'Heartbreaking': 3 Eastern Colorado papers closing, 'things have run their course'

The news behind the news in Colorado

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Three newspapers with two different owners on Colorado’s Eastern Plains — the Plainsman Herald, the Burlington Record, and the Lamar Ledger — announced within days of each other that they will go out of business.

The development would knock out a significant source of original local news in multiple counties in a part of Colorado with an already thin local news and information ecosystem.

The Herald’s announcement last week was particularly brutal. The decision comes just weeks after a commercial TV mini-documentary about Colorado newspapers bouncing back and holding on prominently spotlighted the paper.

“We were recently featured in a 9News Denver story about small town newspapers making a comeback,” the Herald posted in a July 15 note to readers on Facebook. “The producer Gary Shapiro was awesome and did a truly great piece of work. However, the main focus was a little more optimistic than reality. It really did not paint a complete picture of the Plainsman Herald’s dire outlook and many other small papers like it.”

More from the Plainsman Herald’s announcement:

No matter how much we/ I/ you love this paper and the idea of local news, the Plainsman Herald is not special or immune to all of the issues associated with the digital age, and sometimes we must face the reality that things have run their course.

And so, the rural Eastern Plains newspaper said it “will not be able to continue publishing a print edition into 2025.”

Around the same time the Herald said it would close, Prairie Mountain Media, which is financially controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund, told its readers it would shutter its weekly Lamar Ledger that reaches more than 3,000 homes in Prowers County. The company also said it will mothball the Burlington Record in Kit Carson County about two hours north. Prowers and Kit Carson are small, rural Colorado counties on the Kansas border.

If and when this triple threat happens, the development has the potential to leave Colorado’s most southeasterly county without a newspaper serving it — thus creating what could be the state’s first real news desert.

The Colorado News Mapping Project, which tracks where residents say they are getting their news and information in each of Colorado’s 64 counties, lists two Facebook pages other than the Plainsman Herald for Baca County. The map shows the Flager News and Stratton Spotlight left serving Kit Carson County, and the Prowers Journal print newsletter for Prowers. (In my role at Colorado College, I maintain the database for the mapping project.)

So, what led to these particular shut downs?

“Shuttering the Ledger is heartbreaking,” said Prairie Mountain Media General Manager Jill Stravolemos in a statement. “Unfortunately, Lamar is isolated from our other markets and our print and distribution facilities and doesn’t benefit from sales and news efficiencies. It came down to the math; it’s no longer cost-effective to produce the Lamar newspaper.”

The Burlington Record, which is owned by the same company, printed a nearly verbatim announcement to its own readers; the only significant difference was a detail mentioning five employees would lose their jobs.

As for the Plainsman Herald, similar factors were at play.

“The impact of the internet and digital media on local print media revenue has been significant and as with most enterprises when the costs to produce outpace the return, it no longer becomes viable,” the Herald, which has been around in some capacity since 1887, stated. “The reality is that print news 138 years later doesn’t have the following in 2024.”

Furthermore, multiple advertisers and sponsors “have changed paths in regard to print advertising,” the Herald said. “While we recognize that everyone is struggling and we don’t begrudge anyone trying to cut costs, we can’t continue to absorb increasing costs and cover local events without sufficient community sponsors and advertisers.”

Whether anyone might step in to save these papers is an open question, but the Herald and others like it fear it’s unlikely.

Across the Continental Divide, for instance, Grant Houston has said he just doesn’t know what will happen to his Lake City Silver World when he decides to retire. He is one of more than 40 local newspaper owners in Colorado in recent years who have said they are nearing retirement age or otherwise looking to exit the business.

A serious question will be what succession planning looks like for many of them — if anything at all.

As for the Plainsman Herald, “We are certainly willing to discuss options, as parting with a 138 year old friend is not easy,” it said. “However, buyers for unprofitable rural weekly papers are scarce to nonexistent and there is no way to spin the story to magically make this paper a profitable & viable enterprise.”

More:

Additionally, the incessant weekly grind without the hope for profitability will be a non-starter for most. Non profit and community run papers are options and I am willing to participate in discussions and possibly on a temporary basis serve in an advisory role. The past five years have been rewarding, but also has shown us that any continuation of this periodical beyond 2024 is not feasible and thus will not include Lonesome Prairie Publications.

Yeah, so the situation is dire. Here are some thoughts moving forward:

• As we learned with the Pueblo Chieftain’s print plant closure that abruptly and significantly destabilized the state’s print newspaper industry, followed by another press plant shut down a year later, a regional newspaper blink-out like this is bound to happen again.

• So, who or what entity in Colorado sees it as its mission to step in and do … something? Colorado Press Association, COLab, Colorado Media Project, J-schools, philanthropists, local communities, what?

• Will any of the larger regional or statewide media outlets make a concerted effort to deploy reporting resources to these ghosted areas to at the very least serve as a watchdog on local governments?

• What would be the minimum viable product for any laid-off Eastern Plains journalist to start a local digital news publication if they wanted? Might the Tiny News Collective, LION, or another entity be a resource? Where might funding originate to help someone launch it?

Colorado has a reputation as a leader in local news thinking and innovation, and journalists and their advocates have responded swiftly and deftly to previous shocks to the system, whether it was the 2018 Denver Rebellion, last year’s Chieftain Chernobyl, or other issues along the way.

For my part, I’m happy to use this weekly newsletter platform to provide a forum for hashing out ideas.

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Mountain-Ear newspaper says lawsuit is ‘an attempt to manufacture controversy’

The Mountain-Ear newspaper in the Central Mountains region of Colorado has responded to a lawsuit from its Gilpin County rival, the Weekly Register-Call.

The Mountain-Ear argues the judge should dismiss the case for a variety of reasons. One of them is that “there is no actual controversy.”

Last month, Register-Call publisher Bob Sweeney sued the Mountain-Ear and asked a judge to decide whether the Mountain-Ear newspaper must have a U.S. postal permit in Gilpin County in order for that county’s commissioners to make the Mountain-Ear Gilpin’s “newspaper of record,” as they had done.

Sweeney argues that the Mountain-Ear has a main office in Nederland, which is in Boulder County where it also has a postal permit to operate. The Mountain-Ear also leases an office in Gilpin County, but Sweeney contends it doesn’t have a U.S. periodical postal permit in that county. Sweeney’s suit argues it must in order to be the Gilpin County newspaper of record.

State law doesn’t explicitly say it has to, but Sweeney’s lawyer argued in the lawsuit that a judge could look to the U.S. Postal Service’s Domestic Mail Manual, which states the “publisher of a Periodicals publication must maintain a known office of publication at the location where the original entry for Periodicals mail privileges is authorized.”

Meanwhile, Sweeney’s Register-Call newspaper has a postal permit in Gilpin and therefore the insinuation is that the Register-Call should be the only publication that the county can call its “newspaper of record.”

With that distinction come thousands of dollars each year in advertising from the county coffers for the paper to publish public notices.

All over Colorado, local county commissioners vote on whether to make a newspaper the county’s “paper of record.” Newspapers fight over these contracts that bring in a steady stream of revenue from printing those public notices about county business. Being a county’s newspaper of record also can give it some gravitas in a community.

Responding formally to the lawsuit, the Mountain-Ear has asked a Gilpin County judge to dismiss the case “because there is no actual controversy.” Elsewhere in the response, the paper’s attorney argued that the Register-Call’s lawsuit is an “attempt to manufacture controversy where none exists.”

The Mountain-Ear contends that state law requires only that the newspaper has “been admitted to the United States mails with periodicals mailing privileges” and that Postal Service regulations specifically allow a paper to maintain more than one office. “No Colorado statute says a newspaper may only be ‘published’ in one county,” the paper’s lawyer wrote, and argued that the Mountain-Ear meets every other requirement to be a paper of record under the law.

In the July 11 legal filing, the Mountain-Ear argued that Colorado’s state statutes regarding what determines whether a newspaper can become a county’s “newspaper of record” are not ambiguous. And while our state laws might not address everything under the sun, the lawyer cites case law showing that a statute’s “silence on an issue does not necessarily mean that the statute is ambiguous.”

From the response:

Nor does this statute provide that a newspaper published by an LLC may only be “published” in the county where the LLC listed its initial principal office in its articles of organization. Such a construction would pressure newspapers to ignore the realities of population distribution and limit distribution to arbitrary county lines – an absurd result. Colorado courts will not interpret rules or statutes in a way that leads to an absurd result.

The Mountain-Ear also argues the judge should dismiss the case because the Register-Call didn’t add the Gilpin County Commission as a party to the legal dispute.

“Although a decision of this Court would technically not be binding on Gilpin County if it is not a party to this case, a decision in Plaintiff’s favor would have the practical effect of holding that Gilpin County acted illegally in naming The Mountain-Ear its newspaper of record and would be used to try to coerce Gilpin County into changing its decision now or in the future,” the response reads. “Such a decision could also be used for political purposes against commissioners that voted to make The Mountain-Ear Gilpin County’s newspaper of record.”

Sweeney has said multiple times in the past that he did not want to sue the county.

I’ve never heard of such a case about newspaper public notices before, so we’ll see what happens here and whether any precedent might get set over it.

Colorado Sun co-founder: ‘Don’t know of another large news outlet … that has our structure’

Nearly six years after its founding, the Colorado Sun is often viewed nationally as a bright spot in the local news sustainability world. Launched in 2018 with fewer than a dozen staffers, the outlet now has 27 full-time employees.

The nonprofit news site reaches around 800,000 to a million unique visitors a month, its suite of newsletters has around 125,000 active subscribers, and it is approaching 14,000 members, Larry Ryckman said this week.

The Sun’s president, co-founder, and editor appeared on the “What Works” podcast with journalist Ellen Clegg and Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy. (The Sun had its own chapter in their recent book “What Works in Community News.”)

The Sun doesn’t cover major league sports, but does politics and public affairs, investigative journalism, and covers rural issues in Colorado areas that don’t have vibrant local news scenes. The site is free to read online, but offers paid-subscription newsletters. Its stories often wind up republished in newspapers across the state.

Last year, about 60% of the Sun’s revenue came from memberships, about 20% came from sponsorships and advertising, and around 20% came from grants, Ryckman said.

The 20-minute discussion gets into the weeds about the Sun’s self-directed nonprofit structure with a five-member governing board with an executive committee and how it works in practice. “I really don’t know of another large news outlet out there that has our structure,” he said. “There might be a very good reason for that … time will tell.”

Some more nuggets from the conversation:

• “Alden kind of put the brakes on further big cutbacks at the Denver Post after we launched the Colorado Sun in 2018,” he said of the hedge fund that has gutted newspapers and led to 10 Post journalists defecting to launch the Sun in 2018.

• “Really, Colorado Public Radio and the Colorado Sun are the only two news outlets that I’m aware of that have a statewide focus, and that’s what really sets us apart,” Ryckman said.

• When talking about what drives viral spikes, he said, “anything about Lauren Boebert gets a lot traffic,” adding that the Sun is more than Boebert coverage.

“Larry mentioned that Colorado is kind of a hotbed of experimentation in journalism, and it’s true — I definitely discovered that when I was out there a few years ago,” Kennedy noted at the end of the conversation. Ryckman was the third guest from the Colorado the hosts had on their program.

Listen to their latest podcast edition here.

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🔎 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

• For an in-depth story in the Denver Post, reporters Sam Tabachnik and Shelly Bradbury exposed a shocking practice by the Pueblo Municipal Courts that they found “weaponizes” contempt of court orders to “inflate jail time for minor crimes.” The reporting cited experts saying Pueblo city judges “sent people to jail for months on charges that in other Colorado courts are punished by one or two days in jail, if that.” The reporters also found Pueblo “routinely slapped contempt charges on unhoused individuals and those in the throes of addiction. The practice costs taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in incarceration costs.”

• Writing in the Southern Ute Drum newspaper, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe used Colorado’s open records laws to show the City of Durango was pursuing what the Drum headline called “secret efforts to annex Reservation lands.” Colorado now has a new law that makes it so “cities and towns that want to annex land within the boundaries of a sovereign, federally recognized tribe’s reservation are required to get the tribal government’s approval first,” reported Shannon Mullane for the Colorado Sun.

• Denver’s 9NEWS nightly newscast ‘Next with Kyle Clark’ has produced an important “in-depth look at how America’s choice for president will impact the state.” Called “Decision 2024: The Stakes for Colorado,” the outlet synthesizes information from Donald Trump’s “written campaign platform, the RNC’s official platform and the governing blueprint put together by Trump allies” at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The journalism shows the stakes of an election and doesn’t stick to the who’s up, who’s down of horse-race political coverage.

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.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

🎙 Tim Regan-Porter of the Colorado Press Association caught up with NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen for his latest episode of the Local News Matters podcast. Their conversation, “Reimagining local election coverage for community trust,” is worth a listen if you run or work in a local newsroom.

🤖 I’ll be on a virtual panel discussion with Sreenath Sreenivasan about AI in the newsroom on Aug. 1 hosted by Science Writers Association of the Rocky Mountains. Register for the 4 p.m. MT conversation here. The panel will be moderated by Kenna Hughes-Castleberry, SWARM’s programming chair and the science communicator at the JILA physics research institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.

📰 Colorado Springs publisher Dirk R. Hobbs has found a niche in lifestyle magazines and business newsprint markets, reported Debbie Kelley for the Gazette. His latest endeavor is the “nearly 1-year-old tabloid newsprint Southern Colorado Business Forum & Digest, with multiple media platforms to ensure his products are seen and heard throughout the region.”

🆕 University of Colorado Boulder student Gabe Allen has joined the KUNC newsroom as its first Neil Best Fellow, the station reported. “As part of his fellowship, Allen will work with the KUNC Digital Desk for six months to report and write original and enterprising local stories.”

💨 Meteorologist Brian Bledsoe is leaving KKTV in the Springs. “From the fires, floods, blizzards, educating thousands of kids on weather, and you tolerating my amateur chef skills, it’s been a ride,” he said of his 20 years on TV. “However, I am retiring from television on August 2nd.”

🔗 Colorado journalists showed the “power of collaboration” in a UCHealth debt collection exposé, Joseph Burns reported for the website of the Association of Health Care Journalists. “One of the most important lessons learned was the teamwork that came from the collaborative nature of the project,” he wrote, and cited one of the collaborators saying, “At COLab, journalists no longer compete as they once did to be the first to break stories. Instead, COLab journalists from different newsrooms work on projects together to serve the public good.”

🏆 Denver journalist Julian Rubinstein’s film “The Holly” won a Heartland Emmy this week for best documentary. The movie is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple Plus.

⬆️ Former Pueblo Chieftain reporter Anna Lynn Winfrey announced she has begun work at the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio.

💨 Lily O’Neill is leaving as a food reporter for the Denver Post and is moving South.

👀 Grant Makers in Health wrote about the “crucial role of philanthropy in nurturing equitable local journalism,” and stated “this evolution is exemplified in Colorado, where a vibrant ecosystem of funders collaborates closely with newsrooms to enhance equity in journalism and amplify the voices of marginalized communities.”

💨 This was Luke Zahlmann’s last week at the Denver Gazette covering the Rockies. “I had an amazing time on the beat I once worked as a college student in 2019,” the reporter said on social media.

⬆️ Jade Lewandowski, who served as director of sales with O’Rourke Media Group, has been promoted to vice president of sales, the company announced. “Pam Mathes will continue to support and work closely with Lewandowski to drive sales in Wisconsin and also will be getting more involved with key initiatives in Colorado and other OMG markets,” a press release stated.

📲 Controversial Colorado figure David Lesh, described by John LaConte in Vail Daily as a “social media content creator,” applauded an appeals court ruling this week. The decision “overturned a criminal charge against him, saying the case was based on outlandish claims that would have set a dangerous precedent,” LaConte reported.

💨 KKTV anchor and consumer investigative reporter Katie Pelton has left the TV station in the Springs. “I have loved working here and covering Southern Colorado,” she said.

I’m Corey Hutchins, co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. 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.) Reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.