'Death threats' says a small-town newspaper publisher in Colorado

The news behind the news in Colorado this week

May 10, 2024

A rural Colorado newspaper publisher says he has faced threats and harassment as his town has lurched into the paranoid style of extremist right-wing politics.

“The events of the past several weeks not only left me flabbergasted, but for a brief moment, I thought I was going to be gunned down in the parking lot of the courthouse,” Wet Mountain Tribune publisher Jordan Hedberg wrote earlier this week in a personal column for the paper. (The column disappeared from the paper’s website May 10 after Hedberg said he reconciled with his antagonist.)

Those events he was talking about within the past month have included, according to the progressive Colorado Times Recorder, a virtual meeting of national and state-based “election conspiracy advocates” who organized a special meeting of the Custer County commission, a screening of a “Jan. 6 conspiracy film,” and a civil disobedience training in which an organizer presented the sheriff with a battle ax.

Hedberg, the newspaper publisher who is in his mid-30s and raises organic beef, has clashed with locals and public officials. During the pandemic, he rankled members of the county commission when he crusaded against the questionable educational bona fides of the county’s top health official, and more recently, he has been bird-dogging the local sheriff for hiring a “controversial” former police chief.

Responding to a story by Colorado Times Recorder reporter Heidi Beedle about the recent meeting in Custer County, Hedberg said he warned the commissioners “that you don’t work with extremists who call for the execution of our leaders.” (Indeed, media reported that one of those who participated has “repeatedly called for his political opponents, including Republican U.S. senators and Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, to be publicly executed.”)

Simmering underneath has been an ongoing newspaper war between the Tribune and its rival, the decidedly right-wing Sangre de Cristo Sentinel, which is run by a conservative activist named George Gramlich.

This week, things boiled over. From Hedberg’s column:

Unknown to me was that a man who sat through the three hours of conspiracy theory gibberish at the Wednesday meeting needed to renew his license plates at the courthouse on Thursday. By chance, I was also in the courthouse Thursday. This man, an avid reader of the Sangre de Cristo Sentinel, recognized me waiting in line and started to verbally harass me using the nicknames George Gramlich gave to me in his publication.
I had never seen the man and was confused when he whispered to me, “Hey Jordy, you f***ing f**got.” (Jordy is the name given to me by Gramlich and has also questioned my sexuality and manhood). He proceeded to claim I was funded by the billionaire Jewish financier George Soros, another lie promoted by Gramlich. He then got in my face calling me a “Nazi wife beater,” Another lie Gramlich had written about me.

Online, Hedberg posted a video of an irate man in reflective sunglasses and a black shirt with a 1776 logo on the breast. The video begins after Hedberg says the man cocked his finger and thumb into a gun gesture and said “Boom! We will see you around, Jordy.”

In the May 2 video, the two shout back and forth at each other. At one point, Hedberg, the Tribune publisher, says “I voted for Trump twice, you idiot” and calls his antagonist a “little bitch” for not giving his name. In the video, the man disputes that he threatened Hedberg. A week later, after his column came out, Hedberg posted an update on Twitter/X, saying the man had “reached out to me, and we both apologized for the escalation.” The publisher said he planned to take the video offline; he also took down the online version of the column.

On social media, Hedberg had characterized the confrontation as “death threats from people I don’t know,” and he publicized his column as the “reflection of a small-town publisher as his community devolves into mindless election-conspiracy-stupidity... and death threats.”

Custer County, with a population of about 5,000, is small.

West of Pueblo and shaped like the tip of a house key, it encompasses the towns of Westcliffe and Silver Cliff. It’s in an area of southern Colorado known as the Wet Mountain Valley and has been served by the Wet Mountain Tribune newspaper since 1883.

This newsletter has documented the ongoing newspaper war between the Tribune and Sentinel for years — including a 2022 federal lawsuit over public notices that ended in the Tribune’s favor. Hedberg says he is currently suing the Sentinel’s editor for defamation.

Last year, the Colorado Sun’s Jennifer Brown wrote about how Custer County readers are “divided between a traditional, 100-year-old paper and a right-wing newcomer.”

Gramlich, who runs the Sentinel where he openly carries a pistol on his hip in a newsroom bedecked with a “Don’t Tread on Me Flag,” has said he started the paper along with a local tea party leader with a goal to affect the county’s politics and culture, and to keep tabs on local government. In an appearance on a radio show, he once took credit for changing the political makeup of the county commission by using his paper to attack incumbents he called RINOs — Republicans in Name Only — for their “liberal bullshit.”

A successful 2017 recall election showed the partisan newspaper publisher the power of local media, he said, adding that when he started the Sentinel, “we wanted to make a difference but we had no clue of the influence a local newspaper has on the local politics and culture.” Furthermore, “we’re not journalists, we’re partisans,” Gramlich said. “And we make no bones about it. We don’t pretend to be journalists. But it’s working for us.”

In his column, Hedberg wrote that the recent incident outside the courthouse was under investigation by the sheriff’s office.

“The commissioners, and now the Sheriff, have promoted these election conspiracy theorist extremists for years, and they continue to insist that the election system that they all won under is also fraudulent,” Hedberg wrote in his column. “Some people, like the man who wanted to get his laughs in at my expense as I contemplated death in the courthouse parking lot, seem to believe the [Board of County Commissioners] and Sheriff. It is all so very stupid.”

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Colorado journalists and newsrooms rack up awards

It’s journalism award season across the country, and Colorado’s newsrooms and journalists brought home some new hardware for their office walls.

On May 4 at the Denver Press Club, the Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists administered the Top of the Rockies awards, which covers journalism in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming.

“Forty-four Colorado media outlets took home the awards for work in 2023,” reported Jason Salzman of the Colorado Times Recorder digital site, who also crunched the local numbers. He found:

Topping all Colorado outlets, the Durango Herald got 31 certificates. It was followed by the Colorado Sun (29), Denver Gazette (27), Yellow Scene Magazine (18), and Boulder Reporting Lab (18). Added together, Anschutz publications, the Colorado Springs and Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, won the most awards.

Earning the title of journalist of the year was Sandra Fish of the Colorado Sun. (Last month, you might recall, Fish had been booted from the Republican State Assembly.) Fish “shared the honor with longtime political journalist Fred Brown,” the Sun reported.

Kareem El Damanhoury, who teaches journalism at the University of Denver, was named educator of the year. He said he was dedicating the award to “all the journalists who lost their lives reporting in the field, including at least 92 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza.”

You can find the entire list of Top of the Rockies winners here.

The Denver Post held its own internal awards this week where Noelle Phillips and Sam Tabachnik earned journalist of the year nods. Post reporter Elizabeth Hernandez has a roundup of the rest of the individual awards here.

“I love where I work,” she said on social media, adding, we’re “a great crew right now. It’s so fun to be around smart, talented, hardworking, nice people who care about the world around them & want to show other people, too.”

The Colorado Student Media Association on May 7 announced winners for its high-school journalists “of the year” categories as well.

The Pulitzer Prizes also came out this week and had at least one Colorado connection. Brian Howey, who is a member of the Mississippi Today team that won a finalist honor for its series “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs,” last year worked as an investigative journalist for Sentinel Colorado’s “In the Blue” series.

The Colorado Broadcasters Association held its own awards gala last month. Here is the list of winners.

Colorado loses Rick Sallinger, a local TV icon

Plenty of Colorado journalists likely have a memory of the time they were scooped by Rick Sallinger of CBS Colorado.

Mine was in 2015 during the first court hearing for the Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Dear. So many reporters had signed up to cover it that a court spokesman administered a lottery. Sallinger and I were lucky to have our business cards drawn at random so we could get a seat inside.

Once in, though, we couldn’t leave — if we did we forfeited our seat. A judge had also said reporters couldn’t tweet or broadcast from the courtroom. So when Dear stood up at the start of the hearing and shouted that he was guilty, calling himself a “warrior for the babies,” the dozen or so journalists there had a choice: leave and report it and not be able to witness the rest, or wait until the proceeding was over to report the consequential breaking news.

Sallinger and I were the only two reporters to bolt out of the courtroom. Racing each other in the lobby, he got his story up before mine.

This week, Sallinger’s family said the 74-year-old reporter died of natural causes. CBS Colorado published a remembrance, calling him “one of the most important journalists Colorado has known.”

“He was the best father I could ask for,” his son, Marc, who is also a TV journalist and works across the street at 9NEWS, said on social media. “Working alongside him as competitors in Denver news was special everyday. I will miss it so much.”

Denver’s CCM newspapers gobble up two hyper-local neighborhood publications

Three years to the day after announcing a unique-in-the-nation newspaper ownership model, Colorado Community Media this week added two newspapers to its string of two-dozen Denver-area titles.

From CCM:

The Denver North Star and the G.E.S. Gazette, established in 2019 and 2021 as free monthly publications and digital products, are joining the portfolio. The National Trust for Local News, Colorado Community Media’s parent company, completed the acquisition of those titles on Wednesday.

The North Star’s origin story began in 2019 when Sabrina D’Agosta, then 41, and David Sabados, then 37, launched it as a monthly print newspaper to run in their free time. Sabados was a veteran of Democratic politics and they both had run unsuccessfully for city council in Denver where they saw the need for a hyperlocal paper to serve the area.

Two years later, Sabados started the bilingual G.E.S. Gazette, which covers the neighborhoods of Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea. Later, that publication migrated to a digital-only model.

“We took a long look at Denver’s and the state’s media landscape of hyperlocal publications and ended up where we started: when we thought about who we trusted to keep the papers’ community feel and ensure their long-term viability, we knew they would be in good hands at CCM,” Sabados said in CCM’s story about the new merger.

He and his wife, Emma Donahue, will serve as advisors during the transition.

“I’ve long been a fan of the Denver North Star and the G.E.S. Gazette, and what David and his team have done for that community,” Colorado Community Media publisher Linda Shapley said in the CCM story. “I’m thrilled to take the baton and do what I can to make those publications even stronger.”

This is the latest expansion for CCM and the National Trust for Local News.

In March, I reported for Harvard’s Nieman Lab that the nonprofit, which has been buying newspapers in multiple states and investing in their modernization, announced it had bought a “mission-driven” printing press from Canada with plans to move it to Denver.

One-month warning: Apply by June 12 for Press Forward funding for local news in Colorado

Two-year grants of $100,000 are open for “small newsrooms or coalitions that provide original reporting in underserved communities” in Colorado (and elsewhere) with a deadline of June 12 to apply.

The money is coming from the national Press Forward campaign dedicated to help sustain local news in communities across the country.

“The funding will be unrestricted, general operating support, allowing news organizations to spend it as needed to sustain and grow their operations,” reports Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter and is helping lead the local Press Forward chapter.

More Colorado media odds & ends

⚙️ Reporter Saja Hindi has left the Denver Post. “I’ll miss it, including working with many of you & the greatest colleagues, but I'm excited for the next chapter,” she said.

📵 9NEWS investigative reporter Jeremy Jojola wrote on his personal website this week that he is “one year clean and sober from Twitter.” The social media platform had become “more like hard alcohol for me in early 2023,” he said. “My addiction to the site became a mental health problem as I constantly sought out my Twitter dopamine buzz from sunrise to sunset.” The past year, he added, has been “so much better for my mental health and focus.”

📱 Two Democratic lawmakers were “lashing out at Gov. Jared Polis” last week “over his opposition to a bill aimed at protecting kids on social media,” according to Shaun Boyd of CBS Colorado. “They say the governor worked behind the scenes and went to great lengths to make sure the bill died, including enlisting the help of some powerful lobbyists, who the lawmakers say made threats of political retaliation if they didn't drop the measure.”

📌 Check out the Colorado News Mapping Project — now including descriptions for nearly all 600-plus sources of news and information in the state — and fill out the form to add a source to the map or let us know if we should update something already on it.

🍊 Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns the Truth Social online posting platform, “has fired a Colorado auditor that federal regulators recently charged with ‘massive fraud,’” reported the Associated Press.

➡️ Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, published a research paper I produced about workforce pathways for journalism in Colorado to “contribute to ecosystem learning and continuous improvement of Colorado’s journalism workforce pipeline.”

🎙 Across its national network, the hyperlocal podcasting company City Cast has “190,000 monthly listeners and 350,000 subscribers to its free newsletters,” according to founder David Plotz, reported Mark Stenberg for Adweek. “Denver is its largest audio market, with 30,000 listeners, while D.C. and Chicago tie for its largest readership base, with around 45,000 subscribers apiece.” The network is “unprofitable but expanding,” he noted.

🎤 City Cast Denver host Bree Davies this week sat down with Chris Osher and Jenny Deam of the Denver Gazette to discuss the pair’s investigation into “why Denver is lagging behind other major metro areas when it comes to getting [people experiencing homelessness] transitioned into permanent housing.”

🧱 Colorado Public Radio announced it chose Semple Brown as the architecture firm for its new headquarters at 777 Grant St. in Denver, that was purchased for the station by a thus-far secret donor. The station chose the firm “to transform the building after a rigorous process focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging; accessibility; climate and sustainability; wellbeing for employees, visitors and guests; and community,” according to a statement this week.

🗞 “No doubt that the Sentinel, and all of the media in Colorado, and across the nation, need to do more to help educate the public about how journalism works,” wrote the editorial board of Sentinel Colorado. “We must communicate how news is vetted and inspected by the public every day for accuracy and fairness.”

🏛 Colorado Democratic Congresswoman Diana DeGette praised Colorado Public Radio in a legislative setting this week, noting that it is the only news outlet left in the state that has a dedicated reporter in Washington, D.C. “Shame on the GOP for wasting our time by going after a vital source of news for millions of Americans,” she posted on social media. (Some Republicans had led an effort to hold hearings about media bias at National Public Radio.)

☀️ The Colorado Sun has announced the date and location of its next Sun Fest, which will take place at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies on Sept. 27.

🎺 Denver 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark has a tendency to read and respond (often quite deftly) to viewer feedback on air — and it is not always constructive criticism. “If bullshit was music, you’d be a brass band,” wrote someone named Jeff from Brighton this week. Clark’s response? He brought in about a dozen members of Denver’s Guerrilla Fanfare Brass Band to play live on set.

📡 Brad Turner has joined the KUNC newsroom as “executive producer,” the station announced this week, adding that Turner was “previously Executive Producer at Colorado Public Radio, where he managed podcasts.”

🗣 Join Axios Denver and Denver Press Club for a “series of three events throughout the election year to get smarter, faster about what’s at stake.” RSVP here. “Interviews with Attorney General Phil Weiser and top Colorado political minds about the June primary election.”

🐢 Colorado newspaper publisher Bob Sweeney told this newsletter this week that he’s about 30 days out from filing a lawsuit in Gilpin County over whether his Weekly Register-Call should be the official newspaper of record in Gilpin (background here.) Buuuuuut we’ll see. “There will be a lawsuit filed in the next 30 days,” he told this newsletter in (checks notes) January.

I’m Corey Hutchins, co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute. For nearly 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. Colorado Media Project is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab, both of which I sometimes write about here. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter hit me up.) Follow me on Threads, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.

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