BOULDER, Colo. — Chuck Plunkett said he knew that he was risking his job as the editorial page editor of The Denver Post when he wrote an impassioned editorial last month blasting the newspaper’s hedge-fund owners as “vulture capitalists” who had hobbled Colorado’s largest newspaper with deep layoffs and cost-cutting.

On Thursday, Mr. Plunkett resigned after he said an executive who oversees the newspaper refused to run another sharp-edged editorial Mr. Plunkett had written for this Sunday’s newspaper. Mr. Plunkett said the editorial included new criticism of Alden Global Capital, the New York hedge fund that runs The Post and other newspapers through a subsidiary called Digital First Media.

“What they were asking was to be quiet,” Mr. Plunkett said in an interview. “For me to just sit quietly by would be hypocritical.”

Mr. Plunkett said his editorial had discussed how Alden continued to cut newsroom jobs despite making significant profits, its efforts to keep articles about newsroom turmoil out of its own newspapers and the firing of the editorial page editor of The Boulder Daily Camera, another Alden-owned paper in Colorado. Dave Krieger, the editor in Boulder, was fired last month after he self-published an editorial that excoriated Alden’s management.