April 26, 2012 10:41 PM UTC

Copy Editors Next on Denver Post's Chopping Block?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Westword’s Michael Roberts:

Within the past several months, the Denver Post has made buyout deals with nineteen staffers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Keefe, and laid off popular columnists Mike Littwin and Penny Parker, among others. But the cuts aren’t over. In an internal memo on view below, editor Greg Moore teases a decrease in the number of copy editors; our sources say as many as two-thirds of the positions could be eliminated. And that’s not all.

Earlier this month, sources told us about pay cuts for sports columnist Woody Paige and opinion writer Vincent Carroll, the layoff of Viva Colorado editor and publisher Rowena Alegria and editorial print reductions estimated at eighteen pages per week, with ten of those said to be coming from the sports section.

Not that editorial is the only department facing diminution. Indeed, Alegria was officially a business-department employee — and Moore’s e-mail to staffers, sent Tuesday afternoon, alludes to downsizing at divisions across the width and breadth of the Post’s operation. This jibes with “Service Woes at the Denver Post,” a piece published earlier this week in Colorado Pols, a blog that continues to have a tense relationship with the paper of record. Back in 2010, as you’ll recall, a Post lawyer sent Colorado Pols a letter alleging that the site was lifting too much of its content. In response, Colorado Pols declared that it would stop using any Post material, and it’s stuck with this policy (and typically alluded to the paper generically) for nearly two years…

According to Roberts, there will be another staff meeting on Monday to go over these latest changes, which might involve reporters copyediting each other, relying on an out-of-state resource, or maybe just a lot more errors. As our reader noted last weekend, you might not get your paper anymore anyway, so maybe there’s no need to sweat the little things.

Roberts also cites a report that the Post is trying to sublet a part of their downtown office building being vacated by offices of the Colorado Supreme Court, and that if a tenant were interested in the entire building, “the paper would consider moving.” Despite this, the story in today’s Post “stresses” that the paper will remain in business. Says Roberts,

Once upon a time, such a reassurance would have been unnecessary — but not now.