At the close of the 19th century, from downtown Denver offices, an unlikely pair of business partners unleashed a daily paper that aspired to perform as “a vaudeville show,” an entertaining mix of news and features designed to win the devotion of a young but growing cow town.
Across time and space — 125 years and seven city blocks — a new generation of that same enterprise employs mouse clicks and computer keystrokes to shepherd the news onto digital platforms that explode the boundaries of waning print circulation in an emerging hub of the New West.
These chapters in the history of The Denver Post share a singular goal: to capture the attention of an information-consuming public pulled in many directions, by multiple competing newspapers in the late 1800s and now by myriad digital sites.
For most of these 125 years, change has been a constant. Often, especially in the early times, it churned within a print journalism franchise governed by seemingly immutable laws of profitability. The Post rattled off years of fat returns that made its owners millionaires and, by extension over the ensuing decades, fueled the city’s performing arts community and charitable institutions.
Change was reflected in the city’s own shifting politics, evolving racial attitudes and general growing pains. As a mirror to that evolution, The Post sank to sad depths in its raucous beginning but also rose to proud heights.
The paper’s editorial silence amid the Teapot Dome political scandal, its early tolerance of the Ku Klux Klan and xenophobic treatment of German and Japanese immigrants during wartime marked professional lows. But all of that stood in stark contrast to its denouncement of “mccarthyism” — editor Palmer Hoyt refused to dignify the term with capital letters — its steps toward more inclusive op-ed pages and staffing and, ultimately, Pulitzer Prize-winning efforts in news coverage, photography and editorial cartooning.
Along the way, The Post underwent the upheaval of multiple ownership changes. Local family stewardship under Harry Tammen and Frederick Bonfils and their heirs survived the takeover bid of one corporate suitor but eventually sold to the Times Mirror Co. in 1980. MediaNews Group bought a struggling enterprise in 1987 and, ultimately, ceded control to Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund. All of the new owners were greeted with skepticism, although each has left defining imprints and its own legacy of change.
Even The Post’s physical product underwent massive transformation — from modernized printing presses to rotogravure that lent high-quality color reproduction to the paper’s erstwhile Sunday magazine, Empire, to the advent of digital photography to the introduction of an online edition that redefined the paper’s business model. The Post’s look has undergone, for better and worse, continual metamorphosis. (There was even, in the mid-1980s, a prototype circulating of The Post reimagined as a tabloid.)
That fleeting thought was a nod to one other constant: the pitched battle with the Rocky Mountain News, an improbable heavyweight duel between broadsheet and tabloid that played out across their pages and, on one occasion, spilled into the streets when adversarial owners resorted to fisticuffs. At its best, the competition benefited readers of both papers.
For decades, industry observers insisted Denver’s increasingly rare status as a two-newspaper town could not be sustained. Eventually, they were proved correct, as the papers entered a joint operating agreement in 2001 that preserved competing editorial voices only until the Rocky’s parent company shifted its attention to broadcast properties and closed the paper in 2009.
But far from settling the score for good, the end of the newspaper war found The Post confronted by the equally daunting challenge of creating a new economic model for the digital world. Print circulation, while still popular with hard-core subscribers who prefer the look and feel of newsprint in their hands each morning, continues to decline.
In the meantime, the online presence that initially moved forward in fits and starts continues to gather momentum as traditional print journalism melds with video capability — even live webcasts — and social media.
Lee Ann Colacioppo, The Post’s editor, presides over a reimagining of journalism that spans thickly rolled newsprint plopping on porches to a marketplace of ideas beamed via broadband to smartphones. Across more than a century, that change has been messy, painful, colorful, cathartic and irrepressible. The future promises more of the same.
“When people ask what quality you need to have to survive and be happy as editor in this environment,” Colacioppo says, “I tell them you’ve got to be happy in chaos.”
The newspaper’s first iteration, called simply the Evening Post, rolled off the presses on Aug. 8, 1892, as a political standard-bearer for Grover Cleveland and died about a year later amid a crash in silver prices. A few months after that, it was restarted with similar political orientation but new ownership amid difficult economic times and robust competition from four other papers.
When The Post went back on the block yet again, it landed in the hands of its legendary overseers, hotel souvenir shop owner Harry Tammen, 39, and Frederick Bonfils, a 34-year-old money man of questionable repute, who purchased the paper for $12,500. They proved an odd couple with disparate backgrounds but undeniable chemistry. Neither had a clue about publishing a newspaper, but they tasked the renamed Denver Evening Post with a simple goal: Be the talk of the town.
“The argument against Bonfils and Tammen was that they were amateurs,” says Stephen Leonard, a history professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “But maybe there was an argument for not being highly professional, because they thought differently. They weren’t boxed in to the same degree other people were.”
An editorial page was hardly necessary; the new owners encouraged their writers to infuse stories with opinion and then splashed them across The Post’s pages in bold, busy headlines, often with a dash of red ink for emphasis. It was a typographical train wreck, but in 1895 it was doing what news operations would continually strive to do, with dizzying technological advances, more than a century later — capture eyeballs.
The Post’s earliest crusades took unusual forms and often intersected its own economic interests. In Bill Hosokawa’s comprehensive history, “Thunder in the Rockies,” the former Post editor describes one in which it undercut price-fixing coal companies by selling its own coal directly to the public. When a competing paper’s owner persuaded advertisers not to do business with The Post, the paper flexed its muscle by shining a light on some retail stores’ child labor law violations.
Tammen and Bonfils pursued stories with fervor, discovered they had political clout and made enemies along the way. Once, they nearly came to an untimely end in an incident that, for its near-fatal consequences and bizarre aftermath, captured the rowdy spirit of the times better than most.
In 1900, The Post had taken up the cause of the infamous Alfred Packer, the mountain guide who reportedly resorted to cannibalism as the sole survivor of a snow-bound mining party that faced starvation. Tammen and Bonfils were weighing whether to back a lawyer who claimed he could win Packer’s freedom from prison.
But then they learned that the attorney, William Anderson, had visited Packer in Cañon City, passed himself off as a Post honcho and coaxed $25 from the inmate for his services. Irate, they called Anderson to their offices, castigated him for bilking Packer and threatened to have him disbarred.
As Anderson was being booted from the premises, he suddenly pulled a revolver from his overcoat and shot Bonfils twice. Then he hit Tammen with two shots — even as reporter Polly Pry, assigned to lend human interest to the Packer crusade, thrust herself between the two men and begged Anderson to stop. Both Tammen and Bonfils eventually would recover from their wounds, and Anderson was soon in police custody.
But the fiasco didn’t end there. Some who felt wronged by The Post in the past rushed to Anderson’s defense, and even helped him post bond. Eventually, after two hung juries, Anderson was acquitted of the charges against him.
In a strange twist, Tammen subsequently pleaded guilty to attempting to bribe jurors in the second trial and got one day in jail. He actually served about one hour before his release, whereupon he immediately hammered out a front-page screed putting his actions in the most charitable context: “It is sufficient for me to say that I did whatever I could to bring about (Anderson’s) conviction, and whatever I did was done because I was prompted by the sincere feeling that he had attempted to murder me.”
The owners not only survived that close call but thrived as readership rose and profits rolled in. In 1901, the upstart paper dropped “Evening” from its name and surged into the circulation lead, surpassing the more established Rocky Mountain News.
Tom Noel, history professor at the University of Colorado Denver, recounts the circus atmosphere that came to define The Post in its early days of spectacle and promotion. Escape artist Harry Houdini once slipped out of a straitjacket while dangling from the newspaper’s balcony. Circus elephants — Tammen devoted considerable time to the Sells-Floto Circus he persuaded Bonfils to purchase — delivered the paper.
Buffalo Bill Cody, a good friend of Tammen’s, tossed silver dollars to a crowd gathered at the offices. (Eventually, The Post orchestrated his burial on Lookout Mountain.) The Post sponsored all manner of contests, from best lawn to Christmas decorations to hunting and fishing competitions. On its pages, meanwhile, it became the first newspaper in the West to run comic strips.
“Some people hated it, but everybody read it,” Noel says.
In a notable display of hubris in early 1929, Bonfils sent a telegram to the White House offering The Post’s editor-in-chief job to Calvin Coolidge, as he prepared to leave the presidency, at a salary of $75,000. A front-page story declared: “With Calvin Coolidge at the editorial helm of The Post — the greatest newspaper between the Missouri river and the Pacific coast — the voice of the West would be heard and listened to in Washington D.C., and around the entire world.”
He declined.
The “voice of the West,” meanwhile, did not always speak with measured eloquence, particularly during wartime, when it proved only too willing to parrot public animus toward locals of German or Japanese descent. Noel also points out that when The Post abruptly halted its coverage of the 1920s Teapot Dome oil-and-politics scandal, allegedly in response to a bribe, its reputation suffered.
Leonard, the MSU Denver historian, describes the paper’s attitudes during those periods as “antediluvian. They were not a progressive force in the ’30s and early ’40s,” he says. The Post ran mixed coverage of the well-connected Ku Klux Klan, although the paper did eventually denounce the hate group and took the lead in some critical social and political issues.
Under Bonfils and Tammen, and well after their deaths, the newspaper did nothing so well as turn extraordinary profits — even during the Depression.
Tammen died of cancer in 1924 at 68, leaving his stake to his wife and various charities, mostly notably Children’s Hospital. Bonfils lived nine more years before passing away at 72, ultimately leaving his daughters, May and Helen, as principal owners of The Post. Legal issues surrounding the will left the sisters estranged.
Helen’s first love was the theater, and that affinity would later play a key part in The Post’s history. She also felt a stronger attachment than May did to their father’s newspaper, and assumed a more active role in its operation.
William Shepherd, managing editor at the paper since 1912, had been Bonfils’ handpicked successor and assumed the roles of president, editor and publisher. But while change was happening on the Denver newspaper front, The Post was no longer in the vanguard as Shepherd oversaw an increasingly stale, though profitable, enterprise.
The Rocky Mountain News began to be revitalized, with its 1942 redesign as a tabloid, and only a wartime newsprint shortage seemed to be holding it back. Earnest Ray Campbell, as trustee of the Tammen estate, began the search for someone to take over upon Shepherd’s retirement in 1946.
Campbell wanted a westerner, preferably a relatively young man who could guide The Post for decades to come — someone who, Hosokawa wrote, “could restore The Post’s old color and flamboyance without the venality.”
Things were about to change in a big way.
Edwin Palmer “Ep” Hoyt, the 49-year-old editor of The Oregonian, stood alone at the top of Campbell’s list of candidates, but he judged The Post too much of a reclamation project and prepared a list of a dozen reasons why he would decline The Post’s offer.
Chief among his concerns were the lack of an editorial page, the presence — real or implied — of a blacklist of individuals or topics (Helen’s own sister was at one point exiled from any mention on the society pages) and a sensational approach to the news whose days had long since passed.
But Campbell and Bonfils agreed to remedy each of Hoyt’s criticisms, offered a $40,000 starting salary — double his pay at The Oregonian — and in short order Hoyt agreed to assume stewardship of The Post.
He quickly instituted an editorial page, missing for 35 years, that included a mix of political views and an “Open Forum” for readers. A few years later, when Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy launched his anti-communist witch hunt, Hoyt — ardently anti-communist himself — used the editorial page to call out the senator for his unsubstantiated claims.
He rode reporters to remove commentary from the news pages, added racial diversity to the paper and expanded The Post’s Denver-centric scope. He charged reporter Red Fenwick with traveling a 13-state Western region and covering the so-called Rocky Mountain Empire.
Hoyt’s influence also shook the local political establishment, as The Post backed 35-year-old Quigg Newton for mayor, ending the long reign of Benjamin Stapleton. Two Pulitzers for editorial cartooning — by Paul Conrad in 1964 and Pat Oliphant in 1967 — also came on Hoyt’s watch.
“He made it journalistically a very respectable newspaper, so that a paper that had a very bad national reputation a few years before him taking over now had a very good national reputation,” Leonard says. “The Post was clearly a power in Denver.”
Hoyt’s arrival also soon led to the paper moving, in 1950, into new accommodations at 15th and California streets. The new editor also loosened the paper’s notoriously tight purse strings when it came to news gathering. Testing a new, more liberal expense account policy, Fenwick floated this: “One bottle of booze for Wyoming politician, $5.”
It sailed through.
But all the changes had repercussions on the financial front. Suddenly, the hefty profits that had been piling up for years slowed considerably as The Post spent liberally on improvements to its product.
May Bonfils Stanton, still at odds with her sister and upset with some of Hoyt’s decisions, agreed to sell her interest in The Post to chain owner Samuel Newhouse Jr., whose takeover bid launched a battle that lasted 13 years. “Miss Helen,” determined to maintain local ownership, enlisted one of her New York theater friends, attorney Donald Seawell, to not only fend off the Newhouse gambit but also assist with her personal affairs.
They won the legal battle in 1972, shortly after she passed away at 83. “Helen loved The Post like no one else,” Seawell, who died two years ago at 103, said in a 1992 interview for the paper’s centennial edition. “She never dreamed of giving in to Newhouse, no matter what the price might be.”
The price of the legal fight was steep, and coupled with Hoyt’s spending sent The Post to its lowest profit levels since the mid-1920s. Seawell, who became The Post’s president, chairman and publisher, also hatched a new project: the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
In 1974, he famously sketched out a rough plan for the complex on an envelope while stopped at the intersection of 14th and Curtis streets. Within hours, he had persuaded Mayor Bill McNichols — as well as the board of the Bonfils Foundation, funded largely by The Post — to sign on to the idea.
Seawell’s use of funds from the foundation to open the DCPA in 1978 perpetuated the criticism that he was siphoning off Post money to advance his self-aggrandizing pet project, a charge he vehemently rejected. Still, after spending more than a decade beating back the takeover attempt by Newhouse, Seawell in 1980 ended up selling the paper to a different chain, Times Mirror Co. out of Los Angeles.
In his 1992 interview, he pegged the sale — a bargain at $95 million, which helped the Bonfils Foundation ensure the future of the DCPA — to two elements he judged imperative for survival: a move to morning publication and construction of a new printing plant. Times Mirror agreed to pursue both strategies.
Although The Post had grown exponentially, ranking first among evening papers in space devoted to news in 1968, Hoyt’s later career prompted some to regard the paper as gripped by much the same doldrums that followed Frederick Bonfils’ death. The arrival of Times Mirror management triggered another spasm of drastic change that, depending on point of view, either diluted The Post’s hometown character or jump-started the paper in a rapidly intensifying competition with the Rocky Mountain News, which lurched into the circulation lead for the first time since 1901.
“It went from being a hometown, family deal to being corporate,” recalls Dick Kreck, the longtime editor and writer for the paper whose career eventually would span three ownerships. “Before, you felt like you knew everybody on the staff. When Miss Helen was around, and she’d come into the building sometimes. You felt management involvement.
“When Times Mirror came in, things changed.”
The new ownership of The Post moved quickly to modernize the paper’s dated design, shift delivery to mornings despite the inevitable circulation hit and inject new names and a more aggressive approach to the news.
“Money was no object,” recalls Neil Westergaard, now editor of the Denver Business Journal who worked in several capacities at The Post, including a stint as top editor. “When you talk about change, when Times Mirror bought the paper, they pulled out all the stops.They brought a sophistication and a commitment to journalism.”
The paper thought big right out of the box. The Post lured popular Rocky Mountain News sports columnist Woody Paige to cross the street and bring his irreverent, unique style to a broad range of subjects. It brought new focus to investigative journalism that soon paid off in a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1984 and a second Pulitzer for a 1985 project that debunked a national frenzy over missing kids.
The paper still valued local, breaking news — Westergaard recalls the paper’s timely work on the night radio host Alan Berg was killed in his driveway in 1984 — but it also was quick to dispatch reporters anywhere necessary, as it did after Berg’s murder in fleshing out the white nationalist organization behind it.
In other high-profile evidence of its expanding scope, The Post revived the roving regional writer with the hiring of Jim Carrier, who recalls he couldn’t say no to this job description: “You can have any car of your choice, drive around the West and write about anything you want.” Promoted as the Rocky Mountain Ranger, he captured the regional ethos in detailed narratives about everything from atomic energy to the Yellowstone fire to the search for the mythical Marlboro Man over the next 13 years.
“It was one of the last great newspaper jobs in the country,” says Carrier, 73, now an author and documentary filmmaker based in Vermont.
A slight digression: The newspaper war, as it played out among the reporters and photographers who battled for an edge every day, could be anxiety-inducing and deadly serious.
But competition wasn’t without its lighter moments.
One of the more public pranks happened just before Christmas in 1989. The News earlier had pulled into the circulation lead, and The Post was still adjusting to its latest sale and the introduction of yet another new editor. The papers had been locked in a battle to procure the comic strip “Garfield,” which the News eventually won.
Soon, large, cutout replicas depicting Garfield the cat and his canine companion, Odie, went up on the roof of its building. From his office window down West Colfax Avenue at The Post, Carrier looked out and saw the characters staring right back at him — and it ticked him off.
“They were trumpeting the stealing, as we viewed it, of a very important and probably expensive cartoon,” he recalls. “And I’m sitting there thinking that thing is sticking in our eye, really.”
“That was certainly a subtext of Jim’s whole idea, that we’ve got to do something,” adds Pat O’Driscoll, another reporter at the time. “He was not only angry at looking at Garfield, but what it stood for — the Rocky outdoing us — and here we were with a certain amount of chaos and upheaval with a new editor.”
Four Post colleagues hatched a plan.
“We thought, what if Odie were holding a copy of the Denver Post in his mouth?” says O’Driscoll, who now works in public affairs for the National Park Service. “A very large copy of The Post, because these images were probably 10 feet tall themselves. We kind of eyeballed it, and figured something in the neighborhood of a 4-by-8 foot cutout would be the way to go.”
They had cased the building ahead of time to determine how difficult it would be to get past the security desk and access the rooftop. Not too tough, as it turned out. O’Driscoll’s wife at the time, a graphic artist, created the rolled-up newspaper from foam-core board. They wrapped it in brown paper with a red bow.
On the morning the caper unfolded, O’Driscoll and Carrier, dressed as workmen and carrying hand tools, lunch boxes and a ladder, waltzed through the lobby and waved to the guards as they got on the elevator. Separately, reporter Jennifer Gavin, wearing a coat over her work clothes, brought the wrapped newspaper replica into the News building, smiled at the security guard and said the package was for the Christmas party. Outside, reporter Michelle Fulcher sat at the wheel of the getaway car.
“It was like a ‘Mission Impossible’ thing,” Carrier says. “It looked like we were going to work. And we were.”
Within 10 minutes, they had affixed the replica newspaper to Odie’s mouth, with The Denver Post logo clearly visible and the headline “Merry Xmas.”
They made a clean getaway, while, outside, Post photographer John Leyba captured the prank on film and the reporters notified local TV stations.
“About 45 minutes to an hour later, men in suits were seen scrambling out on the roof frantically trying to pull the newspaper down,” O’Driscoll says. “I do remember, back in our newsroom, folks — when they found out about it — were just beaming, feeling like some of the pressure of the recent turmoil was off. More than one said, ‘This feels like it used to be. We needed this.’”
Later, the culprits mounted one of Leyba’s photos on poster board and delivered it as a Christmas card to the News’ editor.
“There was some anxiety with getting up and reading a competitive paper every day,” recalls Fulcher, now a producer at Colorado Public Radio. “So there was sort of this sense that we took it to a different place, and it was fun again.”
“I don’t know what the lasting effect was,” adds Carrier, “but in the end, we won the war.”
But that was still 20 years away, and The Post had more jarring changes to endure.
Bleeding circulation and some alarming losses on the retail front — the closing of The Denver department stores erased The Post’s biggest advertiser at $2 million per year — sapped Times Mirror’s resolve. By the fall of 1987, it had instituted budget cuts and offered employee buyouts.
Enter William Dean Singleton, the young, aggressive Texan who earlier had told Times Mirror executives he’d be interested in its Denver property, and his partner Richard Scudder in MediaNews Group. Shortly after they negotiated wage concessions with The Post’s unions, the $95 million sale was complete.
Singleton’s arrival met with skepticism: He had a reputation as a cost-cutter, and was trying to revive both the Dallas Times-Herald and the Houston Post, although both attempts eventually failed. But he saw promising signs in Denver — strong Sunday positioning and particularly strong help-wanted classifieds — that offered building blocks to success.
“I looked at Denver,” recalls Singleton, who retired in 2013, “and said, ‘We can win the war.’”
But two years of still more management changes, a revolving door of editors and a move from the 15th and California digs into new offices at Civic Center Plaza got things off to an uneven start. Late in 1989, though, Gil Spencer arrived as the new editor, a move calculated to bring stability to a staff reeling from all the changes.
Spencer, recently editor of the New York Daily News, brought a Pulitzer pedigree and colorful, if profane, personality to the paper and restored the newsroom’s sagging morale. He also brought a renewed emphasis to storytelling, something regularly on display in his own weekly column.
“That’s when they really started turning things around,” recalls Westergaard. “He had this urbane, Cary Grant look, but the folksy affability of Jimmy Stewart. Even though he wasn’t from here, he knew which stories were going to get legs and which ones weren’t. He got everybody pulling in the same direction.”
That began a strong four-year run before Spencer retired in 1993 (he died in 2011 at 85), and passed the reins to Westergaard. But that began a string of three-years-and-out editors that — while overlapping the paper’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Columbine school shootings and the retaking of the daily circulation lead after 17 years — found the staff once again in need of consistency and a firm hand.
That would come in the 2002 hiring of Greg Moore, a rising editor at the Boston Globe who became The Post’s first African-American editor — and one of the longer-tenured newsroom bosses by the time he left in 2016.
Two other key changes also unfolded through this stretch: First, the internet began to assert its impact on news and, arguably more important, on classified advertising. And second, with The Post and the News still engaged in their epic stare-down, the News in 2001 blinked. The papers entered a joint operating agreement that would combine business operations of both in the interest of preserving separate, independent editorial voices.
That arrangement would last only until 2009, when the E.W. Scripps Co. shut down the News for good as it focused attention on its broadcast properties. But the technological sea change would only accelerate in the ensuing years.
Todd Engdahl, a longtime Post journalist who was serving as city editor in the early 1990s, remembers speaking casually to colleagues about how the paper needed to get online when, in 1995, Westergaard “called my bluff.” He offered Engdahl an opportunity to step away from city desk and get The Post headed in the right direction.
That began a years-long and at times frustrating process of not only upgrading the paper’s technology, but also the way it thinks about publishing the news. Lacking a budget and a clear template for how to launch an online presence, Engdahl figured things out as he went along.
Using young but tech-savvy interns and learning from what other newspaper pioneers were doing, he launched The Post’s reborn Sunday magazine, Empire, in an online version to augment its print renaissance. He started adding one-time features — a ski guide, a Broncos preview, “little things here and there to bulk up the site.”
Denver Post Online — DPO — was hosted on a small, local ISP, “a server on a shelf in some guy’s kitchen,” Engdahl says. Gradually, the venture grew, adding some classified help-wanted ads, The Associated Press and TV listings. But it was slow going, especially after Westergaard left the paper and his successors showed less enthusiasm for the project.
The pace was frustrating, but adaptation to the internet was happening sporadically around the country, and wasn’t necessarily led by the titans of the news industry. In Colorado, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph was the first paper online, Engdahl recalls, and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal didn’t join in until the same year as The Post.
“About the turn of the century,” he says, “management kind of woke up finally and said we’ve got to take this seriously.”
On April 20, 1999, the Columbine tragedy marked the tipping point, the endless chain of grief, anger, controversy and breaking news that pushed The Post headlong into an online news site that did more than simply repurpose the newspaper every 24 hours. There were midday updates to stories, an archive of previous reporting, photo galleries.
Then, later that year, DPO got a boost from the arrival of Eric Grilly, the 28-year-old son of the paper’s publisher, who came to Denver to head The Post’s interactive efforts. Engdahl was skeptical of working for the publisher’s kid, but he soon found any misgivings put to rest: Grilly not only knew his stuff, but he also had the ear of upper management. That meant more resources.
By 2007, the digital Denver Post was continuing to gain momentum — and the pace has only quickened. Rebecca Risch signed onto the digital side when it was still in its infancy and the online operation wasn’t even on the same floor as the newsroom. Now The Post’s digital director, she describes a major metamorphosis over her 18 years.
“From being kind of exiled to being in the heart of the news operation — in some ways it felt slow and in some ways it felt fast,” she says. “There were moments when I had been at The Post for a year or two that felt like, ‘Why are we getting no respect for what we’re trying to do?’ Clearly, the internet was going to be a thing.”
Engdahl, who now runs his own legislative reporting business, has an even broader perspective: “The mid-’90s seem as distant and quaint to me now as the ’70s,” he says. “So much has changed in the online and interactive world.”
At lot of those changes, and others, came during Moore’s 14-year run as editor, which began just as the disastrous Hayman wildfire, the largest in state history, took off less than 100 miles from Denver. He would oversee work that resulted in four more Pulitzers, two won by photojournalist Craig Walker, one by editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe and the fourth by the staff for coverage of the 2012 Aurora theater shooting — a somber bookend to the Columbine honor.
The new millennium began with big ideas for expansion. After the 9/11 attacks, The Post sent reporters all over the world and explored opening foreign bureaus. But then the industry took an economic nosedive that began a trend toward downsizing that continues. As his newsroom shrank from its high of 309 employees to just over 100, through buyouts, layoffs and attrition, Moore faced increasing expectations to do more with less.
He approached it as a management challenge to pick stories better and execute them faster. “Some stories didn’t get the time and attention they could have, but we also picked some really good targets,” he says. “The Pulitzers attest to that.”
Although he presided over the newsroom when The Post prevailed in the newspaper war, the Feb. 27, 2009, closing of the Rocky Mountain News proved no cause for celebration.
“It wasn’t a bittersweet thing; it was just sad,” says Moore, who saw two prominent dailies close in Toledo, Ohio, and Cleveland earlier in his career. “It was sad to see 200 journalists unemployed overnight. On the other hand, if the message hadn’t hit home before that we were in treacherous times, the Rocky closing drove it home. It was sad, but it enabled us to accelerate change.”
That meant an increasing emphasis on the digital product as newspaper circulation declined. Additionally, The Post launched The Cannabist, a stand-alone, online publication tasked with tracking all aspects of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado.
The online transition gained momentum through a merger and reorganization that put The Post under the banner of Digital First Media — a name designed to reflect the new priorities.
Meanwhile, the New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital ultimately gained control of The Post by buying up outstanding debt. That led to even more cost cutting.
When Moore left in 2016, Colacioppo took over a newsroom whose first order of business was yet another round of buyouts. That wasn’t exactly what she envisioned when, growing up in a home that subscribed to The Post, she dreamed of one day working there.
But in the year she has served as editor, the pace of change toward the digital delivery of news has continued to accelerate. She has watched the evolution from print to when, she says, “we told ourselves that we were digitally focused” to actually practicing that mantra and exploring new ways to tell stories.
These days, The Post operates in an environment where “something that was true two years ago or five years ago is not true today,” Colacioppo says, but it has moved beyond a defensive response to the economic and technological shifts that have disrupted and downsized the industry.
“At some point, you move away from thinking the market is doing this to us — the digital world is doing this to The Denver Post,” she says. “What makes the job satisfying is when you can get your head out of that, and take concrete steps to show that a newspaper that has been a leader in innovation all these 125 years, for better or worse, still has it in it to do that.”