Cuts at newspapers are common these days. The owner and publisher of the Salt Lake Tribune, a former Digital First property, this week announced that it is laying off staff and considering shrinking its print edition, to address a 40 percent decline in ad revenue. But Alden’s cuts are happening at twice the industry rate. Furthermore, leaked financial information last week confirmed what had been rumored of the privately held company for years: Digital First Media reported a 17 percent operating margin, the highest in the industry, in its 2017 fiscal year. Its profit totaled nearly $160 million, $28 million of which came from The Denver Post. As the Nieman Lab analyst Ken Doctor wrote, “Alden Global Capital is making so much money wrecking local journalism it might not want to stop anytime soon.”

My colleagues and I have risked our jobs to rebel against Digital First’s bleeding of its papers at Alden’s behest. The insurrection started a couple years ago with sporadic protests outside our building near the state capitol, some of us speaking out in articles in local media. It ramped up in March, when, weeks after moving our newsroom out of downtown and into our printing press in Adams County (which is, quite literally, in the most polluted ZIP code in the U.S.), we learned that 30 more staffers would be laid off. That represented one-third of our remaining newsroom.

The Denver Newspaper Guild, which had been negotiating with owners for years for raises, to little avail, again mobilized. Reporters spoke out on social media, sharing the #NewsMatters and #AldenExposed hashtags, and signed petitions. On April 8, a six-page editorial section in The Denver Post protested Alden’s irresponsible ownership, garnering national coverage.

In late April, the Boulder Daily Camera fired its editorial-page editor, Dave Krieger, after he published a critical piece about the paper’s owners. Then, last week, The Denver Post’s editorial-page editor, Chuck Plunkett, resigned in protest. He said management had told him not to run editorials criticizing Alden or Digital First, and had kept him from publishing an editorial blasting Alden for the size of its profits. Plunkett spoke at our rally on Tuesday, his voice shaking with emotion. “Don’t let the vultures get you down!” he shouted. I called him a hero, loudly, for the cameras.

These weeks have been surreal, spent watching people I’ve worked with for my entire adult life get laid off or resign in disgust and sadness. Many more staffers have left on similarly bad terms, poached by competing publications or repelled by the cognitive dissonance of doing good work for bad owners. Over the last week, I’ve found myself spending nearly as much time planning protests as writing articles.

Evan Semón

This is not why I got into journalism. I moved to Denver from Dayton, Ohio, in the summer of 2000 with a vague dream of working at The Denver Post. I didn’t know anyone in Colorado, except an aunt and uncle in the suburbs, and I didn’t even have a job waiting for me; my only “in” was that I had toured the Post’s offices and gotten a brief audience with its features editor. I had been writing for newspapers since high school, and as a graduate of Bowling Green State University’s journalism program, I harbored romantic notions of hacking it at a major metro paper.