TV news layoffs hit Colorado Springs but miss Denver amid Scripps cutbacks
The news behind the news in Colorado
The spinning blade of budget cuts that have chopped up Colorado’s newspapers over the years are now coming for commercial TV news stations.
This week, E.W. Scripps, the large TV broadcaster, told staff at its local stations, including in Colorado, that they would be laid off.
While the cuts sliced into KOAA in Colorado Springs, they missed Denver7.
A company spokesperson told media this week that while the layoffs were difficult, they are part of Scripps’ attempt to adapt to an industry that’s in a state of “continued disruption.”
The retrenchment at the Cincinnati, Ohio-based Scripps follows that of other TV broadcasters with local stations, including at Tegna, Nexstar, and Gray Television.
In Colorado, Scripps owns KOAA, the NBC affiliate in Colorado Springs, which is also known as News5. Scripps also owns Denver7, which goes by the call letters KMGH and is also known as the Denver Channel.
Ross White, KOAA’s general manager, declined to offer specific numbers but confirmed over email that there are “impacted positions” at the station.
“While these changes are incredibly difficult, they are necessary as KOAA and our parent company, Scripps, adapt to shifting viewer habits and the ongoing disruptions in the broadcasting industry,” White said.
A source familiar with the layoffs at KOAA said they were aware of at least three people affected.
“These were great journalists who contributed to the newsroom for years,” the source said. “They’ll be missed and their loss likely means more work for those still there. And plenty of questions remain for what the ultimate plan is for Scripps and local news in general.”
An hour north up I-25, “No positions were impacted at Denver7,” the station’s general manager, Brian Joyce, said in an email.
“Like many local television stations across the industry — we are constantly looking for ways to better connect with our communities and to do this in a sustainable way,” Joyce added. “As we search for new ways to adapt to shifting consumer preferences, one thing remains clear — we need to continue listening to our audiences about what they need from us.”
This week, Denver7 launched a new segment called “Denver 7: Your Voice,” designed to help the station do that, Joyce said, adding that the new segment aims to “give people from all walks of life a chance to have a conversation with Denver7 personalities.”
The station will be sending its journalists to communities around the state to hear about what makes them distinct and the challenges they face.
“By focusing on the full complexity of life in Colorado communities — not just dropping in during emergencies — we aim to strengthen our connection with our audiences,” he said.
Mathew Keys, who founded The Desk that covers broadcasters and streaming services, offered this context about Scripps and the broader local TV market:
The changes come nearly a week after Scripps delayed the release of its fourth quarter (Q4) and full-year financial earnings report, which was expected last Thursday. The company said the delay was necessary because it continued to work with some creditors about restructuring certain debt. The company will release its financial earnings report in mid-March.
Last year, Scripps laid off around 250 employees and contractors at its national news channel Scripps News. After the layoffs were finished, Scripps News ended its over-the-air broadcast and reverted to a streaming-only channel with a much smaller team of journalists and behind-the-scenes workers.
The business of local TV has been challenged in recent years as broadcasters grapple with a downturn in the traditional advertising market and lower distribution fee revenues brought on by higher cable and satellite TV churn. Other broadcasters, including Gray Media, Sinclair, Paramount, Allen Media, NBC Universal and Disney, have laid off employees in order to address specific revenue woes.
At the same time, various lobbying groups representing the interests of commercial broadcasters have pushed federal agencies to refresh various regulations with the goal of bringing greater parity between traditional TV companies and larger technology firms, many of whom operate their own streaming products.
Back in Colorado Springs, White said KOAA will keep on keeping on.
“The News5 team remains committed to serving our Southern Colorado communities with a double-digit team of reporters out in the field,” he said, “connecting our viewers with each other and reporting on the stories that really matter to them.”
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‘Can they do that?’ Open-government group is holding a ‘transparency slam’
Are you a Colorado journalist who has faced some next-level nonsense from a public official, agency, or entity? Think your story might be more egregious than anyone else’s?
You could find out — from a panel of judges, and in public — next week at the Denver Press Club. There, the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition is holding a notable event called a “Transparency Slam.”
Here’s how the nonprofit open-government group describes it in an announcement:
Get ready for Sunshine Week with the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition's Transparency Slam.
Bring your open government gripes, cheers or solutions and share them in 3-minute talks that will be judged by a panel of experts, who will also offer ideas and solutions. …
Judges: Steve Zansberg, FOI attorney and CFOIC president; Rachael Johnson, Colorado Local Legal Initiative attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; Eric Maxfield, FOI attorney and CFOIC board member; Katy Donnelly, FOI attorney; Mary Dulacki, chief compliance officer, Denver Department of Public Safety.
“Bring your Colorado open government stories with prizes for the best and worst. Judged by celebrity FOI attorneys,” the event registration page reads.
Register here to attend. The event is Friday, March 14 at 6 p.m. at the Denver Press Club.
Colorado-connected newsrooms join new ‘Climate News Task Force’
Nearly a dozen newsrooms across the country announced they have linked up to form something called the Climate News Task Force.
Two of them have connections to Colorado.
They are the Paonia-based High Country News magazine and the Mountain West News Bureau. Michael De Yoanna, who lives in Colorado, is the managing editor of the MWNB, which includes KUNC in Northern Colorado.
The goal of the CNTF: “to increase and improve climate journalism collaborations and innovate new solutions to current challenges.”
Here’s more about what this new partnership will do:
Working together, CNTF members will:
Support collaboration between newsrooms by developing new relationships, tools, and platforms for sharing content, measuring impact, and increasing capacity; and
Develop a funding roadmap with consensus recommendations for philanthropic donors seeking to provide financial support for increasing and improving climate news.
The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing is launching the program. The project counts financial support through grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Meliore Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.
“We are excited to explore innovative possibilities for building new tools, methods of sharing content for cross publishing and other collaborative solutions to increase the reach and impact of newsrooms who work together,” Reynolds Journalism Institute director of innovation Kat Duncan, who is leading the convening, said in a statement.
He added: “We will be working with CNTF members to devise innovative solutions that can help newsrooms across the country become more collaborative, sustainable and impactful.”
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Listen to leading doers and thinkers in local news — from small rural and ethnic publications to large ecosystem builders and funders — address these topics and more on the Local News Matters podcast hosted by Tim Regan-Porter, CEO of the Colorado Press Association. Know someone you think should be on the show? Fill out this form.🎙
Colorado Community Media announces closure of 2 newspapers
Colorado Community Media, the hyperlocal nonprofit newspaper chain in the Denver suburbs, publicly announced it is closing two newspapers.
This newsletter reported on the upcoming closures of two of its Denver papers on Feb. 21 as part of a deeper look into CCM and its parent, the National Trust for Local News.
The Washington Park Profile, which has been around since 1978 serving as “a primary news source for central and south-central Denver,” will be no more, wrote CCM Executive Director Brooke Warner.
The same goes for the Life on Capitol Hill newspaper, which has served that neighborhood since 1975.
Here’s what Warner had to say about the reasons in a farewell column that appeared in both papers:
Just as our neighborhoods and city have grown and changed, so too have the ways in which people get their news and information. Email newsletters, social channels and other forms of social cohesion have created instant and frequent connections within neighborhoods.
As news consumption habits evolve, so must the products we create to deliver local news. Monthly print products like the Washington Park Profile, distributed for free to homes and racked locations while relying exclusively on advertising revenue to supplement the costs of producing it, have become increasingly difficult to keep sustainable.
It’s for this reason that we decided to make this edition of the Washington Park Profile its last. This was a difficult decision, but a necessary one to allow our staff to focus their time, attention and resources on supporting the evolution of our other many news brands across the Denver region.
Amalie Nash, who is based in Colorado and serves as the head of transformation for the National Trust for Local News, previously told this newsletter that it “remains to be seen” whether CCM would cut more print newspapers.
“If there’s a strong case to be made for a digital future and not having a print product that’s losing money, if that’s the case then I think we need to look at those avenues,” she said about some of the properties.
A newspaper’s closure in the Vail Valley ‘tracks with the trends’
Eagle County’s oldest business, the Vail Valley Enterprise, which has been around since 1901, has folded.
“Although it published weekly for 124 years, surviving a fire, numerous competitors, and changing times, the Enterprise is no longer a permanent institution. The last issue was published on Dec. 26, 2024,” wrote Kathy Heicher in Vail Daily.
This newsletter reported on the paper’s demise in January.
Heicher is president of the Eagle County Historical Society and edited the Eagle Valley Enterprise for most of the 1970s and again from 2001-2009. In her Vail Daily column, she offers a detailed history of the newspaper.
An excerpt:
The challenge was always that although the Enterprise primarily focused on downvalley news, the ad revenue was upvalley.
By the late 1990s, the Nikoliches sensed that the Internet was changing the newspaper scene. Classified ads, always a reliable cash cow for any newspaper, were dwindling. Survival required taking the newspaper up to the next level.
Corporations began scooping up small Colorado mountain town newspapers. The Nikoliches sold the Enterprise to Morris Communications, which, after a few years sold to Swift Communications, the parent company of the Vail Daily. In 2021, the Swift newspapers were purchased by Ogden Newspapers out of West Virginia.
The corporate ownership model and competition with the free-circulation Vail Daily was a game changer. The size of the Enterprise staff and newspaper gradually dwindled over the next 28 years. The Eagle Valley Enterprise was a mere shadow of its former self when it folded.
Nikolich, who now lives in Denver and writes novels, predicted that the demise of the Enterprise will leave an open space in the Eagle County news community. But he also acknowledges that it might take people a long time to realize it is gone.
“It was a long, slow death. There are probably not many people who remember when it was a weekly newspaper, intensely covering small communities,” said Nikolich. “You can’t replace it with the Internet. Not even Facebook is that localized.”
The newspaper’s death was not unexpected. The once-lively newspaper dwindled to several pages of legal notices bolstered by a few stories and photos run earlier in the week in its much more dominant sister publication, the Vail Daily.
“The Enterprise was really a casualty of the free-daily newspaper business model,” said Bob Brown, the publisher of the Vail Daily. He notes that other former weekly newspapers in Eagle County, including the Vail Trail and the Avon-based Vail Valley Times, met the same fate in competing with a free-daily newspaper.
“At the end of its life, the Enterprise press run was just 30 copies, 16 of which were for paid subscribers,” Heicher wrote. “The final issue consisted of only four pages. The announcement that the Enterprise would cease publication was made without fanfare other than a small ad within the newspaper.”
Heicher reached out to me to ask if the Vail Valley Enterprise’s demise was atypical or reflected broader developments. “This local newspaper blinking out in the valley certainly tracks with the trends,” I told her for the piece.
Read the whole column here.
🌿 This week’s newsletter is proudly supported by Colorado PR + marketing firm Grasslands: A Journalism-Minded Agency™, founded by Ricardo Baca (ex-Denver Post, ex-Rocky Mountain News, and current Colorado Public Radio board of directors). We understand Colorado journalists because we were journalists — and we’re here to help.
Named “Colorado’s Agency of Record” by our clients and partners, Grasslands is excited to host another Colorado Journalist Meet-Up at 5:30 p.m. March 13, 2025, at a private location in Denver. This media-only event is for active members of the media to eat, drink, learn, network and reconnect with their media communities. The evening's programming, “Kyle Clark on Colorado Media: A Grasslands Fireside Chat,” will feature the KUSA-9NEWS Anchor in a deep, locally focused conversation with Grasslands Founder Ricardo Baca.
All full-time and freelance Colorado journalists are welcome at this free Meet-up, but you must RSVP to caseyechols@mygrasslands.com beforehand; Note: We are nearing capacity for this event, so RSVP sooner than later to guarantee your spot. (In keeping with the spirit of these events, our non-media friends are not invited and will not be granted entry.) A few shares from our last Colorado Journalist Meet-Up:
“That was one of the most impressive journalism get-togethers I’ve ever seen.” — Ben Markus, Reporter, CPR News
“A fun and thought-provoking night of networking and conversation!” — Tim Wieland, Regional President and General Manager of CBS Colorado and CBS Los Angeles
“Such a fun event. Illuminating discussion and a rare, refreshing chance to hang with colleagues. Journalists could always use more hang time!” — Jason Blevins, Outdoors Reporter, Colorado Sun
Grasslands recognizes, and respects, the essential role reporters play in our communities. Our team is ready to connect you with sources, data, and unique perspectives that elevate your journalism. Our diverse client roster includes beloved Colorado institutions (Naropa University, Illegal Pete's), innovative wellness brands (Boulder County Farmers Markets, Naturally Colorado, Eden Health Club), bold natural products businesses (Wild Zora, Flatiron Food Factory, Flower Union Brands), and other best-in-class Colorado-based businesses.
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More Colorado media odds & ends
🗳 Team Transparency: Almost a year after Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers “frustrated transparency advocates by exempting themselves from parts of the open meetings law, a coalition of residents seeking more access to government records and meetings says it’s drafting a potential ballot initiative to strengthen ‘the public’s right to know,’” reported Scott Franz for KUNC. “The group is calling itself ‘Team Transparency,’ and it’s been meeting monthly in Denver to talk through proposals to send to voters in 2026. It’s also uniting and attracting groups that have found themselves at opposite ends of political issues in the past.”
👻 Meanwhile, a “bill that shields the identities of people who seek and get state compensation for property damage caused by wildlife is headed to the desk of Colorado Gov. Jared Polis,” wrote Jeff Roberts for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. “Proponents say Senate Bill 25-038 is needed to protect ranchers from harassment when gray wolves kill their livestock, although the bill grants confidentiality to all claimants under Colorado’s wildlife damage program.”
🧐 On the Western Slope, a hospital board, “for at least the last few years, has conducted a financial discussion before its regular meeting that no one from the public or media is allowed to attend,” Editor Niki Turner wrote in the Rio Blanco Herald Times. “The explanation from the hospital is that the financial discussions are ‘complex’ and could constitute violations of privacy and confidentiality.”
📺 Rocky Mountain PBS has partnered with the Trust Project, a consortium of news organizations “that adopt shared standards for transparency, accuracy and ethics in journalism.” The Trust Project’s goal is “to amplify transparency, accuracy, inclusion and fairness in journalism so that news consumers can identify trustworthy news.”
💪 “Government should not be defining what constitutes journalism, and certainly it should not give preferential treatment to the people politicians regard as journalists,” wrote Ari Armstrong in Complete Colorado, the news and commentary arm of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute. “That’s wrong, and it’s an affront to the First and Fourteenth Amendments.” (He was talking about one of those transparency bills this newsletter reported on last week.)
🚫 Following up on Armstrong’s column, Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor who is a senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute, wrote his own, headlined “Special privileges for journalists contrary to ‘freedom of press’.”
🎙 Colorado audio journalist Ann Marie Awad earned a spotlight in the national “My First Byline” newsletter this week. Some advice Awad offered: “An edit isn’t personal. A good edit isn’t, anyways. I think there’s something really beautiful about how growth and refinement are built into the very nature of the work we do — that a first draft is a first draft and that’s all it has to be.”
🗣 Eugene Daniels, a Colorado State University alum “and renowned political journalist, has been announced as CSU’s 2025 commencement speaker,” the school announced this week. Daniels is leaving Politico to become MSNBC’s senior Washington correspondent. He is also president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Reporter Kelly Lyell has a piece about it at the Fort Collins Coloradoan. (Daniels caught a big profile in the New York Times this week for being the “face of a White House press corps under attack by Trump.”)
👀 In Colorado, lawmakers determining who are “legitimate members of the media” sparked an open records debate.
👋 High Country News is saying goodbye to Cindy Wehling, “an indefatigable art director,” after 35 years. She “leaves an unmatched legacy of art and design, writ large across hundreds of issues of High Country News,” Greg Hanscom wrote.
🆕 Lincoln Roch, a journalism student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, has a new title. “I will be the new Public Affairs reporter” at the Estes Valley Voice, he wrote on LinkedIn. “In the role, I will continue to provide coverage of the statehouse, but I will also be looking at how state agencies, special districts, and the federal government are [affecting] the Estes Valley.”
⚙️ Jackie Ramirez wrote this week that she is “stepping back from my position as the bilingual editor for La Ciudad to join Adams 14 as the district’s interpreter and translator.”
📡 Under Trump, Colorado’s public media are on alert.
📝 The Denver online news outlet Bucket List Community Cafe is hoping readers fill out its annual survey about their reader habits and what they would like to see.
✂️ The Maine Trust for Local News, which is the Pine Tree State’s companion to Colorado Community Media, “will eliminate 36 full-time and 13 part-time positions, none of which are reporters or photographers,” Kathleen O’Brien reported in the Bangor Daily News. “Leadership plans to increase news staffing later this year.” (Neiman Reports has a deep dive this week into how Maine has become a “laboratory for nonprofit news.”)
🌵 If you read this newsletter, you’re aware of news deserts. But how about legal deserts? “They’re no joke in rural Colorado, where a shortage of attorneys is leading to a shortage of justice,” wrote Robert Sanchez for 5280.
I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute 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. Colorado Media Project, where I’m an advisor, 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.