Bloodbath at The Denver Post— what can be done?
“On Wednesday, Denver Post journalists learned the budget ax would fall hard on their newsroom cutting deeper than previous layoffs and splintering roughly a third of their ranks.
The news, tweeted out by reporters during an all-hands-on-deck meeting led by top editor Lee Ann Colacioppo, reached near media saturation in Denver given the scale of the bloodletting at Colorado’s flagship paper. All job categories will be affected, said senior news editor Dana Coffield, meaning editors, reporters, copy editors, designers, photographers, and more. Speaking to The Washington Post, politics reporter wunderkind Jesse Paul described “sobs,” “gasps,” and “expletives” upon learning the news. The cuts slash 25 union employees and five non-union employees, said newsroom union leader and reporter Kieran Nicholson.
By now, Denver Post staffers are used to news about themselves and their paper’s secretive corporate hedge-fund owner Alden Global Capital, known for its bloodthirsty cash-harvesting and its control of Post parent company Digital First Media. Two years ago, journalists rallied outside their own building in protest of this havoc-wreaking overlord. One week in 2016, both Denver’s alt-weekly Westword and the city’s lifestyle magazine 5280 were running cover stories about Alden and the effects of its staff reductions. It was only four months ago when the latest layoffs— about a dozen— lashed the broadsheet with four of them coming from the newsroom. Cuts have already sliced deeply into the paper, which Colacioppo acknowledged in a memo to staff released Wednesday.”
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Hutchins, Corey. The Colorado Independent 16 March 2018.