What a struggling Western community taught me about reporting outside the bubble in a time of industry tumult.

In 2018, GateHouse Media bought Colorado’s oldest family-owned daily. Newsroom staff fell from 30 to 18.

By Jill Rothenberg

“Hi there,” I said to the woman pushing a cart through the narrow aisles of the Dollar General. There are 18 dollar stores and counting in Pueblo, the southern Colorado city of 111,000 where I have lived and reported for the past six years.

“I’m writing about dollar stores for the Colorado Sun, a digital news site based in Denver,” I told the woman. “Can I ask you some questions?”

“Who’s this for again?” she asked, not seeming to recognize the name.

“The Colorado Sun. It’s an online news site founded by former Denver Post editors and reporters — after the Post was bought last year.”

“Sure, but I need to watch my daughter over there,” she said, pointing to a young woman placing cans in and out of her cart. “She’s developmentally disabled and I bring her here to be around people and to practice going through the check-out line, unloading groceries, and making change.”

Cheryl was 58 and lived near the Dollar General on Pueblo Boulevard, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. Still in her uniform from her job at a nearby nursing home, she explained that the dollar stores are less overwhelming for her daughter than the area’s four Walmarts. Like so many of her fellow residents, she was also drawn by the prices. Pueblo has a poverty rate nearly double the state average of 10 percent.

Cheryl’s story is one of many that I heard reporting on the growth of Pueblo’s dollar stores. But, as with so many other small towns and cities, it is not clear which publications will be around in ten years to continue telling them.

Pueblo is more fortunate than most. Its longtime paper, the Pueblo Chieftain, continues to publish, and yellow Chieftain delivery boxes remain a common site on front yard gates. But it is not the paper it once was. Until its sale to GateHouse Media in May of 2018, it was the oldest family-owned daily in the state, with roots as a weekly founded in 1868 by a local physician; it was later transformed into one of Colorado’s biggest and most respected dailies by businessman Frank Hoag.

After GateHouse purchased the paper from Hoag’s great-granddaughter, the company quickly began reducing staff through early retirement buyouts and layoffs. The casualties included some of the paper’s most beloved bylines, including 30-year veteran reporter Peter Roper and longtime business editor Dennis Darrow. In the first 18 months of the new ownership, the reporting staff was reduced from 30 to 18. (GateHouse owns 154 daily newspapers, most of which are designed out of its hub in Austin, Texas. With GateHouse expected to acquire Gannett for $1.4 billion, this number is set to grow.)

When GateHouse bought the Chieftain, the paper reported on its own sale in a story written by editor Steve Henson, but the staff cuts were not reported. (Henson did not reply to an email for this story.) The instinct in the newsroom was to treat the cuts like any other local story — as they would have been treated under the longtime family owners. Apparently, GateHouse saw things differently.

“The journalists did want to self-report,” said Luke Lyons, a Pueblo native, the Chieftain’s arts and entertainment reporter and the paper’s labor union chair. “We wanted to let the public know that the paper isn’t designed in Pueblo anymore, that there have been layoffs, this is why the funnies look different. But we were told by higher-ups that we couldn’t report it.”

This lack of transparency is a common problem with this new generation of newspaper chains, says Corey Hutchins, Columbia Journalism Review’s Rocky Mountain contributor for the United States Project and Colorado College’s Journalist in Residence, whose weekly newsletter chronicles journalism across the state.

“If local newspapers want to foster trust in their communities, then they have to be honest about what’s happening to them,” Hutchins said. “When a newspaper reports about layoffs at a steel mill or layoffs at a hospital, which is very important news, why do they feel it’s not important news when there are layoffs at their own paper? Why don’t they let readers see that the newspaper is shrinking, and it’s being delivered in fewer places with fewer journalists?”

This past June, Lyons and some of his colleagues protested Gatehouse’s ongoing staff cuts during a lunchtime protest outside the newsroom. Some of the paper’s employees held up signs reading “Gut-house.” The protest and the larger story of the staff cuts were covered in the state media outside of Pueblo, but that, too, is shrinking and struggling to find a footing for the future. Like dollar stores rising in the shadows of Walmart, a new generation of journalism start-ups have begun to pop up in their place.