The Colorado Sun

What you're reading

The Colorado Sun is a Denver-based statewide newsroom founded in 2018 by ten former Denver Post journalists who walked out together to start a journalist-owned, reader-supported alternative after hedge-fund owner Alden Global Capital imposed deep cuts on the Post. The Sun is structured as a journalist-owned public benefit corporation (PBC), with the founding journalists as owners, and is one of the most-cited US examples of the post-newspaper-collapse journalist-cooperative model.

The newsroom has grown to roughly 30 journalists covering Colorado statewide — politics from Denver to the Western Slope, the state legislature, the governor's office, K-12 and higher-ed, water and wildfire (defining Colorado beats), housing and homelessness in mountain towns and Front Range cities, criminal justice, business, the Broncos and Avalanche, and long-form narrative-style enterprise reporting that has won national recognition. The Sun publishes online with a membership-plus-subscription model and a daily newsletter (The Sunriser) that reaches a large statewide audience. It is one of the most successful US examples of the rebuild-after-newspaper-collapse model.

Ownership & funding

The Colorado Sun (journalist-owned public benefit corp). Funded primarily through memberships + subscription.

Journalist-owned public benefit corporation funded by reader memberships and subscriptions removes both hedge-fund-owner pressure and donor-class influence. Subscription and membership revenue rewards distinctive, statewide enterprise reporting that readers will pay for — Colorado-specific investigations, long-form narrative pieces, water-and-wildfire coverage, and trusted statehouse reporting. The PBC structure means the founding journalists make editorial-and-business decisions together rather than answering to outside owners. The trade-off is scale: the model has supported steady growth but can't underwrite the hundred-journalist scale of the pre-Alden Denver Post. Sponsorships from Colorado-anchored organizations supplement reader revenue. The model has become a template that other journalist-cooperative startups have studied.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places The Colorado Sun at Center with a factuality rating of High.

The Colorado Sun sits at Center because its day-to-day reporting on Colorado state government, water and wildfire, housing, and statewide civic affairs runs in a deliberately straight, source-driven register that the founding journalists' Denver Post training shaped. Coverage of the Polis administration treats the Democratic governor descriptively, including on intra-Democratic disputes over transportation funding, oil-and-gas regulation, and homelessness policy. Coverage of the Republican legislative minority and rural Western Slope perspectives gets serious treatment rather than dismissal. Investigations on wildfire-mitigation failures, mountain-town housing collapse, and oil-and-gas regulation hit Republicans and Democrats alike when the facts warranted.

The pattern leans modestly liberal on social issues because Colorado has shifted blue and the Sun's reader-and-membership base reflects that, but the lean is reader-base rather than editorially imposed. Coverage of Western Slope rural concerns is unusually serious for an urban-coastal-trained newsroom. Factuality lands at High because the reporting is document-driven, the founding journalists brought decades of Denver Post sourcing and standards into the operation, the corrections record is clean, and the long-form enterprise work has won national journalism prizes (Pulitzer Prize finalist nods, Investigative Reporters and Editors recognition). The membership audience would catch errors quickly, which creates strong accuracy pressure.

Editorial vs news side

The Colorado Sun runs an Opinion section publishing guest commentary from across the Colorado political spectrum — Democratic and Republican legislators, business leaders, advocacy-group spokespeople, academics, and civic-organization heads. The selection skews toward reasoned-discourse contributors rather than partisan firebrands, consistent with the journalist-owned PBC's editorial-independence posture. The news desk operates separately under different bylines and tagging. Readers should treat the news report as the basis for the Center rating and the opinion section as a curated forum that aims for political balance rather than as a clearly tilted opinion track. The two are visually and editorially distinguished on the site.

Why we include them in nwsly

Statewide Colorado newsroom founded by ex-Denver Post journalists.

Colorado is a fast-growing state with major US-template policy decisions on water, wildfire, housing, and energy transition, and the state has been a national leader on ballot-initiative politics. The Sun is the most-staffed statewide newsroom and the strongest accountability operation since Alden's cuts to the Denver Post. nwsly uses it for granular statewide reporting on water rights, wildfire policy, mountain-town housing, oil-and-gas regulation, and statehouse coverage that other Colorado outlets don't reach at the same depth. The journalist-owned PBC structure makes it editorially independent in a way few US local outlets are. Among Center sources, it brings distinctive Western and Mountain West coverage.

Recent nwsly briefs citing The Colorado Sun

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