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The Colorado Sun Rises Again For Former Denver Post Reporters In New Online News Site

The Colorado Sun

Several staffers who left The Denver Post amid budget and staff cuts made by the newspaper's New York-based hedge fund owners are forming a new online news site called The Colorado Sun.

Reporter Tamara Chaung previously covered technology at the Denver Post and is part of the team developing The Colorado Sun. She says they’re getting help from startup groupCivil. They’re using new technology and funding models to support local newsrooms across the country.

“We’re trying to figure out a new way to do journalism,” Chaung says. “One that’s sustainable and covers local news and isn’t ruled by a single owner, or hedge fund, or investors. It’s actually employee-owned.”

Chaung says The Colorado Sun will launch later this summer with a staff of award-winning reporters and editors who formerly worked at the Post. That includes former senior editor Larry Ryckman as well as Dana Coffield who directed the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Aurora theater shooting..

“I don’t know if it will be a success or a failure,” Chaung says. “But I’d be working under that same uncertainty if I stayed at my old job. This way we can try something really different.”

The Colorado Sun is raising money through a Kickstarter campaign. Civil has provided funding for the its first two years. Civil says the arrangement would decentralize ownership, and rules would be in place to make sure one person can't secure total control of publications.

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