Reporter Jennifer Brown with The Colorado Sun joined us to discuss the struggles of small town newspapers in Colorado. Traditional newspapers are vanishing in Colorado and across the country, according to a new analysis done for the Colorado Media Project.
The analysis found that Colorado has 212 newspapers left. 52 have closed in the last decade, 19 of which have closed just since 2019.
“When small towns, especially, lose their paper, there's no one paying attention to the city council, the county commissioners, the school board, all those things that connect and engage a community,” Brown told KUNC.
Publisher Gannett, which owns the Pueblo Chieftain, announced in June that it would be shutting down its printing operation in mid August.
“And this printing press in Pueblo printed more than 80, weeklies, dailies, magazines - a lot of weekly papers in the southern part of the state, especially,” Brown said. “And the problem is really that the printing is super expensive.”
With the closure of such a major printing press, papers that were already struggling to afford printing services are going to have to pay more and travel farther for them.
The cost increases could cause multiple local papers to give up and close. Meanwhile, they’re taking their work online, collaborating with other media outlets and applying for grants to keep their services sustainable.
