How the town got its news fix

You could say the Aspen Daily News lasted because it happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Much has changed in the local media landscape in the 30 years of this newspaper’s history, but the former oft-derided street-sheet turned well-established-daily-publication found its niche and managed to stayed there.

In 1978, radio was the dominant news source, with two local radio stations — KSNO and KSPN, both still in existence today — dominating the airwaves and providing Aspenites their daily dose of local news.

“There were three people in the KSPN newsroom,” recalled Daily News founder Dave Danforth, who was one of them for a time. “We broke a lot of stories and got people fired.”

The Aspen Times at that time was a 97-year-old weekly newspaper, and people lined up at its office on Main Street every Thursday to get the town’s only print publication, said Andy Stone, who is retiring after 34 years (including a few sabbaticals) at that paper.

As it’s explained a few times in this edition, Danforth and his partners started the Aspen Daily News on a whim, not at all expecting it to last, after Danforth was fired from his reporter job at KSPN.

“We needed something to keep us out of the bars and off the streets,” he said. “Everybody thinks (my firing from KSPN) caused the birth of the Daily News but it didn’t.”

One of Danforth’s partners, Mark Shaw, had seen a “street sheet” with ads around the edges while on assignment in Miles City, Mont., which is how that idea came about, and Lee Duncan, who also had a radio career, knew how to write headlines. And it just so happened a friend had a press he was willing to print the street sheet on, so the trio could conceivably make some money on their hastily dreamed-up venture. Finally, a local story of scandalous proportions broke on the morning the first edition was being put together, and the name “Aspen Daily News” was conceived and pasted to the top.

By then The Aspen Times had outlasted a handful of short-lived weeklies, there was a once-a-week local news program on GrassRoots TV, and the glossy local magazines of the day were too infrequent to really report news.

“(Danforth) was right to know that people wanted their news more than once a week,” said Stone, who noted that the Times, sitting in a position of power, could be “a little lazy.” And even though “we probably foolishly scoffed it somewhat — our attitude was sort of amused — obviously it worked. The town had an appetite for something more often.”

And the new street-sheet was free — likely the first free print news source in the country — while the weekly Times was 25 cents, so that was an immediate draw.

Power of the press

The 1980s saw a lot of changes in the media landscape. Cable TV was a rapidly growing industry, and as more  people got cable (including nascent stations like CNN), “it gave people more of a news habit,” said Danforth. A couple of short-lived local TV stations also featured local news, but one went bankrupt and another moved to Denver.

Local commercial radio stations had their fair share of shakeups and by the end of the decade, radio’s relevance as a local news source was reduced. KSPN’s news budget was slashed and KSNO, which was started by Aspen Times Publisher Bil Dunaway and first broadcast in the Times building, had been sold to the first of many out-of-town owners in 1978. (It wasn’t until much later that public radio stations like KAJX and KDNK became respected local news sources.)

This was of course long before the Internet and the cell phone — even fax machines were not in widespread use until the late-’80s — and living in the remote mountains of Colorado meant getting the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post a day late, and not much else in terms of print news.

After the first few shaky off-seasons, the Daily News was publishing six days per week, Monday through Saturday, and in February 1984 it got its own press. That was significant because it meant the newspaper could print more than four pages, thus fill more pages with advertising — and it did.

Stone believes that it was around that time that “people began to take it a little more seriously.” Within a couple years of getting its press, the Daily News started cutting into the Times’ advertising, he said.

Stone and a colleague, cartoonist Chris Cassatt, told Dunaway that the Times would have to start its own daily to compete, but the news-hound publisher initially shied away from the time and effort that would be required.

The Aspen Times eventually relented and started publishing the Times Daily in 1988.

 A daily will kill a weekly and a free paper will kill a paper you have to pay for, said Stone. “The Times had no choice but to start a daily.”

True competition

Two daily newspapers in a relatively small town changed just about everything.

“There was no danger that somebody would fart and it wouldn’t get reported,” said Stone. “The town gets gone over with a fine tooth comb. And that’s good and bad in town.”

Every story that can be dug up is dug up, whether it’s newsworthy or not, said Stone. Two newspapers keep officials on their toes and in the spotlight, but it can also cloud news judgment, because both newspapers would rather run a story than take the risk of being “scooped” by the other paper.

Having two papers also avoids “predatory pricing” with advertising rates, said Danforth. Newspapers with monopolies can essentially demand any price for ads.

“You can change the way a town operates when you have two newspapers,” he said, noting that for some years, Aspen restaurants would compete heatedly for customers by advertising their daily specials. And they could do it because it was cheap.

Another unique thing about Aspen’s newspapers is that both were run for the longest time by journalists —  Dunaway and Danforth — rather than executives.

“This town became news junkies because the news organizations growing the fastest were run by journalists,” said Danforth.

The Aspen Daily News added a Sunday edition in 1996, and the Times, which published Monday through Friday and put out its weekly first on Thursdays and later on Fridays, added weekend papers in 2005. Even in this regard things are different in Aspen: Sunday papers are the smallest (least advertising) of the week, in contrast with the fat Sunday editions of major metro markets.

Dead trees still dominate

In the 1990s, Dunaway ended his 38-year reign at The Aspen Times, and after a few changes in ownership and management — and losing lots of money when it started the Glenwood Independent — the two papers were sold to Swift, a Nevada-based chain that owns dozens of newspapers in Colorado, California and Nevada, among other states.

There are differing opinions on how much the Times’ ownership by a corporate chain has changed the local media landscape, but one things certain: for many people, picking up both free papers every day is a tradition.

“We knew sooner or later that free circulation would win,” said Danforth. “The whole concept is we deliver the eyes and advertisers pay for it. We don’t survive on paid circulation because it’s an old fuddy-duddy concept.”

And despite a now long-standing rivalry, the Times and the Daily News will print each other’s papers (and be very gracious about it) when something goes wrong with the press.

As for what’s next in the local media landscape, neither Danforth nor Stone purport to know. The rise of the Internet as a global news source could hardly be imagined even a decade ago, and so far, Aspen is still dominated by “two ink-smeared-on-dead-trees” products, said Stone.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but both are also skeptical of any Web source besides the two papers for hard local daily news.

“I don’t think either of these newspapers are going anywhere,” said Stone, pointing out that all across the country, traditional news media “are still generating 99 percent of the news content. It begins with a news reporting staff” and then it’s reprinted everywhere.

“The question is,” asked Danforth, “how far down do you read in those (Internet) stories? You can get news on the Internet but people are consuming news a lot less. There’s something about spreading the paper out in front of you.”

lutz@aspendailynews.com