Who needs local media these days?

One small fact is overlooked in most of the coverage of the $5.9 million settlement Fort Collins has agreed to pay Timothy Masters after a decade of wrongful imprisonment.

After two failed appeals, the case may have remained closed without the efforts of a locally owned newspaper.

Peggy Hettrick had been dead for 20 years, and Masters in jail for her murder for eight, when his new defense team found evidence they claimed proved, if not Masters’ innocence, then at least misconduct on the part of those who put him away. The dailies weren’t interested in the story; they’d covered the sensational trial and moved on.

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Greg Campbell and business partner Joel Dyer had started Fort Collins Weekly in 2003 with the classic alternative newsweekly ethos, what alt-weeklies did before a couple of national chains carved up ownership: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as Finley Peter Dunn once wrote.

Campbell had already written the expose “Blood Diamonds.” If he could dig into how African diamond mines funded the military ambitions of ruthless warlords, a small-town constabulary running as its own Barney Fife-dom held no threats.

Fort Collins Weekly broke the Masters story in a long, deeply researched story in July 2007. It took another month for bigger, chain-owned media outlets to notice, locked as they were in their own mini-newspaper war, lobbing faux-ternative entertainment weeklies into each other’s territory to capture some ad revenue for the home office.

Fort Collins Weekly got caught in that crossfire. Swift Communications, owner of the Greeley Tribune, bought out Dyer and Campbell in 2007, changed the paper’s name to Fort Collins Now, and discovered how hard it is to attract readers to a publication dedicated only to making its benevolent overlords in their galaxy far, far away a little more comfortable.

Swift closed Fort Collins Now in 2009, after Masters’ conviction had been vacated; as soon as the website contract expires, even its ghost will be a mere memory, although Campbell preserves his Masters stories at www.bygregcampbell.com.

Now that Masters is free and financially comfortable – he also settled with Larimer County in February for an additional $4.1 million – actors on the periphery of the drama are being quoted as saying they just knew things weren’t right with the original investigation. But no one had the courage to speak up then against the powers-that-were – perhaps because no one would have listened.

That’s what locally owned newspapers do.