Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund that this year became the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States, has made an offer to purchase Lee Enterprises, the media company that owns many of Montana’s daily newspapers. Dennis Swibold, a professor of journalism at the University of Montana and author of a book on the history of newspaper ownership in the state, said in Lee, Alden must think it can find some loose change somewhere. “They see savings,” Swibold said. “They wouldn’t be making this offer if they didn’t see cuts.”
“It is not hyperbole to say that parts of democracy die when a hedge fund is allowed to run local news into the ground, whether it be a newspaper or a TV station. Trust in government erodes as our watchdog function gets stripped down.”
This time it’s Lee Enterprises in the crosshairs. Adding it to its empire would leave two American local newspaper giants—Gannett and Alden—and everyone else far behind.
“They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that’s honestly a misnomer. A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory.”
Daniel Tom was the target of racism and bullying growing up in Mesa, Ariz. Decades later here in the small mountain town of Buena Vista in south-central Colorado, life is easier, quieter. Still, there are at least a few signs that make him feel unwelcome—actual signs that read “Chinaman Gulch.” “I think it’s something that tells us that we don’t really belong,” Tom said.
“Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage—not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression,” Haaland said in a statement. “Today’s actions will accelerate an important process to reconcile derogatory place names and mark a significant step in honoring the ancestors who have stewarded our lands since time immemorial.”
After a summer of deadly heat and uncontrolled wildfires, British Columbia was hit by record rainfalls that forced the evacuation of towns and destroyed highways and rail lines.
Fuel pumps in parts of British Columbia have been running dry amid panic buying as residents watched highways become impassable and key oil and fuel infrastructure shut down.
Colorado oil and gas producers are facing the prospect of tougher smog regulations as EPA completes its latest about-face on a series of contested Trump-era air quality compliance decisions. In a final rule signed last week, EPA opted to declare all of Weld County, which sprawls north of Denver to the state line, out of compliance with its 2015 ground-level ozone standard. The county accounts for the bulk of Colorado’s oil and gas output.
The Biden administration previously said it will hold oil auctions early next year across up to 700,000 acres in Wyoming, New Mexico and seven other states with federal oil and natural gas deposits. It will now grant an additional 10 days to the previous 30-day comment periods.
Even as Biden urged world leaders to take action to avert catastrophic warming, a key piece of his approach to the climate crisis was missing: efforts to curb the expansion of fossil fuel production on public lands in the United States.
The $4.6 billion in the infrastructure package to plug abandoned oil and gas wells is resurfacing questions about whether some states have the staff and infrastructure to handle the cash or will let the funds go to waste.
Proposed reforms meant to ensure taxpayers don’t get stuck paying to clean up oil and gas sites could actually leave the public open to eventually covering billions of dollars in costs, environmentalists and local governments contend.
A Utah federal court’s order allowing oil and gas leasing on public lands to proceed will stand after conservation groups dropped their appeal in the Tenth Circuit.
Oil companies have replaced Indigenous people’s traditional lands with mines that cover an area bigger than New York City, stripping away boreal forest and wetlands and rerouting waterways.
In a regulatory seesaw, federal land managers again want to change conservation plans for greater sage grouse, seeking more protection and restoration for the imperiled bird.
Idaho Fish and Game and wildlife managers are planning an emergency hunt to understand how widespread chronic wasting disease is in Idaho’s deer population.
While gray wolves are under pressure from a federal delisting and increased hunting in some Rocky Mountain states, Colorado wildlife officials heard a number of detailed options Thursday for implementing a voter-approved reintroduction of the species west of the Continental Divide.
Not everyone is convinced that carbon capture can—or should—save coal. But it’s largely because of coal that Wyoming now houses some of the most advanced carbon capture, utilization and storage projects in the world. As carbon capture technology advances, that infrastructure represents a head start for a state looking to boost its economic prospects.
PacifiCorp could be forced to shut down one of four coal-burning units at the Jim Bridger power plant at year’s end unless it is granted more time to comply with federal haze standards, according to landowner advocacy group Powder River Basin Resource Council.
Climate change isn’t what’s driving some U.S. coal-fired power plants to shut down. It’s the expense of stricter pollution controls on their wastewater.
The basis of the lawsuit is that the power plant and the coal mine have not taken proper care of covering the huge piles of coal. When the wind blows, the dust from piles cover property and people in an oily grit that is toxic.
The prospect of getting an advanced nuclear reactor has injected new optimism into a community used to weathering the booms and busts of Wyoming’s energy industry.
NorthWestern Energy’s plans to build a gas-fired power plant have stalled in Laurel, Montana, where neighbors say the generator will ruin their quality of life.
Among other things, Sams will now have to tackle the effects of climate change, park overcrowding, a multibillion-dollar maintenance backlog, and a workforce culture fraught with gender discrimination and harassment.
Today’s Great Salt Lake bears little resemblance to how it’s depicted on maps, which show a familiar blue footprint spreading across northwest Utah. The maps conceal the urgency of our water woes by drowning out how climate change and allocation issues have impacted one of the West’s iconic bodies of water. The Salt Lake Tribune and AccuWeather will update their Utah maps to show the lake as it really is, a puddle of its former self, rimmed by vast reaches of exposed lake bed.
With wildfires devastating mountain ecosystems across the western United States, their successful forest revegetation recovery hinges on, among other factors, an adequate lasting snowpack, according to research by the University of Nevada, Reno and Oregon State University.
Colorado’s State Wildland Inmate Fire Team—SWIFT—will soon expand and pay inmates more, though prison-reform advocates argue the wages remain unfair and amount to modern-day slavery.
One year after Montana issued its standard for the mining contaminant selenium, B.C.’s long-delayed parallel objective is “deeply disappointing” to tribes and regulators
“There are plans, and that’s great, but we’re continuing to make the river the victim of more and more nitrogen and phosphorus leaching into the stream.”
A Canadian mining company hoping to build a gold mine in Idaho west of Yellowstone National Park can resume exploratory drilling, the U.S. Forest Service said Friday.
A federal raid on a household marijuana garden on tribal land in northern New Mexico is sowing uncertainty and resentment about U.S. drug enforcement priorities on Native American reservations, as more states roll out legal marketplaces for recreational pot sales.
The Biden administration today moved to formally scrap President Trump’s signature Clean Water Act rule off the books. But exactly when EPA will float a new definition for what constitutes a “water of the U.S.,” or WOTUS—and which wetlands and streams receive federal protection—is not yet clear.
Rockies Today is edited by Matthew Frank, fellow in regional journalism at the O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana.
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