Writers and editors at the Denver Post recently did what more than a few journalists have only dreamed of doing: They denounced their proprietor in the pages of the Denver Post. So audacious was their action that the gesture made the front page of the New York Times, which reported approvingly that the Post “is in open revolt against its owner” and “pulled no punches” in its weekend Perspective section: “News matters,” read the Post headline: “Colo[rado] should demand the newspaper it deserves.”
The immediate cause of the newsroom rebellion was a familiar one. The Post’s owner, a New York-based hedge fund called Alden Global Capital, had demanded significant staff reductions and the Post’s editorial-page editor asked, in an impassioned essay, whether “these heartbreaking instructions . . . represent the beginning of the end” for the Post. Then he issued a challenge: If the “vulture capitalists” at Alden Global aren’t “willing to do good journalism here, [they] should sell the Post to owners who will.”
