Denver Post editors resign amid dispute with ownership

Three top figures at The Denver Post, including its former owner, have resigned amid budget and staff cuts made by the hedge fund that owns the Post.

Alden Global Capital owns a controlling interest in Digital First Media, which operates The Denver Post and dozens of newspaper properties nationwide, including the Daily Freeman and New York newspaper properties in Saratoga Springs, Troy and Oneida.

Several Denver Post reporters tweeted that Dean Singleton stepped down Friday as chairman and from his position on the editorial board. He owned the newspaper from 1987 until 2013 and saw it through tough economic times and an intense rivalry with the Rocky Mountain News.

“I once told people I wanted the Post to be one of the 10 best newspapers in America, and I think we achieved that,” Singleton said in an interview published in the newspaper in October.

Senior editors Dana Coffield and Larry Ryckman also resigned.

“I’m sad to leave, but it was time to go. I will be rooting for those still fighting the good fight,” Ryckman tweeted.

The Post published an editorial on April 6 headlined “As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved,” calling on Alden Global Capital to sell the newspaper after it cut 30 more positions in the newsroom, leaving it at a fraction of its size just a few years ago. Editorial Page Editor Chuck Plunkett did not inform the newspaper’s editor or owners of his intentions to publish the editorial.

He resigned Thursday after he said another piece critical of the company was rejected.

Plunkett said in an interview that he resigned after Digital First Media management refused to run a new piece that mentioned last week’s dismissal of an editor at a DFM-owned newspaper, as well as new financial data on the company, controlled by Alden Global Capital.

“I was trying to follow good journalism ethics and I was not allowed to do it anymore,” Plunkett said.

Plunkett said it was made clear to him he had to stay quiet and he did not publish some opinion pieces submitted on the newspaper’s future, which has roiled Denver’s leadership and led to a national debate over the future of local journalism. Then, last week, the editorial page editor of The Boulder Daily Camera said he was dismissed after he self-published an editorial echoing Plunkett’s that had been rejected by leadership.

On Tuesday, a prominent newspaper analyst published what he said were internal figures of the profits Digital First Media made off its newspapers. Plunkett decided he couldn’t stay silent and filed another editorial. But he had to send it to the Post’s editor, Lee Ann Colacioppo, to send it higher up for approval. The piece was rejected, Plunkett said, and he resigned.

“I was boxed into a corner and given an ethical quandary I couldn’t resolve,” Plunkett said.