MYSTERY at Denver7: Sudden exit of 3 top newsroom leaders leaves tongues wagging

The news behind the news in Colorado

If you thought the only drama in Denver’s local TV news scene was a looming takeover of 9NEWS by FOX31, think again.

This week, three top people in the newsroom at Denver7, which also goes by the names KMGH and the Denver Channel, suddenly hit the bricks.

News Director Megan McRae, Assistant News Director Olivia Dickinson, and Digital Director Landon Haaf are all gone.

Poof, just like that.

No public announcement, no teary on-air goodbyes. And it sure sounds like there wasn’t any cake in the break room at the E.W. Scripps-owned building on Delgany Street in Five Points.

Denver7 General Manager Brian Joyce confirmed the abrupt hat-trick vanishing act in an email. He declined to offer any details about the circumstances of what he called a personnel matter.

So, what exactly happened to these three remains an open question at this point.

But the news appeared unexpected for Denver7 staff who apparently learned about it in a meeting this week and in a subsequent email from Joyce. That staff-wide note hinted at some precipitance.

“The search to fill these positions begins right away,” Joyce told staff, according to Scott Jones at the broadcast insider’s site FTVLive. (Jones wrote that the Denver7 triumvirate had been “shown the door.” I sent Denver7’s GM Joyce a link to the item as I sought more information and he said he had nothing else to provide. Notably, he did not warn against linking to it when given the chance.)

More from the Joyce memo published at FTVLive:

“Meanwhile, you will be supported with an interim leadership plan which includes our corporate news team and some experienced managers already in the newsroom, who will be working under my direction. In the interim, I have asked for a few leaders in our newsroom to step up and help with our transition. Russell Haythorn will serve as acting news director and will report directly to me. … Jeff Anastasio has agreed to help and be our interim digital director.

A job listing posted on Tuesday for a senior news director at Denver7 puts the salary range between $220,000 and $245,000. Part of the job duties include monitoring “all on-air and online product for compliance to Federal, State and local laws as well as First & Fourteenth Amendments.”

Last year, E.W. Scripps, which owns Denver7, laid off some people at its Colorado Springs station, but the budget cuts spared the Denver outlet.

This week, Matthew Keys at The Desk, which covers the broadcast and streaming industries, reported that Scripps sold its legal brand Court TV where mass layoffs are taking place. Variety also reported this week that layoffs “loom” throughout Scripps as the company sets a “cost-cutting” and “revenue growth” plan that includes AI and automation.

“We don’t have any further comment at this time on specifics,” Joyce said in an email about the latest shakeup in Denver. But, remember, he did say it was not part of a restructure, and the station is re-hiring for the three roles.

As for the abruptly departed themselves, so far, silence.

A cell phone number I’ve used in the past for McRae has gone straight to voicemail since last weekend; I’ve heard it might not be operative anymore. Emails sent to potential Gmail addresses for Haaf and McRae found through a subscription people-search service went unanswered, as did requests to connect with all three on LinkedIn. I can’t be sure they saw my outreach.

In the absence of any official announcement or public statements, Denver journalists were pinging each other throughout the week with the kinds of DMs, texts, and emails that start with “word is,” “I hear,” and “Omg.”

For a local TV news station that could position itself as, well, something in the event of a destabilizing consolidation of FOX31 and 9NEWS, the unceremonious Denver7 news-side decapitation is a cringe-face emoji when it comes to timing.

Meanwhile, the station’s corporate parent, E.W. Scripps, is currently fighting off a hostile takeover bid of its own in the form of the conservative local broadcast giant Sinclair.

Sinclair’s attempt to gobble up Scripps would give the conservative broadcaster its first foothold in Colorado and drastically reshape the Denver TV landscape. If successful, it would also turn Sinclair into a local broadcasting behemoth with some 240 stations nationwide.

It was 2023 when Denver7 hired away McRae, who then went by the last name Jurgemeyer, from 9NEWS where she was a news director. She became the rival station’s senior news director overseeing the newsroom.

She told this newsletter at the time that she chose to cross the street because she was excited about Denver7’s vision and the company’s “desire to find ways to stay relevant against the challenges of a shrinking audience for traditional broadcast news.” She described the job change as a “messy and difficult process,” but said she wanted to join a team that was “unafraid to try new things to keep local journalism alive.”

That didn’t last long.

In the meantime, though, she was able to bring two more journalists, weathercaster Danielle Grant and reporter Anusha Roy, from 9NEWS to her new home.

Whatever happened this week at Denver7, KMGH, the Denver Channel, or however you describe it, the station’s GM Joyce promised in an email that it “remains committed to serving Denver with the quality, local journalism and information people need to feel connected to this community.”

Whether it remains as committed to letting Denver know what’s going on under the hood — and the extent to which that might even matter to its audience — well, you be the judge.

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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 will be working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

• Our grant funding deadline is Feb. 16. Learn more about our current funding opportunities and identify your interests.

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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Longmont’s newspaper goes deep on a local AI ‘news site’ or ‘news-shaped object’

Local news and information likely created with help from artificial intelligence tools is coming to your state and town whether you like it or not.

Some of it will be produced by outsiders, like ones in several Colorado towns run by someone in New York City.

Others will be from local media vets like Scott Converse in Longmont who has set up something called Longmont News Network.

If you’re lucky, a journalistic outlet that adheres to a discipline of verification where you live will do the kind of deep dive into whatever emerges that London Lyle produced for the Longmont Times-Call newspaper this week.

“Longmont media veteran launches AI news site, but is it just ‘a news-shaped object’?” was the headline of an in-depth Feb. 8 story.

From the piece:

Scott Converse has spent years launching and experimenting with local news projects, driven in part by his dissatisfaction with the state of local journalism. The longtime local media and technology figure’s latest project, Longmont News Network, uses artificial intelligence to generate stories about civic affairs in Longmont.

Since increasing its publishing frequency earlier this year, the platform has drawn attention for both its ambitions and its mistakes, including articles containing fabricated information, misspelled names, and AI-generated images that some residents mistook for real photographs.

Robin Burke, a professor of information technology at the University of Colorado Boulder, draws a distinction between news and what he calls “news-shaped objects.” AI-generated articles, he says, fall squarely in the latter category.

But Converse sees AI as the future of journalism.

The story goes on to explain Converse’s history and role in the local media scene and what he’s doing now. Here are some nuggets from the story:

• “When first contacted by the Times-Call for an interview, Converse requested an agenda for the call, writing in a Facebook message that ‘you are, technically, the competition.’”

• “During the interview, Converse said the Times-Call played a role in his decision to launch LNN. He said he started the Longmont Observer because he was dissatisfied with the Times-Call’s local coverage and unhappy that the newspaper’s office had moved out of Longmont.”

• “Converse said LNN is an experiment built around what he describes as AI ‘agents’ that act as reporters, scanning public documents, meeting transcripts, budgets and records to generate stories.”

• “Converse has also circulated a 13-page business plan for a broader venture called SmartNewsNetwork, which frames LNN as a pilot project, with Longmont being the first city in what he hopes will be a nationwide phenomenon.”

• “LNN has drawn attention not just for its business model but for errors that appear to stem from AI hallucinations.”

• “In a Jan. 20 article titled “A winter without snow: How Longmont is feeling the weight of Colorado’s 2026 snow drought,” an entire section referenced drought concerns that were not raised during the City Council open forum it purported to summarize. A Reddit user who said they listened to the full meeting wrote, “There was not a single mention of water. How much of this is hallucination?” Converse replied in the thread, apologizing for the error and acknowledging it was an AI hallucination.”

• “Less than 30 minutes after the interview ended, Converse emailed the Times-Call an AI-generated article summarizing the conversation, along with an AI-generated mock newspaper front page. The article stated, ‘The interview reveals a fundamental tension between the technological optimism of an engineer and the ethical skepticism of a traditional reporter.’”

There’s a whole lot more, so read the entire compelling story at the link above.

Pioneering Colorado radio legend James ‘Dr. Daddio’ Walker has died

“Colorado is mourning the loss of a radio legend,” said Chandra Thomas Whitfield of Colorado Public Radio this week.

James “Dr. Daddio” Walker, “whose radio station KDKO was long known as ‘The Soul of the Rockies,’” has died.

“Dr. Daddio opened doors for countless Black radio professionals and provided a platform for leaders and citizens to be heard, standing proudly for ‘Unity in the Community’ while amplifying the fight for civil rights across Colorado and beyond,” said Omar Montgomery, the president of the NAACP of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, according to CBS Colorado.

Whitfield offered an illuminating segment about Walker’s life on Colorado Matters this week that is worth a listen.

“I want to become a role model to our young Black adults on the basis that if there is something you want to do in life, you can do it,” Walker had told the Rocky Mountain News in the 1980s. “For me to own this station was not an easy task. But I knew it could be done. I knew that some way and somehow, I would get a chance to get this station.”

From a remembrance by Kyle Harris at Denverite:

Walker started his career as a social worker in St. Louis, received a degree in education, worked as an insurance salesman and got his start as a radio announcer at KOKA in Shreveport, La., followed by stints in Atlanta, Jackson and Houston.

In 1967, he moved to Denver and started visiting radio stations, looking for work.

“I went to every radio station in the town,” he told The Rocky Mountain News in 1989. “They just wouldn’t hire Blacks.”

After about 20 years, though, he purchased the station with help from the mayor’s office and several investors.

“Dr. Daddy-O is to me, a community warrior,” Terri Gentry, a historian at History Colorado and family friend, told Byron Reed of 9NEWS. “He came into Colorado, and he started KDKO radio, and on KDKO radio, he opened up opportunities for all of our community members to have access to resources.”

Caribou Current arts & culture mag launches in Boulder County

A new monthly arts-and-culture print publication has officially launched in Boulder County, Golden, and the Peak-to-Peak region.

Caribou Current hit the streets last week.

From a welcome item by Managing Editor Jezy J. Gray:

Taking our name from the storied Caribou Ranch recording studio in Nederland, where giants like Steely Dan and Stevie Nicks laid down some of their most legendary cuts before its fiery demise in 1985, our goal is simple: to bring you the very best arts reporting this side of the Continental Divide.

It took some doing to get here. Our small but mighty team of local journalists was assembled from the wreckage of Boulder Weekly, the leader in regional arts coverage for more than three decades. We were devastated when the paper went down in flames last summer, thinking our journey with you was done. Now, with the help of our time-tested sister publication The Mountain-Ear in Nederland, we’re back and better than ever.

In a Q-and-A for the piece, Gray promised readers “feature stories, profiles, interviews, previews, art news, curated calendar listings and pretty much whatever else tickles our fancy,” and said, “you can expect everything from short and sweet event round-ups to longform culture journalism and points in between.”

Find the inaugural edition at the link above.

Bennet, Neguse blast Trump’s support for TV deal to allow Denver’s FOX31 to eat 9NEWS

The fickle whims of Donald Trump this week saw the 79-year-old Republican president lurching from a previous position to a new one on a deal that could have major impacts for Denver’s TV news scene.

On Feb. 7, he indicated that he now supports Nexstar Media Group’s takeover of its broadcast rival Tegna, though he had earlier indicated he opposed it.

“GET THAT DEAL DONE,” the president said, along with some other things that I don’t care to repeat because they frankly aren’t worth dignifying.

From the Associated Press:

The acquisition, which Nexstar announced in August and requires regulatory approval, would bring together two companies with significant holdings in local broadcast media. Nexstar oversees more than 200 owned and partner stations in 116 markets nationwide and also runs networks like The CW and NewsNation. Meanwhile, Tegna owns 64 news stations across 51 markets.

In November, Trump had criticized the purchase. “If this would also allow the Radical Left Networks to ‘enlarge,’ I would not be happy,” he wrote then.

The Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission, whose leadership Trump appointed, will have to green-light the deal.

Almost immediately, Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Democratic Congressman Joe Neguse put out a statement blasting Trump’s announcement.

“Today, Donald Trump backed a media merger that will have devastating consequences for local news in Colorado and for American journalism writ large,” they wrote. “By designating news outlets he dislikes as ‘the enemy,’ Trump has continued his baseless attack on reporters who devote their careers to investigating those in power and holding them to account.”

The joint statement went on to call the administration’s effort an “attempt to obscure the clear abuses being perpetrated by the president and his allies, while depriving communities across the country of reliable, accessible local news.”

The two Democrats said that is why they have “fought against this reckless and illegal merger last year,” adding that they “will continue doing everything we can to oppose this dangerous erosion of one of the most essential pillars of our democracy.”

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More Colorado media odds & ends

👀 Courier, “a local and national news group with a progressive perspective, is expanding to nine additional states this year,” including Colorado, its publisher, Tara McGowan, told Axios.

⏸ A House committee shelved a half-baked bill dealing with county newspaper public notices and their ability to exist online following testimony from Colorado Press Association CEO Tim Regan-Porter. “I think we can come up with something that meets his goals and makes sense from a policy perspective without negatively impacting any legal newspapers,” he said in an email.

🗣 The Society of Professional Journalists Colorado Professional Chapter, of which I’m a board member, is hosting a Feb. 18 in-person conversation about DEI in the media industry at the Denver Press Club. Panelists will include Colorado Public Radio’s Nathan Fernando-Frescas and Chandra Thomas Whitfield, Denverite’s Paolo Zialcita, and Yolánda L. Chase, the founder of Diversity Way-Maker and Intersect Global Leadership Institute.

⏳ State lawmakers are “trying for the third straight year to give state and local government entities up to three calendar weeks to fulfill many Colorado Open Records Act requests,” Jeff Roberts wrote for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

🏛 LaVozColorado Publisher Pauline Rivera joined the Hispanic Tech and Telecommunications Partnerships, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Telecom and Internet Council, LGTBT Tech, Asian Pacific American Advocates, Asian American Journalists Association, Hispanic Federation, and others in Washington, D.C. “in an effort to relay the value of community/local journalism.”

😬 The University of Colorado Boulder appears in a new report titled “The secret war against student journalists,” by Marie McMullan of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE.

📲 Lawmakers and Evergreen community members “stood near Evergreen High School on Monday to unveil legislation to prevent acts of violent extremism by tightening the time social media companies are allowed to respond to warrants from law enforcement,” Ava Kian reported for Colorado Public Radio.

🕹 John Weiss, the former owner of the Colorado Springs Independent alt-weekly, is introducing The Catalyst Fund of Manitou on Feb. 13 at 110 Pawnee Ave. in Manitou Springs. Part of the fund will support “creating locally controlled, independent news and cultural reporting for the region, building on the strengths of existing local media,” according to an announcement.

🆕 Rocky Mountain Public Media has hired Amber Payne as chief experience officer. “As part of her role, a new addition to the organization, Payne will lead content strategy for journalism, civic engagement, radio and programming teams,” Julian Wyllie reported for Current. “Payne most recently worked as publisher and GM for The Emancipator, a multimedia digital magazine now operating under Howard University in Washington, D.C. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2021 and has also been managing editor of BET.com, EP of Teen Vogue and founder and managing editor of NBCBLK, an NBC News digital initiative.”

🎙 Coloradan Vanessa Otero, the founder of Ad Fontes Media, the company behind the Media Bias Chart, wrote that she’s starting a series called “Navigating the News with Vanessa” where she and paid members who sign up can “talk about the biggest current news stories together.”

🏆 Denver’s 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark said on social media he was “honored to be recognized at this year’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Awards.”

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.