Stolen newspapers after a front-page exposé on Colorado's West Slope

The news behind the news in Colorado

Jan 19, 2024

UPDATE: Saturday, Jan. 20, 3:20 p.m.: Reached by phone, Paul Choate, a local restaurant owner in Ridgway, said he is reluctant to say much while he’s in the process of obtaining legal representation. “It’ll come out eventually,” he said about why he took the newspapers, adding that he hoped to make something positive out of the situation. He indicated graphic details in the coverage played a role. Meanwhile, Report for America, a national program that counts the Plaindealer as a partner, said at least 135 donors had contributed $6,000 to the paper by noon Mountain Time Friday.

UPDATE, Saturday, Jan. 20, 11:40 a.m.: “A Ridgway man was cited this morning on suspicion of petty theft in connection with the theft of more than 200 printed copies of this week’s Ouray County Plaindealer,” the newspaper reported. “The Ouray County Sheriff’s Office cited Paul Choate, 41, who admitted to stealing the newspapers early Thursday morning. He returned them to the Plaindealer office Thursday night with an apology.”

More from the story:

Choate, who owns Kate’s Place restaurant in Ridgway, admitted he took the newspapers because of the front page story. The Plaindealer reprinted 250 copies of this week’s edition before Choate returned the stolen copies.

The Plaindealer’s owners said they are “not disclosing Choate’s relationship to the sexual assault case.”

UPDATE, Friday, Jan. 19, 4:20 p.m.: “A suspect has been identified and will be cited by local law enforcement. We are not going to name that person until a citation has been issued,” the newspaper owners said in a statement.

“An individual returned a garbage bag full of newspapers to the Plaindealer office on Thursday night and confessed to taking them. Investigators have asked us not to give more details until their work is completely finished,” they added. “The suspect in this matter is unrelated to any of the defendants in the alleged sex assault case, and unrelated to any law enforcement, including the Ouray Police chief and his department.”

This week, a front-page story appeared in the small and mighty Ouray County Plaindealer about a 17-year-old girl’s allegations of being raped by teenagers at the home of a police chief.

What happened next? Papers started disappearing from newspaper boxes around the county, the paper’s owners, Erin McIntyre and Mike Wiggins, said.

Here’s more from a note to readers in an email Thursday:

All of our newspaper racks in Ouray and all but one rack in Ridgway were hit by a thief who stole all the newspapers. From what we know so far, it seems this person put in four quarters and took all the papers at these racks. It’s pretty clear that someone didn’t want the community to read the news this week. …
Whoever did this does not understand that stealing newspapers doesn’t stop a story.

We’re not going to stop doing our job, which is to shine light on important issues in our community and keep you informed. This person is not going to shut down the freedom of the press by stealing a few hundred newspapers. Our community won’t stand for it and we won’t, either.

McIntyre also said the young newspaper publishers were working with a printing plant in Montrose to get another press run published on Thursday. “I'll leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions on which story they didn’t want you to read,” she wrote.

Online, a backlash was surging.

When news of the alleged newspaper thefts hit social media Thursday afternoon, Colorado journalists began sharing a link to the online version of the rape allegations story, including an editor at the Colorado Sun, Denver Post staffers, prominent Denver TV anchor Kyle Clark, and others. (The Plaindealer made the story free to read on its website while other stories are not.) The Denver Post published details of the rape allegations, naming two suspects; the story led with news of the stolen papers.

Clark also included a broadcast segment about it on his ‘Next’ show Thursday evening, indicating the sexual assault story was the news someone was trying to suppress.

“We have a link to the article at the Next section of 9NEWS dot com,” Clark told his audience Thursday evening. “I recommend you read it if for no other reason [than] that because somebody doesn’t want you to see it.”

If that was the case, the pilfered periodicals produced a classic Streisand effect. The online version prominently displayed mugshots of the three young men arrested for suspected sexual assault, including the Ouray police chief’s stepson; the front-page print story did not.

McIntyre said Friday she hasn’t yet looked at how much traffic the online story might have generated. But she said more than $2,000 in donations had flowed in to the newsroom since they publicized the thefts.

“People are angry this happened,” she said in a text message Friday morning. “Law enforcement is going to catch this person and we plan on pressing charges.” (She pointed to a 2022 state statute that makes the act of interfering with the lawful distribution of newspapers a finable offense.)

“If you hoped to silence or intimidate us,” Plaindealer co-owner Wiggins said, “you failed miserably.”

An empty newspaper box in Ouray County (photo courtesy the Plaindealer)

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'Newspaper of record' war set to pop in Gilpin

Last February, a simmering dispute was set to boil over between Colorado’s oldest weekly newspaper and the local government of the state’s second-smallest county.

Publisher Bob Sweeney, who owns the Weekly Register-Call in Black Hawk, was threatening to sue the county over the local government’s decision not to award his publication a coveted “newspaper of record” status.

At issue was two out of three Gilpin County commissioners voting in 2022 to revoke the Register-Call’s distinction as that county’s “newspaper of record” and allow the nearby Mountain-Ear newspaper that has an office in the Boulder County town of Nederland to carry that distinction.

“I really don’t want to sue the county,” Sweeney told this newsletter last February. “I’d just as soon get it settled.”

But a year later, things aren’t settled — and are set to pop in Gilpin, the county named after the first territorial governor. Sweeney, who bought the paper in 2021, has engaged a law firm.

“There will be a lawsuit filed in the next 30 days,” he said over the phone Wednesday. “I really didn’t want to sue the county,” he added. “It really pained me … I didn’t buy [the newspaper] to get into a fight with the county commissioners.”

Being a “newspaper of record” means it’s the one a county pays to place required notices to keep residents abreast of county business. Being a county’s paper of record also can give it some gravitas in a community. Losing that distinction can cost a newspaper some reliable revenue. (The county paid about $24,000 to publish notices in 2022, with about $19,000 going to the Register-Call and about $4,500 going the Mountain-Ear after deciding to anoint a coveted “newspaper of record” status to both papers in January of 2022. Nearly a year later, the county chose to bounce the Register-Call with some harsh words for the paper, saying it was being sloppy in its responsibility of publishing notices on behalf of the mountainous county just east of the Continental Divide.

Sweeney’s contention, however, is that his newspaper is the only one in Gilpin County with a U.S. Postal Service periodical permit. He has argued that the county isn’t allowed to only run its notices in a paper with a postal address across the county line in Boulder. He has flat-out accused Gilpin County of “breaking the law” by running public notices in Boulder County. Gilpin County Attorney Brad Benning has said he is confident that his county can legally award a paper-of-record status to the Mountain-Ear.

On Jan. 9, the Gilpin County Commissioners voted to retain the Mountain-Ear once again as the county’s newspaper of record — and it set Sweeney off. In a Jan. 11 “Barb Wire Bob” column, he accused the commissioners of believing they could “usurp Colorado publication laws and send your tax dollars outside the county lines.”

While Sweeney rattled sabres in his opinion pages, the county’s decision was front-page news for the Mountain-Ear. The report of the public hearing about it was spicy.

From the writeup:

Eric Douglas noted that the editor and most of the staff of The Mountain-Ear actually live in Gilpin County, unlike the WRC staff. He said that because of incompetence, empty legal threats, and personal insults issued from the WRC, he recommends The Mountain-Ear as the paper of record.

Douglas is chair of the Gilpin County Democratic Party, and Sweeney says he believes the whole issue is political. Though he says he has been nice to local Democrats he has described his Register-Call as “the newcomer conservative paper in town.” His paper endorsed a Republican for an unsuccessful bid for county commissioner, and with Democrats controlling the three-person board, Sweeney has said he believes he’s catching a raw deal.

Four Corners Free Press monthly newspaper folds

Only two weeks into 2024 a local newspaper in Colorado has gone out of business.

The Colorado Sun’s Kevin Simpson has the news:

The Four Corners Free Press, an alternative monthly based in Cortez that served up award-winning news coverage, a wide range of editorial voices and even a popular police blotter, will publish its final edition next weekend, ending a 20-year run and becoming another casualty in the decline of rural print publications.
Co-founder and editor Gail Binkly pointed to rising printing costs — a recurring theme among many struggling rural papers — and the loss of advertisers during the pandemic as factors in the decision to close the paper she owned along with her husband, David Long, and Wendy Mimiaga. She added that they’ve long been operating on a shoestring, but that the economics finally became untenable.

The Four Corners Free Press was one of the handful of news organizations in the state’s southwest region that was a partner with the Daily Yonder, as reported in this newsletter in December.

Simpson reported that before its closure, the Free Press had about 275 paid subscribers and “the bulk of its distribution came from news racks and coin-operated boxes — nearly 40 spread throughout the region.” Copies of the paper sold for 50 cents or $12 a year for a subscription.

Other nuggets from the piece that stood out:

Binkly and her co-owners “have thought about conversion to online-only, but the logistics — and the economics of online advertising, which is less lucrative than print — seem daunting.”
“The most popular thing in our newspaper honestly, is the police blotter,” she said, because it was written “in a way that makes it interesting, sometimes humorous.”
“Readers in the region are still served by the Cortez Journal.”

Simpson put this most recent closure in broader context: “The decline of legacy newspapers also affects democracy, as it creates information gaps that make it more difficult for voters to make informed choices, while powerful institutions lack oversight by watchdog reporters.”

Colorado presidential candidate calls out news media’s pro-growth bias

News on the presidential campaign trail is focused on New Hampshire this week where three Republicans are left standing.

One of them, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has turned into a media critic, recently calling out the FOX TV channel for its fealty to Donald Trump.

Closer to home, Dave Gardner of Colorado Springs, who is running for president on a platform that embraces an “end to growth,” released a video outlining his own critiques of the news media.

In the video, Gardner points to what he calls a cultural notion of the “goodness” of increasing consumption. “Rising retail sales, increasing housing starts, more automobiles being manufactured and purchased — these are all treated by all our cultural messengers as good news,” he says. “Even though you and I know increasing levels of consumption are bad news for our life-supporting ecosystem.”

One of those cultural messengers, he noted, is mainstream media coverage of the economy. He highlighted headlines like “Positive sign: Housing starts in U.S. surpass $1 million in March.”

“Whenever the Associated Press reports on the latest GDP growth figures we get a quote praising the growth from an economist at the Federal Reserve or at one of the big investment banks,” Gardner says. “The reporter hasn’t sought out an expert with an alternative — and frankly more informed — opinion. The assumption is we all agree rising GDP is a very good thing.”

He notes that news stories often portray economic growth as an “area of competition among nations, states and cities. The implication here is that the faster the growth the better your nation, state, or city.” Reporters writing about retail sales numbers, for instance, also treat increased sales as good news — assuming “there is universal agreement about that — even though it means more natural resources were extracted, more carbon emissions, and more stuff in the landfill next year.”

Journalists, he says, might do better by seeking out the perspectives of an ecological economist or an environmentalist “who might interpret over one million housing starts as bad news because of the loss of forest or farmland that’s being converted into subdivisions.”

Economic growth, Gardner says, is in “fundamental conflict with sustainability” — but he’s not surprised others might not realize it.

Gardner says for the past 15 years he has been following news about economic growth and has found a “complete absence of alternative viewpoints in story after story about economic growth, retail, construction, etcetera.”

He finishes the video by saying that once he has brought this phenomenon of “cultural propaganda” to the attention of those who watch, “it will be painfully obvious to you when you see it” in media yourselves.

Insight: the financials of 2 one-person Colorado newsrooms

For years, this newsletter has chronicled the rise of the “one-person newsroom” as newspapers shrink or fade in Colorado cities and towns and ex-reporters for them launch their own news sites or newsletters.

Each time, whether it’s in Estes Park, Greeley, or Steamboat Springs, I try to get a sense of what success will mean to the journalist, including financial sustainability.

In November, we heard from several of these independent journalists from around the state, but few spoke about the raw economics of their job. Recently, though, two of them provided a look at their books.

Shay Castle, who ran Boulder Beat for five years after leaving the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper, recently wrote a farewell note to readers as she joins Boulder Weekly as its editor. In the note, she reported how much revenue Boulder Beat generated in its five years: $176,181.32 with a yearly average of $35,236.26.

A week later, Allen Best, who runs the nonprofit Big Pivots newsletter that chronicles “the necessary transitions in energy, water, and other realms in Colorado and beyond in the Great Plains and Intermountain West,” said how much he is pulling in for the work.

“For 2023, total revenue for Big Pivots was $42,672,” he wrote. “If we are careful with our money, that will allow Big Pivots to do some good in Colorado and beyond.”

CU J-school prof: 'We should be boycotting candidates who are authoritarian’

University of Colorado Boulder journalism professor Michael McDevitt had some strong words for journalists covering the upcoming elections.

“The U.S. news media has blood on its hands from 2016,” said McDevitt, a former reporter who teaches political communication, research methods, journalism studies, and opinion writing. “It will go down as one of the worst moments in the history of American journalism.”

Here’s more, from a write-up at CU by Joe Arney:

That’s because, he said, reporters and media outlets failed to consider their role as a political institution—the so-called Fourth Estate—and their responsibility to defend democracy against a rising tide of authoritarian thought. Oftentimes, the media inadvertently contributed to the normalization of extremism, by misreading their audiences or erring in how they balance their coverage of candidates.
McDevitt pointed to a study of the 2016 election that found both candidates received the same amount of negative coverage. “You had a legitimate candidate playing by the rules of democracy, and an authoritarian,” he said. “We should be boycotting candidates who are authoritarian and anti-intellectual, and offering aggressive commentary to explain why.”

Thankfully, roughly a dozen newsrooms in Colorado recently participated in the Colorado Engaged Elections 2023 Fellowship, which equipped them to better cover the upcoming elections.

Meanwhile, one of Colorado’s most prominent journalists, 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark, often talks about the role of journalism in a democracy.

“Sitting this one out — letting some other journalist or some other news outlet cover threats to American democracy — isn't impartiality or editorial discretion — it’s a decision to enable those threats to democracy,” Clark has said. “It would be as if a local TV station decided not to cover a wildfire racing toward homes and people. It’s OK to be anti-wildfire. And it’s OK to be pro-democracy.”

Per the CU writeup, McDevitt is “currently at work on another book exploring how to rethink journalism in an era of democratic backsliding” and is “curious to understand how the press understands its role in democratic backsliding, and how reporters feel they can turn the ship around—including their limits in doing so.”

More Colorado media odds & ends

👀 The top Republican in Colorado’s House of Representatives, Mike Lynch, was able to keep under wraps for more than a year an arrest for suspicion of drunken driving and having a gun on him while intoxicated — until he launched a bid for Congress, that is. Nick Coltrain and Seth Klamaan broke the news of the Sept. 30, 2022 incident in the Denver Post Wednesday. (Lynch “pleaded guilty to driving while ability impaired, a lesser offense, and the gun charge,” the Colorado Sun reported; 9NEWS reported he’s on probation until June.)

🤔 On social media, some wondered how the legislative leader was able to keep the scandal from the press corps for so long, especially since he told a reporter that some of his colleagues knew about it. “The reality is that media outlets can no longer hire enough reporters to cover the news adequately,” said Rob Reuteman, a former editor of the Rocky Mountain News. (I don’t know about that. I think state politics is covered pretty robustly here, especially the process and personalities, which makes it more surprising. If this were, say, a county commissioner somewhere, maybe not so much.)

🎙 Rossana Longo-Better interviewed Diamond Hardiman of Free Press on her “Storytellers of Color” program at KGNU about “the newly created Reparative Journalism Project, a video series which is the brainchild of Media 2070 and News Voices.” Hardiman said her project highlights what journalism looks like when it prioritizes repair and healing.

⚙️ Sports writer Mark Kiszla bolted the Denver Post after 40 years to join the Denver Gazette. “Big new hire for the Denver Gazette,” Gazette editor Vince Bzdek said on social media. “We’ve made significant investments in our sports writing team to ensure we are delivering the most trusted information,” publisher Chris Reen said in a statement. “Kiz joins Woody Paige and a deep bench of talented sports reporters and columnists, making our sports department the most formidable in Colorado.”

🏆 CBS Colorado “was awarded a Martin Luther King Jr. Business Award,” the station reported. Journalist Tamara Banks, who emceed a recent event, “lauded CBS for its community journalism endeavors and Elevating Black Voices and Elevating Latino Voices initiatives, adding, ‘Those are voices that don’t often get heard in the mainstream media, especially in a city like Denver.’”

😮 How about this headline from TechDirt: “Colorado Journalist Says Fuck Prior Restraint, Dares Court To Keep Violating The 1st Amendment.” (“Just to, um, be clear: this is a loose paraphrase of our legal position,” Wingerter said on Twitter/X.)

🚗 Bud Wells, a longtime automotive journalist who worked for the Sterling Journal-Advocate, Rocky Mountain News, Greeley Tribune, and the Denver Post where he “persuaded newspaper leadership to start an automotive page,” chronicles his love for vehicles in a new book. Anne Delaney interviewed him for the Tribune.

🗣 “When speakers come to campus, they are protected by the First Amendment to express their views,” Nicole Mueksch, a CU Boulder spokesperson, is quoted saying in the Denver Post about inviting right-wing activist Chris Rufo to campus. “Their presence does not mean we agree with or endorse their views.” Rufo used a self-styled “successful strategy for the political right” that involved having to “work the media” to help oust Harvard president Claudine Gay.

⚙️ Evan Kruegel has joined 9NEWS in Denver after recently leaving rival KDVR FOX31.

⚖️ “Members of all state and local public bodies — from the General Assembly to county commissioners, city councils and school boards — should heed these judicial rulings and fastidiously abide by the clear dictates of the Open Meetings Law,” Colorado First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg wrote in a column. “Conducting serial meetings is but one of several crafty means of attempting to circumvent the law’s requirements.”

🗞 The billionaire-owned Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs is offering $18-$21 per hour for a business reporter.

⭐️ The Pueblo Star Journal reported on a recent field trip that Colorado College visiting instructor Tina Griego took with students in an Introduction to Journalism class. “The students matched the energy with asking questions about the paper, its inner workings and providing their own insight as budding journalists.”

🎬 The Denver Press Club said it is “very happy to announce a special rough-cut screening of ‘Trusted Sources,’ a forthcoming film by Colorado filmmaker Don Colacino, January 25 at 6:30 p.m.”

🤦‍♀️ Denver Post criminal justice reporter Shelly Bradbury said last week she was reading her credit card number “over the phone to a clerk’s office so I can pay 50 cents for a copy of a court order.” She also noted that it’s “confounding how many Colorado district courts insist on printing out digital court records and snail-mailing them to reporters when they literally could just email the original digital records.”

🔎 The team at Local News Matters, a newsletter that rounds up solid local accountability journalism from around the country, recently produced a year-end roundup, choosing one watchdog story from 2023 for each state. For Colorado, they wrote: “A Colorado commission tasked with evaluating judges’ performance often unanimously recommended voters retain judges.” Denver Gazette reporter David Migoya found “a flaw in the process: the group didn’t consider how often a judge’s decisions were reversed.”

🏔 Jason Van Tatenhove of the Colorado Switchblade had a “candid conversation” with Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. The podcast, Van Tatenhove writes, “takes us deep into the heart of a topic that's essential yet often sidelined in our discussions about democracy: the transparency and openness of our government.”

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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