Aspen paper's self-censorship, firing of editor, amid settlement with billionaire developer trigger local outcry

The Aspen Times office (Aspen Daily News photo)

Turmoil at rural daily The Aspen Times in Colorado illustrates how editorial decisions by outside managers and lack of transparency can undermine trust in a newspaper, not just for local residents but for employees of the paper, Sam Tabachnik reports for The Denver Post.

The trouble started when Swedish billionaire Vladislav Doronin, who was developing a controversial luxury hotel in Aspen, sued the Times for defamation a few months ago because he believed the paper's coverage of him falsely painted him as a "corrupt Russian oligarch," Shelly Bradbury reports for the Post.

The Times' upper management opted to withhold two opinion pieces that they worried might upset Doronin as the paper tried to negotiate a settlement. Top editor David Krause resigned shortly afterward, citing poor health and new management. New editor-in-chief and Times veteran Andrew Travers "published the columns along with a series of internal emails about why the articles had been killed," Tabachnik reports. "The Times’ publisher, Allison Pattillo, had supported his decision, Travers said. He said he only agreed to take the top job believing there would no further restrictions on what he could and couldn’t publish. But a day after publishing the columns and emails, they were removed from the Aspen Times’ website." Then Travers was fired, after less than a week on the job.

Roger Marolt, the writer whose columns had been spiked, promptly resigned, and the paper didn't run his farewell column. His columns will soon start running in the town's other daily, the locally owned Aspen Daily News. Travers and Marolt were only the latest exits under the Times' new owners, Tabachnik reports. "Ever since Ogden Newspapers out of West Virginia bought a chain of Colorado ski-town newspapers from Swift Communications in December, an accumulation of names has been sliding off of mastheads like a slow-moving avalanche," Corey Hutchins writes for Inside the News in Colorado.

Locals expressed alarm at news of the paper's self-censorship and praised the Aspen Daily News for reporting on the matter. One man wrote in a June 17 letter to the editor in the Daily News: "If Ogden is willing to censor our press and fire Andrew for allowing an important local columnist to question the motives of a new developer, who knows what they will do when the next billionaire in Aspen is not happy about his treatment by the local media? Hire Andrew back and keep The Aspen Times from becoming irrelevant. Hats off, Aspen Daily News ... for keeping it local."

During a May 24 city council meeting, Aspen's mayor blamed the tumult on outside ownership (The Times was last owned locally about 20 years ago): "I know that the leadership and the ownership of The Aspen Times may be out of town and not understand what is actually going on here, but I would hope that they spend a little bit more time looking into what the local affairs are and what this newspaper means to our community for information."

In a June 14 meeting, city council member Ward Hauenstein went further, begging wealthy locals to buy the paper, Tabachnik reports. "The owner of one of our newspapers may be a bad fit for Aspen. We value truth and freedom," Hauenstein said. "These values are being stolen from us. They were sold to the highest investor."

Scott Stanford, Ogden's regional publisher, defended its handling of the matter. "As a newspaper, we have a responsibility when someone raises a concern about our content to take that concern seriously, review it and, if it is unfair, inaccurate and not based on facts that are already established, then we should evaluate what steps we should take,” Stanford told The Post. That might include "editing, modifying or, in some cases, deleting content that we deem doesn’t live up to those standards ... That’s not suppressing free speech — that’s ensuring we do our jobs responsibly."

But Travers told the Post the columns never should have been an issue for management. "This is a columnist in a resort town writing about hotel development," he said. "It’s not the Pentagon Papers. This is pretty basic stuff in terms of what a newspaper columnist expects to do in a town like Aspen."

Travers also told the Post he's worried about the wider implications of such decisions: "If people with the money or the power to intimidate a news organization can do that and silence public discourse over something as small as this, what does that say about the state of press freedom in the U.S.?"

UPDATE, July 15: In response to calls for a boycott of the Times, Marolt writes that residents should just pay it no mind: "Ignoring requires no pacing; it induces little fatigue. Boycotting sounds like a time suck, whereas ignoring one of the newspapers might free some up."