increase film output, a minimum of an additional $1.5 billion commitment to bolster domestic film production, a $47.5 million fund for workers who are impacted by the merger, and restrictions on how the company handles cable negotiations to help keep prices competitive.

This language about Colorado appears in the settlement agreement itself:

Any payment the Companies make pursuant to this Consent Decree to the Colorado Department of Law is to be held, along with any interest thereon, in trust by the Attorney General to be used in the Attorney General’s sole discretion for reimbursement of the State’s actual costs and attorney’s fees, the payment of restitution, if any, and for future consumer fraud or antitrust enforcement, consumer education, or public welfare purposes.

As part of the agreement, the merged company will “form and operate a fund for purchasing independent films” and will “make an annual contribution of $5 million per year, for a total of $25 million,” the Colorado AG’s office stated.

Sundance, the largest independent film festival in the nation, recently relocated from Park City, Utah, to Boulder, Colorado, and will take place there in January. Because of that, the move could in some ways expand Colorado’s role in the world of independent film.

But folks at the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media didn’t have much to say this week when asked about how they thought this national settlement might benefit the state. The film commissioner looped in an office spokesperson who punted to the AG’s office, saying the film commission wasn’t a part of the suit. A follow-up email about it went unanswered.

“There are no benefits in the Paramount consent decree specific to Colorado,” said Lawrence Pacheco, the spokesperson for the Colorado attorney general’s office. “Consumers nationwide will have the benefits of the annual film release commitments.”

In a statement, Weiser thanked California’s Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, for leading the charge. He added that he believed the settlement will “serve to protect” movie goers and producers.

“We will continue to monitor the commitments made in this decree and ensure that we protect competition, creativity, and workers in these industries,” Weiser said.

A former telecommunications attorney, Weiser, who is currently running for governor, sat down with this newsletter for an hour in the spring to talk about his views about local media and why he has sued to block mergers in the past.

Some believe the concessions in this deal don’t go far enough, and they side-eyed the attorneys general for dropping their court action.

Three reporters from the Los Angeles Times reported this week that the antitrust lawsuit settlement came amid political pressure and not everyone involved believes the outcome is ideal.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This is ultimately not what I wanted,” said Connecticut’s Democratic attorney general William Tong who was party to the suit.

The story reported that a chief concern of Tong’s that others in the 12-member coalition share is “with the merger’s consolidation of CNN and CBS News under Paramount Skydance Chief Executive David Ellison, the billionaire media mogul close to President Trump and son of Oracle co-founder and Republican mega-donor Larry Ellison.”

Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, Winston Cho noted that while the settlement is “broad in scope,” it doesn’t “require any divestitures that are typical of enforcer-friendly deals. Instead, it appears to be a five-year operating agreement imposed through a consent decree.”

“Obviously the billionaires won here,” Alvaro Bedoya, a former Federal Trade Commissioner and a senior advisor to the American Economic Liberties Project, told NPR’s David Folkenflik and Mandalit del Barco. “These guys censored, bribed, and bullied their way to the top.”

The settlement, he added is “coming at a moment when people already perceive media freedom to be at risk. They watch CNN, for example, to be barred from the White House doors, and then two or three days later, hear that one of the president’s closest allies now officially owns CNN. I think that could really be a galvanizing moment.”

Another part of the settlement has also drawn scrutiny: the creation of an oversight board for the merged company ostensibly to protect CNN and CBS from undue influence at the merged company.

Some network employees and media-watchers “have questions and concerns” about how this arrangement will work, Jeremy Barr reported for the Guardian.

As for that particular part of the deal, Pacheco said Weiser has his own concerns with the government getting involved in the operations of news organizations by requiring the creation of an editorial board, “which is why Colorado is not part of this provision of the Paramount consent decree.”

Washington State was the only other one to opt out of that provision.

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➡️ This newsletter is proudly sponsored by The Colorado Health Foundation. As a proud funder of Colorado Media Project, the home of Press Forward Colorado, the CHF understands that healthy communities need a healthy news ecosystem.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

• 🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” Get in touch to see how the data might be useful for any stories you are pursuing — or to learn about potential story ideas. ⬅️

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Josiah Hesse recounts ‘weird vibes’ while writing a novel at Hunter Thompson’s Owl Farm

Colorado journalist and author Josiah Hesse has been getting a lot of attention lately for his new nonfiction book “On Fire for God.”

But this week he penned a piece for his personal Substack about a previous novel he once wrote in Woody Creek, Colorado, at Owl Farm, the former home of the late Hunter S. Thompson.

“It was a journey that would leave me both inspired and disillusioned, where the clash of mythology and reality would force a reckoning with the literary hero of my youth,” he wrote.

The story is not a love letter to the seemingly uncancelable hero of Gonzo journalism.

From the piece, headlined “Weird Vibes While Writing My Novel At Hunter S. Thompson’s House, Part 1”:

I’d once idolized Hunter S. Thompson as the ultimate symbol of counter-culture rebellion and penetrating journalism, though by the end of my pilgrimage the iconoclast that once shaped my identity would look like a violent and immature bully I wouldn’t even want to have dinner with.

The item, which recounts his first days at Owl Farm with Thompson’s former wife, Anita, is well-written and evocative and leaves the reader waiting for more. Here’s how he ends it:

Once again I asked myself what I was looking for in writing my novel in the home where my favorite author shot himself. Was I supposed to believe this land below my feet was sacred, or cursed? Did I think writing a novel here would somehow imbue my typing fingers with Thompson’s brilliance? Was I just as silly as the Buddy Holly disciples visiting a frozen cornfield in my hometown, believing they’d find some supernatural inspiration?

Perhaps this would feel different if I were a musician.

As a kid, I was often told that Led Zeppelin’s music had the power to infect listeners with demonic possession, as evidenced by Jimmy Page’s residence at the former home of occultist Aleister Crowley, who performed many dark-magic rituals in the Scottish property a century before Page shot up heroin and wrote “Stairway to Heaven” on the same stone floors. In 1992, Trent Reznor famously moved into the LA home where the Manson murders took place, building a studio and recording The Downward Spiral album in the same space where a pregnant Sharon Tate was stabbed to death.

Radiohead’s OK Computer, Red Hot Chili Peppers Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath were all recorded in allegedly haunted houses. But do I really believe those environs were essential to the greatness of the records created there?

Not really.

At least, not in any mystical way, nothing more than stirring the imaginations of the creatives at work in those spaces.

Was that what I was looking for, to be inspired?

I was writing a homoerotic, psychological horror novel that was far more Stephen King than Hunter Thompson. I wasn’t short on inspiration, as a great deal of it was loosely based on my own experiences as a repressed evangelical. Ultimately, a writer needs as bland—yet comfortable—space as possible to work in, one where you can disappear from the physical world and fall into the page. Living at Owl Farm would be fantastic if I was writing a biography on Thompson (or, say, Johnny Depp about to portray him in a film) but, like an over-decorated workspace, it was beginning to feel like a distraction from the actual writing I came here to do.

If I hoped to walk away with a stack of cleanly written pages three weeks from now, I’d have to put all notions of a pilgrimage out of my mind and get focused.

But would the ghost of Hunter Thompson allow me to work in peace?

Follow the link above to the piece. His second installment just came out and (double-checking here, yep) ends with him “naked on the kitchen floor, laying in the middle of a pentagram drawn in ketchup.”

Check Hesse’s Substack for Part 3.

Denver Post re-runs story about OpenAI admissions from lawsuit against the company

If this newsletter was involved in a lawsuit with a company and in the course of it learned of embarrassing admissions by an employee of that company, you might read about it here.

That’s what happened this week with the Denver Post, which is part of a lawsuit against Microsoft and the artificial intelligence company OpenAI.

A group of newspapers, which includes the New York Times, New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and others, argue that AI tools are harming their business models by training bots on the work of their journalists without credit. (I own stock in Microsoft, which has pumped billions into the OpenAI research lab that created ChatGPT.)

Here’s the lead of a story on the New York Daily News, republished by the Denver Post:

A senior executive at Microsoft believes AI systems built on the work of others will be seen as “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and possibly the greatest robbery of labor in human history, according to court documents unredacted Thursday in an ongoing Manhattan lawsuit.

The executive’s startling admission, along with an array of others, appeared in a newly unredacted filing in the landmark copyright infringement legal battle playing out in Manhattan Federal Court between newspapers such as The Denver Post, Daily News, The New York Times and tech companies Microsoft and OpenAI.

The Denver Post’s attorney in the case, Steven Lieberman, said the comments prove the companies are knowingly committing theft, as opposed to operating within the parameters of the “fair use” doctrine as they claim, the story reported.

“These comments reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views,” a company spokesperson told the Daily News in a statement. “Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism.”

One Denver Post journalist shared his views publicly about the development.

“Gen-AI is an insulting plagiarism and regurgitation machine, and there’s no counter-evidence that comes even close to holding water,” reporter John Wenzel posted on Bluesky. “It steals the Library of Alexandria every second of every day and we’re all supposed to cheer about it. Proud to work at the @denverpost.com.”

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💰 Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, is inviting local Colorado newsrooms to apply for the 2026 #newsCOneeds campaign running Nov. 1 to Dec. 31 with a $200,000 prize and incentive pool.

The campaign also aligns with NewsMatch and Colorado Gives Day. Submit an interest form here to get started. Apply early. Space is limited to 50 newsrooms, and we review submissions on a rolling basis.

You must be a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit or have a fiscal sponsor, or be an active partner of COLab, a member of the Colorado Press Association, or a member of the Colorado Broadcasters Association. The final deadline is Friday, Oct. 16, 2026. You’ll want to get in on this. 💰

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Independent Colorado journalist lays out personal finances and job-seeking woes

Last month, this newsletter profiled a handful of independent journalists who have launched niche digital publications in Colorado.

One of them was Thompson’s Colorado, authored by former Kansas TV journalist and Longmont resident Nicholas Thompson, which covers transportation.

“I think treating this like my part-time side job going forward is sustainable,” Thompson said at the time when asked whether this would be a full-time endeavor. “Any more and I can’t sustain it. Any less, it loses publishing frequency and impact.”

This week, he bared all in a column about his personal finances, his struggle to find a full-time job, and why he left secure employment to move to “carless” Colorado last July with no savings and no vehicle. The item offers an inside look into one Coloradan’s experience navigating the current economy while he seeks employment.

For the piece, Thompson explains what it would take to make a living wage in Longmont ($27 per hour), what he’s willing to accept ($20), and says he has applied to “more than 200 jobs across the Front Range since May.”

Thompson graduated from journalism school and spent years as a TV reporter, eventually at KTVI in St. Louis. “That chapter ended after an arrest in 2018,” he writes. “Afterward, I rebuilt my career on phones: insurance, customer service, sales and legal intake. I survived. Sometimes I excelled. But surviving a career isn’t the same as wanting it.”

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

I’m also not an innocent bystander in this. I left jobs. I moved states without much of a cushion. I took chances on roles that turned out to be bad fits, and I walked away from situations I didn’t think were sustainable instead of waiting until the next paycheck was lined up. Some of that was principled. Some of it was impulsive. Some of it was me badly misjudging how easy it would be to replace income here.

In the item, the journalist lists five jobs he had and why they didn’t work out, and how he hoped his Thompson’s Colorado newsletter could provide a bridge until he found a full-time position.

“The audience part worked. The career pivot, so far, has not,” he wrote. “I don’t regret coming to Colorado. I moved here car-free because I genuinely believed it made more sense, and for 14 months I made that bet work. Right now, it’s faltering.”

More Colorado media odds & ends

✈️ This newsletter is in travel mode, so content might be lighter than usual and I might not be as quick to respond to emails, voicemails, or DMs.

📺 The E.W. Scripps Company has named Jessie Williams as the news director for KMGH Denver7. Williams will also serve as the regional news director for local Scripps markets in the Colorado region. “Williams currently serves as news director at KTNV, Scripps’ ABC station in Las Vegas,” an announcement read. “She has worked for Scripps for more than a decade, with newsroom leadership experience in Detroit, Milwaukee, Lansing and Las Vegas. She is expected to begin in mid-November.”

🤦‍♂️ Out of all the coverage of a Grand Junction man getting arrested for voter fraud, only the Daily Sentinel newspaper reported his party affiliation, citing online voting records. In an email this week, Mesa County elections clerk Bobbie Gross confirmed: “The individual charged with the crime is a registered Republican, while the victim is registered as unaffiliated.” Stories by KKCO/KJCT, WesternSlopeNow, and Colorado Public Radio about the man accused of trying to vote twice in a June primary election left out that key detail.

☀️ The nonprofit Colorado Sun is “building a new model for statewide news: Regional hubs created with communities and not just about them, staffed by local journalists who understand them and are supported by partnerships with local news organizations,” the statewide digital outlet announced this week.

🗣 See how Colorado schools ranked in the latest “College Free Speech” rankings by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE. “The state’s average speech climate grade is D, compared to the national average of D-,” the national group reported.

👀 “I would say that something needs to happen with the media that recklessly reported on this fake complaint,” Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert told CBS Colorado. (She was talking about news reports that stemmed from a recent salacious alleged complaint about her lodged by a questionable source.)

📸 With convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the news following a new documentary about her by Nathan Fielder, Denver-based photojournalist Benjamin Rasmussen wrote about a photoshoot he did with her for Bloomberg a decade ago and what he did to get his “version of his Elizabeth Holmes stare.”

🆕 Ainsley Coogan has started at the Estes Valley Voice digital outlet. “I’m excited to begin reporting for Estes Park and the surrounding area,” the journalist said. “Local journalism is so important, and I’m honored to have the opportunity to connect with the local community and provide news coverage.”

⚖️ 9NEWS consumer investigative reporter Steve Staeger produced a humorous and compelling vertical video about how he tried to cover a 9NEWS colleague’s traffic ticket court case, but was blocked by a judge from filming, hired a sketch artist to attend the hearing, but then found out that the ticket got dismissed. “Man, that would have been an epic story,” he said, using his own attempt at a story that never ran to explain a local issue involving changes in policy at Denver’s parking department.

📚 “Double Standards” led Elizabeth schools to suppress “The Kite Runner” book, writes Ari Armstrong for the Colorado Times Recorder. The more he learned about the “reasons” for the book’s suppression, “the angrier I became,” he wrote. “Some complaints about the book were fabrications, and the district used double standards to suppress the book.”

🗳 “Journalism ensures you decide who to vote for, not the candidates or the money behind them,” Sentinel Colorado Editor Dave Perry wrote this week.

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute, advisor to Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For more than a decade, I’ve 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. I also write the twice-monthly Community Newswire newsletter for the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont. (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.