How a 141-year-old Colorado newspaper was destroyed by a developer with Soviet ancestry and a West Virginia billionaire.
Aspen was a news geyser at a time when regional newspapers confronted several risks to their survival, and more and more American communities turned becoming news deserts. Small-town clichés like high-school musicals and the Fourth of July parade are covered by the town’s staff of reporters. Aspen’s journalists are also the watchdogs and historians of one of America’s wealthiest towns, a location of extreme economic inequality, and the poster child for the phenomenon known as “super-gentrification,” where, as the locals frequently say, “the billionaires are forcing out the millionaires”. The newspaper gained a reputation for shoe-leather reporting and accountability journalism while operating for a significant portion of its existence out of a purple-painted structure between a pharmacy and the Hotel Jerome. Including the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a litigious developer with Soviet ancestry, and the affluent cousin of a U.S. official, Andrew Travers, a former editor of The Aspen Times, has a cast of blue-bloods and thin-skinned billionaires in his narrative.
