Amid flurry of newspaper closures on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, Burlington sees a heroic revival
In its current office on 14th Street, just a few blocks north of the sprawling, freestanding building that formerly housed the paper, newly hired Record employee Shelby Carter tended to the visitor's request. He wanted to purchase a subscription — just the latest in a wave of support that greeted the paper's sudden closure and unexpected revival by a businessman hailed as a local hero.
"In just the past week I've done at least 10 subscriptions, if not more," Carter said. "And that's just me."
The improbable turnaround story, which injected a sliver of optimism into a flailing industry, sprung from some of Colorado rural newspapers' darkest days. This town of 3,100 near the Kansas border learned in mid-July from owner Prairie Mountain Media — a subsidiary of MediaNews Group, which owns several Colorado papers, including The Denver Post — that the company would shut down the broadsheet weekly, citing the familiar culprits of declining advertising revenue and higher production costs.
The news landed amid a sudden flurry of body blows to an already skeletal collection of news outlets on the state's Eastern Plains. Within days, five weekly papers announced that they would cease printing.
In the far southeastern corner of Colorado, owner Kent Brooks was telling readers that Springfield's Plainsman Herald, another publication with more than a century of history, planned to halt its print edition at the end of the year. The paper has been hanging by its fingernails while changing hands multiple times over the last several years.
Meanwhile, the Lamar Ledger in Prowers County — another weekly Prairie Mountain Media property — announced that it would be shutting down. Just days later, the Fort Morgan Times and Brush News-Tribune, also PMM properties in the northeastern part of the state, joined the ranks of those abandoning print editions.
Corey Hutchins, a journalism instructor at Colorado College who writes a weekly newsletter on media happenings with support from the Colorado Media Project, has chronicled the disturbing regularity of newspaper closings for several years. But the concentration of the most recent closures struck him as alarming.
"Typically you'll see it happen in one town somewhere, and then, weeks or months later, another newspaper might blink out somewhere else," he said. "And this is the first time that I think I really noticed it happening in one region. And unfortunately, this is a region where the news and information ecosystem was already pretty thin.
"So the real question moving forward is: What happens when a newspaper disappears, maybe not just from a county, but when multiple papers disappear from a region around the same time?"
A rescue from just down the highwayBurlington needed a hero.
Christina Castillo, co-owner of C&C Auto Body and member of the local chamber of commerce board, said the news of the Record's closing was met with "a lot of devastation and shock" in a town that already tends to feel isolated. The loss of any business in such a small community is "a kick in the gut," she added, but the Record also serves as a common connector with its coverage of everything from elections to school athletics as well as advertising that links residents to local merchants.
"It's just so crucial to our culture out here, supporting our neighbors and supporting our local businesses," said Castillo, whose company sponsors the paper's sports scoreboard. "So it was a huge blow. How can a town the size of Burlington function without a newspaper?"
Just as the community began to process the loss, murmurs surfaced that perhaps someone would emerge to take up the slack and save the Record. As the rumors gained traction, Castillo described "a nice ripple of excitement" through the community and, almost as suddenly as the town had lost its paper, it saw the Record resurrected.
Tom Bredehoft, a 62-year-old businessman who lives 45 miles down Interstate 70 in Flagler, seized an opportunity he viewed as good both for business and the community and legally claimed the publication's name. Despite some production and delivery hiccups, the Record played on without missing a beat.
"Just doing what's best for a very nice community out here in eastern Colorado," said Bredehoft, the former Flagler mayor who also launched the landmark I-70 Diner, with its rotating pink Cadillac visible from the interstate (though now he leases out the property, renamed McCaffee's I-70 Diner). "They said they couldn't put out a paper, so I came in and put out a paper to keep it alive and going."
Bredehoft, who has spent virtually his entire life in Kit Carson County, says he knew as early as the eighth grade that he wanted to be in the newspaper business. After getting his journalism degree at the University of Northern Colorado, he awaited an opportunity to buy his hometown Flagler News — and finally purchased it on Jan. 1, 1993. In the meantime, he had launched the Mile Saver Shopper, and expanded its territory from northeastern Colorado into Kansas and Nebraska.
Several weeks ago, when a longtime friend and former owner of the Record called him to see if he'd be interested in picking up the pieces left by Prairie Mountain Media, he agreed to add the paper to his publishing portfolio.
Bredehoft figured that he wouldn't actually be buying the paper — he said it was never offered for sale — and if he didn't take the initiative somebody else would. After all, Burlington, aside from being the seat of Kit Carson County, is five times the population of Flagler, and Bredehoft had already shown he could make local news work in a town of 600.
"I thought it was definitely a business opportunity, but I also thought it was something that needed to be done," he said. "It was sad what was happening."
So he moved the operation into its new, smaller quarters on July 27. Two days later the paper's computers were up and running and the day after that the pages for the next edition were shipped off to the printer in Goodland, Kansas — the same press that prints his Flagler News. Bredehoft picked up the papers later that day and the following day mailed them to subscribers.
The hasty transition hit some snags — most notably, Bredehoft said, the post office's refusal to grant him the usual discounted postage rate for the Record because the permit was still in the previous owner's name. While ironing out that wrinkle, he created a workaround: He printed about 900 extra copies of his Flagler News, inserted The Burlington Record into those copies and mailed them out to the Record's subscribers, who scored a temporary two-fer.
Additionally, the Record's website remained up, populated with Denver Post and wire stories. But Bredehoft said he's negotiating to assume control of the site as well as a dedicated Facebook page.
Locals, many of whom had expressed dissatisfaction with declining local coverage and let subscriptions lapse, rushed to aid the revival. Bredehoft said he dropped yearly prices to $45 from $65 and, within one three-day period, the Record added more than 100 new or renewing subscribers. Those numbers have continued to grow.
"I still believe in community newspapers," Bredehoft said, "and I think there will always be people who want to be able to cut the clippings out of the paper. People want to read the sports scores. People want to clip their kids' pictures. I just believe there's always going to be a need and a want, and I think there's people that will support it."
A different story in SpringfieldCircumstances have played out differently in another rural setting.
Kent Brooks harbored no illusions about the economic challenges ahead when he bought his hometown weekly newspaper, The Plainsman Herald in Springfield, nearly five years ago.
He was just hoping to break even when he rescued the publication, the only paper in far southeastern Colorado's Baca County. With determination born of generations connected to the land, and help from family members, Brooks survived early difficulties, plus a pandemic, to keep the operation financially viable — and, for a while, even mildly profitable.
But in a July 16 note to readers, Brooks noted that from the very start, keeping the 138-year-old paper alive on the current news landscape — increasingly common "news deserts" conjure Dust Bowl images that once defined Springfield and the surrounding region — was a "precarious notion." He went on to give notice that the Plainsman Herald, hampered by declining advertising, will stop print publication at the end of the year.
"No matter how much we/ I/ you love this paper and the idea of local news," Brooks wrote, "the Plainsman Herald is not special or immune to all of the issues associated with the digital age, and sometimes we must face the reality that things have run their course."
The lingering question, as he tries to sort out his post-print options, is whether anyone else will step up to reinforce public accountability and the sense of small-town community now that he, and the family that provided his "boots on the ground" in Springfield as well as technical support, no longer can.
"We have had a couple inquiries, but I've watched these rural weeklies be for sale for like five years, and nobody ends up buying them," Brooks said in a recent conversation with The Colorado Sun. "So I don't know. The path is a little bit unclear. The print doesn't make any more sense financially, though."
On its own, the announcement served as a heartbreaking reminder of how fragile the local news ecosystem can be in rural Colorado — and the nation. In his note to readers, Brooks referenced one report that counted 2,627 weekly publications closed or merged over an 18-year stretch.
The Plainsman Herald might've disappeared sooner. But Brooks swooped in at the last minute in October 2019 to keep the publication from going dark.
He bought the paper from local resident Sarah Steinman, who a few years earlier had pooled money with her mom and sister to purchase the Plainsman Herald and fight the economic and demographic headwinds that faced the paper.
While his family has deep agricultural roots in Baca County, Brooks currently lives and works in Wyoming, where he serves as IT director at Casper College. But he's not exactly a stranger to journalism, having studied it at Oklahoma State University before gravitating to information technology management.
When he purchased the Plainsman Herald he managed the paper remotely from Wyoming. He recalls that the first year of his ownership was spent in "survival mode" as he sought to acclimate himself to the business.
At that point, the paper printed about 1,100 copies, roughly the total population of Springfield. When Brooks delved into the newspaper's records he found that in the early 2000s, circulation had reached nearly 1,900.
Now, it hovers "closer to a couple hundred subscribers," with another 100 copies available on news racks around town, Brooks said. The paper has provided free copies to Springfield's two assisted-living facilities.
Knowing he needed a local presence in Springfield, Brooks persuaded his daughter, Lexi Brooks, to assume the role of reporter after she finished her associate's degree in art. It was fresh territory for her, attending community events and meetings of the county commissioners and town council, but she embraced the challenge — and she said her presence as community watchdog was mostly well-received.
The paper also hired a sports stringer to make sure the local school teams were covered.
"We weren't really very fancy," Kent Brooks said. "I guess we provided a little bit of accountability. People loved it, but you know how it goes. People's love and adoration doesn't pay very many bills."
He found an affordable printer two and a half hours away in Liberal, Kansas, and with the help of a foundation grant and his tech-savvy son, Colin, launched an e-edition, though as with many rural areas with aging demographics, circulation leaned 75% toward print. And as printing resources contracted statewide last fall with the closure of a press in Pueblo, he told The Sun in October, in what now seems a prescient observation: "I can't help but think there'll be a point when you go all digital or you shut down."
Initially, local businesses rallied around the paper, providing financial support even though they hardly needed to advertise in such a small community. But Brooks says three or four "foundational accounts" eventually decided to abandon print advertising — a decision he says he totally understands.
Still, that put a halt to "about 30 pretty decent months" when the paper broke even or a little better, and began a 12-month slide to where he stands now, with the print operation no longer financially viable.
Although current plans call for the final issue to be printed the last week of December, much about the Plainsman Herald's future, including its online presence , remains in flux. "There is probably no way to end gracefully," Brooks wrote in his letter to readers, "but we'll try."
Is local news sustainable in Burlington?In an office at the back of the Record's new storefront, the paper's longest-tenured employee, 86-year-old Lucky Gipe, worked on planning the next week's edition while tethered to yards and yards of plastic tubing connected to a humming oxygen generator. At the old building, she said, the joke was that if you can't find Lucky, follow the hose.
From typesetting to proofreading to editing and even advertising, there's not much that Gipe hasn't done at the Record since she started in 1980 — although she doesn't get too involved with the online content, reflecting a generation's preference for print in part because "you can't put online in a scrapbook." She enters 24 hours on her weekly time sheet, but allows that she puts in much more than that.
She didn't take the news of the paper's closure very well.
"I sat right there in the meeting and I said, 'You murdered us,'" she recalled. "Every decision they made had nothing to do with a rural newspaper. That's how I felt about it. ... We were just kind of numb. It was less about the money — it was the fact that I could get out and move and do something every day, right? That's what keeps me going."
The handful of full- and part-time staffers at the Record felt heartened by the constant flow of subscribers into the office and on the phones in the wake of the shutdown announcement, and then again at the news that Bredehoft would continue publishing the paper. Cheri Webb, who in four years with the Record has done everything from proofreading to page layout to taking photos and writing, also noticed that people seemed more engaged and willing to offer news tips — a significant step toward revitalizing admittedly sparse content.
"We get people all the time telling us they don't need their subscription because there's nothing in it anymore," Webb said. "But since it was threatened to go away, we've had more people bring in local stuff to us, because with just the few of us here anymore, we just don't have the resources go out and cover everything."
That's an overarching issue with rural papers that Hutchins, the journalism professor, addressed — the underlying issue for rural news isn't so much a lack of demand as a lack of supply. He notes that one possible solution lies in nearby newspapers picking up the slack for communities that have lost their publications, but existing newspapers already are strapped for resources to cover their current circulation areas.
"It's hard for them to find people they can pay to go and observe public meetings of local government," he said, "and local governments seemingly don't make it easy to get access to archives of their meetings. So it's just kind of becoming, I'm afraid, an information vacuum in a large geographical portion of the state, population-wise."
As Bredehoft thought about his options for continuing the Burlington paper, his wife suggested simply turning the Flagler News into a countywide paper to fill the vacuum. But that undertaking comes with challenges.
For instance, the Kiowa County Independent out of Eads on the Eastern Plains worked to pick up slack a few years ago when the neighboring Range Ledger in Cheyenne County closed — officially creating a "news desert," defined as an entire county with no local news publication. Independent publisher Betsy Barnett, whose publication mourned the announcement by the Plainsman Herald, has found her reporting resources stretched thin, and that while the town of Cheyenne Wells is grateful for her efforts, residents still miss having a paper to call their own.
Bredehoft ultimately dismissed the idea of expanding the Flagler paper and agrees that rural papers should keep their individual identities.
Can he make the Record a sustainable business when corporate ownership could not? Bredehoft thinks so. But the daunting numbers initially gave him pause. Burlington, despite its significantly greater population base, counted only about 100 more subscribers than the Flagler News at the time Prairie Mountain Media shut it down.
He's hoping to increase the subscriber base from the 700 at the time he took over to closer to 1,100 over the next few months, thus creating a stronger pitch to advertisers.
"We need to put out a good product first," he said. "Then advertisers will come. That's what I'm shooting for."
In Springfield, sadness and acceptanceReaders' reaction to Brooks' announcement of the print shutdown of the Plainsman Herald had a sorrowful tone of resignation that reflects what rural residents see going on all around them, particularly on the Eastern Plains.
"It's understandable and necessary but very, very sad."
"Sad to see another small town institution fall victim to the modern age."
Then came the announcements of closures elsewhere on the plains and all Brooks recalls thinking was, "Oh, crap! The epidemic is here."
He'd seen the fallout after the Pueblo printing plant closed, but this time he took it all in from a different vantage point — on the inside, watching his own paper's demise and feeling a little like the domino that triggered similar loss across the plains.
With the coming shutdown of the print edition, Lexi plans to return to college to pursue her bachelor's degree — with her father's blessing and encouragement. Her brother, Colin, worked behind the scenes with his dad, but now has become an apprentice electrician and works regular daytime hours before he can lend his expertise to the paper's IT support.
"You always look back and go, should I have done anything different?" Brooks said. "I'm not sure. The demographics and people's consumption habits for content are just different."
From the start, Brooks has been sensitive to the plight of local news, and even ran a blank front page one week — mimicking a device other papers have employed — to remind readers "here's what local news looks like when you don't have a community paper." He's open to helping a potential buyer by sticking around in a support or advisory role.
Whatever happens, he wants to maintain control of the newspaper's extensive archives, which he has found useful as a chronicler of southeastern Colorado's history. Brooks already has written several books about the region and he's a few hundred pages into his latest manuscript on the Dust Bowl, telling the story through the eyes of Ralph Williams, editor of the Springfield Democrat-Herald before it evolved by merger into the Plainsman Herald.
Brooks calls the Plainsman Herald's historical treasure trove "maybe one of the best Dust Bowl archives on the planet Earth. It doesn't offset the fact that we're losing a lot of news, but I guess it's a consolation prize."
Still, the looming loss of the paper "just stinks rotten."
"We tried to serve the community," Brooks said. "And whatever ends up happening here this fall, I can walk away and say we did the best we could. It's just changing times, you know?"
What needs to change in Burlington?Bredehoft already had a history with The Burlington Record, as he contracted with the paper to print the Flagler News and his shopper back in the days before the Record sold its printing press. But now he's reengaging with the staff on a different level — as its publisher.
"We're starting to develop a relationship, even though they've known me," he said. "But they didn't know how I ran a newspaper or anything. I hope that they understand that I'm not a bad guy and I'm not here just to make money. I'm doing it for the love of the newspaper."
He sees room for improvement in the print product with more attention to detail, and hopes to push toward that goal with an approach in which "hands-on would be the biggest thing. Being involved. I definitely do care about the community, and I care about the newspaper. And I want it to succeed again. "
At 62, he's also cognizant of the long-term outlook. Across the country, small rural papers have confronted confounding economics that intersect with a generation of independent owners reaching an age when they want to cash out of the industry — but find few interested buyers. Part of Bredehoft's strategy appears to center on creating a portfolio of local publications that might attract interest once he's ready to retire.
"I mean, nobody's going to want the Flagler News, because you wouldn't make a living," he said. "But with The Burlington Record, Flagler News and the Mile Saver Shopper, you can make a halfway decent living. So I'm hoping that that's the ticket to keep Flagler having a local paper and Burlington having a local paper."
In the meantime, Bredehoft is grateful — and optimistic — about the response to his move to salvage a paper when so many others in the region have disappeared. But also maybe just a little uncomfortable with all this hero talk.
"I'm not a knight in shining armor," he said. "I was just trying to do the right thing and keep a paper going. I was hoping that (taking over the paper) would revive the people of Burlington to support it. And I think it has."
