The Denver Post’s Politics Desk Implodes

DENVER, CO – By Corey Hutchins for The Colorado Independent. Within the span of about a week, The Denver Post’s state and federal politics team collapsed as three reporters and an editor quit.

That’s after Statehouse reporter Brian Eason (a specialist on tax issues and the state pension system) left in April, bringing the body count to five. Mark K. Matthews, the paper’s Washington, D.C. correspondent, is leaving for E&E News, and editor Chris Rickett is leaving for The Indianapolis Star. Reporter John Frank, who joined The Denver Post in 2014, dropped the mic to join The Colorado Sun. And Jesse Paul, the paper’s wunderkind utility reporter who recently moved to the politics desk, is also joining the Sun. Eason, too, will write for the Sun.

These changes cannot be overstated. A black hole just sucked out megatons of institutional memory from the pages of Colorado’s largest newspaper in the middle of a major midterm election season. The chief beneficiary? The new cryptocurrency/blockchain-backed startup I wrote about in the last newsletter. This week for Columbia Journalism Review I looked at the Sun’s hiring streak — all 10 of its staffers come from The Denver Post — in the context of other states where startups launched amid legacy media retrenchment, including a new one just this week in Memphis, Tennessee.

From the piece:

A decade ago, the prospect of leaving a legacy newspaper on the dream of a sustainable career with a digital startup might have struck some print journalists as risky. These days? “There are big-name newspaper reporters who understand right now that the opportunity created by these new organizations is pretty significant,” says [The Texas] Tribune’s [Evan] Smith. … Lately, the Sun has faced scrutiny of its own: on social media and in person, at a Denver Press Club event, over the diversity of its hires. Colorado newspapers are overwhelmingly white and largely male; the team at the Sun, so far, looks no different. One staffer wrote on Twitter, “To put things in perspective, we had a job posting up for weeks and got a very small number of applications from POC and women,” which he attributed to a “whole ecosystem problem.” Ryckman acknowledges the criticism. “We live in a diverse state and it is something that is a priority for us,” he says. Through freelance arrangements, and by making strategic hires as the site grows, he hopes to increase diversity on his staff. “Yeah, well, that’s how it always goes, right?” Rebekah Henderson, a Denver librarian and filmmaker who hosts a podcast about race called Off Color, says. “They hire freelancers and so people don’t get any kind of benefits and job security.”

Larry Ryckman, an editor of the Sun who recently left the Post as a senior editor, told me he gets calls “practically every other day from people at the Post who want to come work for me.” I — and likely some folks at the Post — wonder who they are. Despite its thinned staff, the paper continues to do investigative journalism and accountability work. It just won eight Heartland Emmys, though some responsible for its success have left. “Lee Ann Colacioppo, the paper’s top editor since 2016, says she’s had no trouble filling vacancies and anticipates finding a more committed staff of journalists who believe in the paper,” I wrote. She added: “Our readers are going to get better news, more news, better-written stories than we ever had with the people who left.” Bet someone at the Sun posts that one on a bulletin board.

Anna Staver, a former producer at KUSA-9News, has also joined the Postand is covering politics.

It is impossible not to note the wave of talent that is leaving the Post, but it is also worth pointing out the talent that remains. Sun staffers I spoke with stressed deeply that they are not trying to damage their former paper and placed the blame squarely on the actions of the newspaper’s hedgefund owners. They see themselves as complementors more than competitors. There’s a scene in the CJR story about how that ended up playing out in Texas. (Spoiler: It was positive.)

The Big Shift 2018: New faces on the op-ed pages

The Denver Post and The Boulder Daily Camera, papers owned by Digital First/Alden Global Capital that lost their opinion editors in a high-profile termination and resignation, respectively, finally have new people at the helm.

Megan Schrader is taking over the editorial-page at the Post after being on its board, writing columns, and moving over from The Gazette in 2016 as a Statehouse reporter. Schrader said under her leadership she would “like very much for the public to feel that these are their pages — a place for constructive dialogue and debate and active learning.” Former DP editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett, who launched the famous Denver Rebellion, said, in his former paper no less, “This is absolutely fantastic news for Colorado … Her mind is razor-sharp. Her heart is in the right place. Her head’s on straight. She will be a great thought leader for our state.”

Over at the Camera, the paper elevated journalist Quentin Young to run the op-ed page. He moves over from being the paper’s features editor. “It will be a privilege to oversee the opinion page and help give expression to new ideas about the community and the issues it faces,” he said in the announcement in his paper. (#ProTip: Just don’t try to write about the owner.)

At The Durango Herald, a family-owned newspaper, my friend Robert Meyerowitz just took on the job as editorial page editor. He comes over from the Palmetto State, with his collie Charlie, where he worked for The Nerve, an investigative newsroom of the libertarian-leaning South Carolina Policy Council. Before that, he was news editor of the Colorado Springs Independent alt-weekly from 2013 to 2015 and a journalist in Montana and Alaska among other far-flung locales. In 1989, he was arrested by the government in Cuba while on assignment. Meyerowitz says he views editorials as another form of accountability. “Reporting gets to a certain point and stops, as it should,” he says. “Editorials can be a coda to that — and a judgment that a news story shouldn’t make so that one complements the other.” (Disclosure: He taught me to play better tennis.)

New publishers, too…

Meanwhile, The Steamboat Pilot & Today recently got a new publisher, Logan Molen, from Oregon. The Glenwood Springs Post-Independent and Rifle Citizen Telegram are also getting one, too, when Jerry Raehal steps down as CEO of the Colorado Press Association to take the reins. The Colorado Independent, where I work, just got its first publisher when Laurie Hirschfeld Zeller, “a news junkie from way back,” came on board. Read her column about it here.

Read more at The Colorado Independent

Photo by Allen Tian

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