Colorado TV news owner slaps down bid by conservative Sinclair broadcast giant

The news behind the news in Colorado

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The parent company of multiple local TV news stations in Colorado is fighting back against a hostile takeover bid from a conservative rival.

This week, E.W. Scripps, which owns Denver7 and KOAA News5 in Colorado Springs, rejected an aggressive offer by Sinclair Broadcast Group to buy the company.

Adam Symson, the president and CEO of Scripps, emailed his staff on Tuesday about the latest development in the Trump-era TV merger wars.

“Our board unanimously decided to reject the proposal as the board determined, after careful review, that Sinclair’s offer was not in the best interests of Scripps and our shareholders as well as our employees and the many communities and audiences we serve across the United States,” he wrote, according to an email obtained by this newsletter.

Employees at Denver7 and KOAA News5 might breathe a little easier — at least for now.

“This news has no impact on your day-to-day work, and we remain focused on executing our strategy,” their CEO told them. “It’s business as usual at Scripps, and our audiences, customers and communities expect the same high level of service we’ve always provided.”

In a statement on its website, Sinclair offered this:

“We are disappointed that despite Scripps encouraging Sinclair to make a proposal, Scripps’ board rejected the proposal without engaging. Our proposal was based on previous discussions and was responsive to concerns about Scripps’ communities, employees and shareholders. It delivers significant strategic and financial benefits for both companies and all shareholders and represents a substantial premium over both Scripps’ unaffected and current share price. We call on Scripps to engage with us regarding our proposal. We believe Scripps’ shareholders deserve a full and fair evaluation of this opportunity.”

As this newsletter reported earlier this month, Sinclair’s attempt to gobble up Scripps would have given the conservative broadcaster its first foothold in Colorado. If successful, it would also turn Sinclair into a local broadcasting behemoth with some 240 stations nationwide.

In some cities, like Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Detroit, news of Sinclair’s attempt to take over a local TV station made headlines.

Here in Colorado, the news didn’t make it much further than national wire reports despite its potential to drastically shakeup the local TV news landscape in at least two of the state’s largest cities. That’s in contrast to a different TV takeover currently in the works that is closer to reality.

Nexstar, which owns KDVR Fox31, is in a public comment period for its planned purchase of Tegna, which owns Denver’s 9NEWS.

Some of Colorado’s top Democratic leaders — as well as one of the state’s most outspoken and influential conservatives — have thrown serious shade on the deal, saying it would be bad for the state’s residents.

Colorado’s Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, who is running for governor, has promised to “closely review this proposed merger to determine if it will harm Coloradans.”

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

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Recently, the Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

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Colorado newspaper editor’s arrest makes news in his own paper

Today’s print edition of the Sky-Hi News in Grand County carries a story about an arrest of the newspaper’s own editor.

Talk about awkward.

News about a domestic violence charge against the 43-year-old who runs the small newsroom in the town of Granby isn’t on the front page. But Publisher Nicole Miller said the paper, located about two hours west of Denver, is striving to be as transparent about what happened as possible.

“I think the thing that was really important to us was that we covered this like we would cover any other case in our community,” she said over the phone this morning as the paper hit the streets.

The development is an example of how a small-town news organization might respond in an era when an uncomfortable story about itself can quickly get swamped by viral social media or larger outside outlets.

Unlike in the past elsewhere in Colorado, that didn’t happen here. After law enforcement got involved, the newspaper let its audience know, and even deviated from its own policy in its coverage.

Here’s the rundown, according to Miller: Earlier in the week, the Sky-Hi News editor alerted his publisher that he had been involved in an incident. Not long after, members of the community saw police at the local newspaper office and were asking questions about it. Miller, who lives in nearby Summit County, found out her editor was at the local jail.

Unlike some other local news outlets, the Sky-Hi News has a stated policy about how it covers certain crimes and has thought about its approach in the digital age. “Typically, the Sky-Hi News will name someone accused of a crime only after they have been formally charged,” it reads.

But this week, the paper departed from that policy in the instance of its own editor, Miller said, because they wanted to be transparent.

On Thursday morning, the Sky-Hi News published a Facebook post saying it was aware that its editor, who it named, had “been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and third-degree assault” and was set to appear in court. The post listed the publisher’s email address and phone number if anyone had any questions.

“It was something folks in the community were already talking about and we wanted to be really transparent about what was happening,” Miller said about the paper’s decision to note an arrest before reporting on charges.

Because Sky-Hi News is part of a small chain — Swift is owned by Ogden Newspapers of West Virginia — the process for handling such a sensitive story might have been easier than if it were a smaller operation or a sole-proprietor-type situation.

To avoid conflicts of interest, the publisher was able to assign a reporter from a nearby Swift sister paper and bring in an outside editor who doesn’t work with the Sky-Hi team to oversee the coverage.

The story came online Thursday, Dec. 18.

“Sky-Hi News editor arrested, faces domestic violence charge,” read a headline on the newspaper’s home page. The paper pushed it out via its multiple social media channels.

Here was the lede:

… the editor of the Sky-Hi News … faces a charge of third-degree assault, classified as domestic violence, after Grand County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested him Wednesday, Dec. 17.

[The editor] made his first court appearance Thursday, Dec. 18.

An affidavit for an arrest warrant states a Grand County Sheriff’s Office deputy found probable cause to arrest [the editor], 43, and charge him with third-degree assault.

The newspaper named the editor-slash-suspect in its coverage and included his mugshot.

• NOTE: I’ve chosen not to name him here because readers can find it elsewhere and I haven’t spoken to the suspect, his attorney, or the person who spoke to authorities. I try not to parrot only what police say in the rare instances that “crime” coverage makes it into this newsletter. What “Inside the News in Colorado” is focusing on is how the newspaper chose to cover itself.

In its coverage, the paper did not run a quote from its editor suspect, but did quote his attorney who said the arrest affidavit “speaks volumes” and cited one particular part of it that the paper had reported.

Today’s print story appears in the courts section on page six.

Miller said news about the editor’s arrest wasn’t the most important thing that happened in Grand County that day. Front-page treatment showcased a story about winter being off to a slow start and a report about county commissioners demanding answers from the state wildlife department after officials re-released a wolf into the county.

About how the paper’s policies intersected with the decision-making for a story about itself, Miller said, “I think you can have policies for all these decisions but I think at the end of the day you have to have editors deciding what they think is the right thing to do.”

The Sky-HI News team is small, listing only an editor and two reporters on its masthead.

For the past couple of years, the paper has relied on Colorado College students, whom I’d helped recruit as their advisor, to cover local public meetings remotely via video. They and I had limited interaction with the current editor; my inbox shows about half a dozen short emails between us in the spring and summer as the paper sought a new contributor.

As of now, the editor is on leave for about two weeks, Miller said. They will re-evaluate after the new year.

“We want to give this the opportunity to move through the court system and that doesn’t happen overnight,” she said. What’s most important, she said, is that the local news team can stay focused on covering news in the county, and the extent to which they can do that will guide her decisions.

“I know that it’s challenging for folks when we write about them and their mugshots are up and their names are in the community — particularly in small communities,” Miller said. “And so this is really an opportunity for us to say ‘This is how we report and we’re going to do it when it’s our own people, too.’”

Publisher says he’ll bring back archives of the Indy alt-weekly in the Springs

A publisher who purchased assets related to the closed Indy alternative weekly in Colorado Springs said this week he planned to revive its archives.

That’s a big deal for the institutional memory of the state’s second-largest city.

“We’re going to be making them available Jan 2026,” Dirk Hobbs of Colorado Media Group, told the Pikes Peak Bulletin, adding that he hasn’t “determined paywall yet.”

More from the story by Heila Ershadi:

Hobbs – whose media company purchased the rights to the Indy last spring after a tumultuous few years in which the Indy rebranded, un-rebranded, closed, changed ownership, and then closed again – said restoring the archives was not a top priority in the first six months of converting the former Indy to the SoCo Insider. The SoCo Insider is not an alt-weekly but a glossy culture-focused magazine that does not do investigative journalism.

“In these first six months of converting the former COS Indy to the SoCo Insider, our focus has been on our mission of showcasing regional arts, music, sports, outdoor, food, entertainment and lifestyle scenes,” said Hobbs. “We’re focused on establishing our positioning as an authoritative resource for those interests using our powerful website … and our digital and print editions.”

Hobbs said the Indy archives are “on a server that is in the hands of the former service provider who provided services for the owners prior to Pikes Peak Media Company” who purchased the Indy in 2024 and then closed it again after about a year of operation.

“We just need to retrieve it from them,” he said.

Speaking on a local podcast in May, some former staffers at the paper lamented the disappearance of the digital archives.

“It’s truly a disservice to the community to continue to have the Indy archive lost in the cyberworld where it remains inaccessible to anyone,” Pam Zubeck, a local investigative reporter who formerly worked at the Indy told the Bulletin.

Indeed, we’re talking about the civic memory from 30 years of an alt-weekly in the 40th largest city in the United States just falling into a sinkhole. And it should be noted that there are likely plenty of fat cats and powerbrokers in the Springs who are just fine with a lot of what the paper reported vanishing into the ether and no longer easily found online.

So, it’s nice to see the paper’s new publisher openly promising their return.

Another Colorado town coughs up money after pulling notices from a local newspaper

First, it was Custer County that buckled under a First Amendment dispute after its board of commissioners voted to pull required legal notices from a local newspaper.

Now it’s the small town of Bennett.

From Jeff Roberts at the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition:

Bennett trustees voted this week to settle a First Amendment claim brought by a weekly newspaper that lost town advertising last spring because the board didn’t like an article about a sexual assault that allegedly happened in the locker room of a middle school.

Under an agreement approved by the trustees Tuesday night, the I-70 Scout will receive $15,000 from a municipal insurance pool and a three-year advertising contract, excluding legal notices, for $15,000 per year. The board directed outside counsel to prepare a draft contract for review at its January meeting.

During the meeting, town attorney Scotty Krob called the settlement terms “a compromise, sort of balancing the town’s support of the First Amendment and also recognition of the board’s frustration with an article that was published by the paper.”

What sparked the whole thing was when Douglas Claussen, publisher of the I-70 Scout and Eastern Colorado News, published a front-page story about a sexual assault that included graphic details that he later acknowledged was too much. He also inserted his own opinion into the article by writing, “shockingly, the mother of the victim did not want to press charges.”

The town’s trustees voted in May to yank town advertising from the paper.

Claussen threatened to sue the town. His attorney, Rachael Johnson of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, sent an August letter to the town saying as much. The letter characterized the vote by town leaders as “egregiously unconstitutional” because doing so was “openly motivated by retaliation for the I-70 Scout’s editorial decision-making.”

News of the town’s recent settlement over all this made the TV airwaves in Denver where 9NEWS journalist Rhea Jha put the development into broader context. “Similar fights like this are playing out nationwide,” she said, citing a recent First Amendment lawsuit by NPR against Republican President Donald Trump.

Jha traveled to Strasburg where the I-70 Scout newspaper has its headquarters.

“Even in small towns,” she reported, “journalism only has power if it’s protected.”

Sentinel Colorado in the spotlight for editorial calling for Trump’s impeachment

Last month, the Sentinel weekly newspaper in Aurora stood out nationally when it published an editorial calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump.

“President Donald Trump’s latest descent into authoritarian delirium arrived with a ‘splat’ Thursday when he publicly said Aurora Congressperson Jason Crow and five other Democratic lawmakers should face the death penalty for crimes of sedition,” the paper wrote in its Nov. 21 editorial.

Trump has “repeatedly violated his oath of office and discarded the U.S. Constitution,” the editorial concluded, adding, “This latest felony is beyond the pale and warrants his impeachment.”

The editorial made some waves.

The Media and Democracy Project called the Sentinel the “only newspaper” to do such a thing. A write-up at Editor & Publisher called it a “first in the nation” move.

The national media critic Margaret Sullivan described the Sentinel as “thoughtfully” calling for Trump’s impeachment and resignation, “given what’s happened especially in this second term.”

The Media and Democracy Project interviewed Sentinel Editor and Publisher Dave Perry earlier this month about the paper’s approach to the editorial.

Here’s an excerpt:

“While newspapers across the nation have shied away from and even discontinued ‘house editorials’ for fear of appearing partisan or angering part of their readership, we feel that controversial news and opinions are not partisan but pragmatic.

Not only do newspapers endanger their credibility by dodging controversial stories and opinions, they undermine our valid arguments that Trump’s impeachment is a national question, not a partisan one. By ignoring hard questions on either side, supporting or dismissing Trump’s impeachment, newspapers can appear complicit.”

“We’ve seen a tsunami of hate mail and some attaboys since they did this,” Perry told me last week about the interview and the publicity the Media and Democracy Project has given it.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

👀 A man accused of following a nonwhite Grand Junction TV reporter for miles, questioning his nationality, yelling “this is Trump’s America now,” and then tackling and choking him outside the newsroom, is slated to go on trial Jan. 5.

⚖️ A judge issued a gag order “preventing the media from reporting” on what Vail Daily reporter John LaConte called a “reverse-transfer and preliminary hearing” involving a 17-year-old who is accused of first-degree murder. LaConte also reported that the newspaper “filed a motion with the court” asking Judge Rachel J. Olguin-Fresquez to lift the gag order, “arguing that the judge’s order constitutes an unconstitutional prior restraint.” This week, Colorado First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg said on LinkedIn that the judge had “lifted the unconstitutional gag order on the Vail Daily.”

🤺 Meanwhile, Colorado Public Radio and 9NEWS are pushing back against Weld County for a requirement that public records requests must be notarized. Such a requirement “creates an arbitrary and unreasonable hurdle” and “does not serve any legitimate government interest,” according to a letter from attorney Madison Schaefer representing both outlets.

👀 Even with a rival newspaper recently closed and its publisher dead, a newspaper war in the small southern Colorado town of Westcliffe carries on. Behold the headline and story in the Wet Mountain Tribune. Then mosey on over to Facebook for the local comments.

⚙️ “After seven years leading the Vail Daily’s newsroom and nearly four years serving as the director of audience growth and content for Swift Communications’ 11 mountain resort publications, Nate Peterson is logging off,” John LaConte wrote for the paper. Peterson will become the Denver Post’s new sports editor.

📦 Sky-Hi News, which is located on Main Street in Granby, “will be moving its office to a new business park in Tabernash in the new year,” the paper reported.

🆕 Rocky Mountain Student Media alumni and longtime Colorado media professional Linda Carpio Shapley “has been named as interim CEO/President of RMSMC,” Allie Seibel reported for the Rocky Mountain Collegian campus paper. “Shapley steps into the role following the departure of Pete Waack as President/CEO in late November.”

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.