Westword’s Michael Roberts reported yesterday on The Denver Post’s announcement that it plans to offer buyouts another 26 journalists:
If this reduction is realized, the Post’s newsroom will have lost more than a third of its workers in around a year.
As we reported in June 2015, there were approximately 165 newsroom members when the Post announced its previous buyout offer. By the end of that July, twenty people were gone — nineteen voluntarily, one via layoff.
The staff diminution has continued since then. The Denver Business Journal reports that there are about 130 people in the newsroom at present. Take 26 people away from that total and the Post’s newsroom will barely be over the century mark.
Can you imagine the sadness and frustration you’d feel if you worked at The Post right about now? It’s bad enough to watch from the outside.
Former Post Editor Greg Moore told me last month that the repeated waves of layoffs expedited his own departure from the newspaper, and how can you blame him or any of the reporters who decide to take the buyout and depart now.
Still, the newspaper landed on my porch this morning, with admirable reporting on a wide range of topics. That pretty much says it all about what we have and what we’ll lose.
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I always get at least a digital subscription to my local paper, even if I totally disagree with their editorial policies. Maybe newspapers as a medium are doomed – I hope not.
"depressing situation…….." More like gross mis-management to me, and lack of effective marketing. The more people get laid off, the worse the quality of the remaining product. I seldom buy it now on Mondays or Tuesdays because it's so thin.
The quality of the journalism at the Post, and the reach of its coverage, has deteriorated so much that it simply is not worth buying anymore. There was a time when it was the best newspaper in the interior West, covering stories from Montana to New Mexico and, certainly, providing an outstanding resource for all news here in Colorado. Those days are long over, unfortunately, and I do not think the paper will survive three more years.
The owner of the Post should take a lesson from Seattle and turn the Post into an online-only publication. That is the only possible way its doom can be held off.
I loved it back when both the Post and the Rocky were big fat serious city newspapers. We got the Post daily but both on Sunday because we preferred the Post in general but loved the Rocky's comics, sports and some of its local columnists. It took a good part of a leisurely Sunday to get around to everything in both. I still love a print paper in the morning at the kitchen table so the continuing deterioration of the print medium in city after city is painful.