Boulder Weekly shuts down publication for first time in 32 years amid internal revolt

By Corey Hutchins | Inside the News in Colorado, Substack

The news behind the news in Colorado

This week, as the nation’s annual conference for alternative weekly newspapers was convening in Madison, Wisconsin, one of its Colorado members was imploding.

Shay Castle, who had been editor of Boulder Weekly for just under two years, said on July 2 that the paper’s owner, Stewart Sallo, had fired her.

A week later, things utterly collapsed at the free alt-weekly that has served the city since 1993. “The newsroom is gone,” Castle said over the phone this Tuesday. “All four of us are gone.”

While the paper typically comes out on Thursdays and populates news racks around Boulder County, this week those racks are empty for the first time in 32 years. No Big Goodbye, no final issue.

“I’m not sure exactly when we’ll be back in publication,” Sallo said in an interview Wednesday. He is planning to take the summer to reassess the viability of print media and his own role in it as someone who is past retirement age.

The reporting for this newsletter is informed by interviews with staff and ownership and from reviewing emails, memos, and at least one audio recording.

What led to the sudden fall of Boulder Weekly?

It wasn’t all that sudden for those who lived through it.

For staff, the meltdown wasn’t because of one thing, but a confluence of things that eventually boiled over. The loss of Publisher Fran Zankowski in January had left the newsroom exposed directly to its ownership in a way that it had not been before — and staff recoiled at things the owner did or tried to do.

The big ones were Sallo proposing layoffs (and uncertainty about when or if they might come), reduced hours for staff, seeking to cut health insurance, wanting to review any coverage of Israel and Palestine, and issues involving a plan for the newsroom to try and become an employee-owned company.

The pandemic had been particularly hard on Boulder Weekly’s bottom line and recovering from it had been slow. Sallo, who runs the business with his wife, Mari Nevar, said in an interview that while he tried hard not to, he realized he might need to cut staff in order to keep the paper alive. He involved the newsroom in conversations about it.

In early April, when told the company would stop paying a portion of health insurance premiums for employees, Castle sent an email that included this:

“At this point, we are hanging on only with the hopes of taking over the paper. But it is becoming increasingly untenable, both mentally/emotionally and financially, and we have our own difficult decisions to make about the viability of remaining at this company.”

More recently, though, toward the end of June, the staff sent a memo to Sallo and Nevar suggesting, among other things, that ownership invest money from the previous sale of an office building, cut or forego their own salary, or offer a loan that could be transferred to new owners.

“You must make the decision you feel is right,” it read. “As must we.”

Why no paper this week? Or … maybe ever?

During a meeting after dismissing the paper’s editor, Sallo and Nevar told those remaining that the reason was largely because of personal differences, not the editor’s work.

They said they didn’t feel respected or welcome in their own company and didn’t have a solid understanding about why. Sallo said it no longer felt like a family-type working environment where people could work out their differences as it had back in the day.

“A publisher and editor cannot work together when there’s that thick of a wall and that kind of antipathy,” he told them at one point. He also acknowledged that he understood the staff were close and believed that if he ever let Castle go, the rest might walk out the door. The owners said they hoped they could work out a plan to keep the paper together.

Later, Sallo asked the arts and culture editor, Jezy Gray, if he would step in as editor.

Gray says he declined in part because of a lack of trust in ownership over a variety of reasons, including an insistence on reviewing certain articles prior to publication. So he quit this Monday after three years at the paper.

Reporters Kaylee Harter, who had been there for nearly two years, and Tyler Hickman, who had been there about a year, were let go shortly after. They didn’t feel equipped or prepared to put out an entire paper, including multiple editor duties, on their own with such short notice. Oversight of coverage was also an issue.

No staff, no paper. As for the future, Sallo isn’t sure.

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