When I wrote last week that the nonprofit National Trust for Local News had sold 21 of its Colorado newspapers to a corporate chain called Times Media Group, I observed: “I honestly don’t know what kind of reputation the company has. But it’s ironic that a nonprofit founded as an alternative to chain ownership has found it necessary to cut a deal with one of those chains.”
Well, now. According to Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab, the chain, which owned some 60 papers in California and Arizona before the Colorado deal, has reputation for “gutting” its properties. Scire writes:
The Times Media Group is, to put it mildly, an odd choice of buyer for the mission-driven National Trust for Local News. The Trust is a nonprofit that has emphasized the importance of local control for local newspapers and describes community newspapers as “vital civic assets.” The Times Media Group is an out-of-state, for-profit media company with a history of reducing local newsrooms.
Colorado media-watcher Corey Hutchins calls Scire’s article “the Nieman Lab story heard ’round Colorado.”
The papers that the Trust sold off are in the Denver suburbs; the nonprofit is retaining seven other papers in more rural areas, where it says the news desert problem is more acute. Among those laid off was Linda Shapley, the editorial director of Colorado Community Media (CCM), the umbrella group for the Trust’s papers before the selloff. I interviewed Shapley for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and she’s been a guest on our podcast.
Last week I tried unsuccessfully to connect with Jerry and Ann Healey, who sold CCM to the Trust in 2021. Jerry Healey did talk with Hutchins, telling him that he “kind of bought into their [the Trust’s] vision,” adding, “But after a while, I realized that it wasn’t working.”
In September 2021, I interviewed the Healeys at a coffee shop just outside of Hartford, Connecticut. They were there to visit their daughter, who worked for ESPN. They had sold their papers to the National Trust just a few months earlier, and at that time they were hopeful they had left their legacy in good hands. I interviewed Shapley at CCM’s headquarters in Englewood, Colorado, the following week.
What follows is an except from “What Works in Community News,” which I co-wrote with Ellen Clegg.
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David Gilbert, a reporter with Colorado Community Media (CCM), was summoned into publisher and co-owner Jerry Healey’s office one day in the spring of 2021. “I’ve got news for you,” Healey told him. “I’ve sold the papers.” Healey wanted Gilbert to write the story about the transaction. CCM published 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in Denver’s suburbs. Gilbert, who’d been on staff for four years, imagined the worst — namely, a corporate chain owner was coming in that would slash costs and eliminate jobs. His first thought, he said, was “Oh, crap, time to pack up my things. I wonder if I can get my job back driving a truck.”
Gilbert needn’t have worried. Jerry Healey, along with his wife and business partner, Ann Healey, had decided to retire, and they’d been looking for a way since the previous fall to sell to someone who would preserve their papers. A complicated transaction came together quickly. Their company was purchased by the nonprofit National Trust for Local News in collaboration with locally based media organizations. A new public benefit corporation, the Colorado News Conservancy, was set up to run CCM, to be owned jointly by the National Trust and The Colorado Sun; the Sun assists with operations as well. The Sun’s minority stake could grow to majority ownership over time. [The Sun’s relationship with CCM has since been unwound.] “We had basically three weeks between the time that the funding commitments were made and we had to close the transaction,” said Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, chief executive officer of the National Trust. “So it was a lot of work, and we had to get bare-bones agreements just so we could move forward to close.”
The sale was heartening because it showed that the owners of independent newspapers don’t always have to sell out to cost-cutting corporations. The question, though, is how many owners are willing to make the financial sacrifice that might be necessary to sell to a community-based organization rather than to a national chain that would be willing to pay top dollar and then earn it back by cutting coverage and staffing. The price of the CCM deal was not made public, and Jerry Healey explained that the two sides had signed a nondisclosure agreement; the transaction was financed with a loan for $1.5 million from FJC, a philanthropic investment foundation. But Healey did say that he and his wife “potentially” left some money on the table by not selling to a for-profit chain, and he said they also agreed to help with financing. “This was outside our comfort level,” he said. “But we believe in the importance of this that much where we are willing to take some of that risk.” Added Ann Healey, who was CCM’s executive editor off and on as well as a high school journalism and Spanish teacher: “We left our papers in a good place and, with good leadership, which it looks like they’ve got, they will be successful.”
The merger has provided the Sun with an opportunity to recruit talented CCM journalists to its own staff. For example, David Gilbert, the CCM reporter whom Jerry Healey asked to report on the sale, was later hired by the Sun; we met him in the Sun newsroom on the first day of his new job. Larry Ryckman [then the Sun’s editor, now the publisher] described CCM as profitable and said, “Our job is not to break it.” Nor did CCM present any financial challenges to the Sun, Ryckman said, since the Sun’s contribution was not cash but, rather, “sweat equity and know-how, boots on the ground, operational muscle.”
Among the first orders of business after the CCM acquisition had been completed was to hire a publisher. That turned out to be Linda Shapley, a veteran Colorado journalist and executive with experience in news and business operations at The Denver Post and elsewhere. In an interview at the CCM offices in suburban Englewood, Shapley said she was recruited by Ryckman and Dana Coffield, another Post veteran, who is the Sun’s senior editor. “I thought about it really hard,” Shapley said. “But I’ve been a lieutenant for a lot of really great generals. And this is my opportunity to be a general.”
The combined newsroom at CCM comprises about 22 journalists, Shapley said, although she hoped to be able to add to that total over time. Total circulation was somewhere in the neighborhood of 120,000 to 130,000; some of the papers are paid and some are free. Her goal, she said, was to improve the papers’ digital presence while not alienating customers who prefer print. That might require a culture shift, especially on the part of advertisers. Jerry Healey, for example, said that he sometimes offered deals to advertisers combining print, digital, and email only to be told they weren’t interested, informing him: “We called you for print.” Shapley’s response: “I totally get that there are advertisers out there who don’t necessarily see digital as a way forward. But they recognize the fact that this is going to be how people find you. So I don’t see them as playing against each other but as something that can work in tandem.”
In a business whose upper ranks remain dominated by white men, Shapley also said she hoped to use her position as a visible Latina leader to encourage more diversity in journalism. “I’m very cognizant of the fact that there aren’t enough journalists of color and that there are communities that aren’t getting heard,” she said. “Obviously that conversation has really started to grow in volume. And I’ve really tried to be somebody who’s listening to that and trying to figure out what I can do.”
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