Business newspapers fight for readership

A decade of explosive business growth in Northern Colorado has spawned three competing monthly business newspapers.

Long-neglected business-news consumers from Loveland to Wyoming will now be able to choose from Northern Colorado Business, The Northern Colorado Business Report and Today’s Business.

A fourth publication, Business Edition, planned by Loveland businessman Duke Thompson, pulled out of the competition before actually publishing.

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Editors and publishers of the three papers cite the growth of the region and a corresponding growth in the need for information as the reasons they decided the time was right to inaugurate their new publications.

They also concurred that the market would probably not long sustain three new business monthlies.

Sally Lee, advertising director at the Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald, recently assumed the additional role of manager of Today’s Business, a monthly tabloid first published this month.

Lee’s paper enjoys financial and production support from Lehman Communications Corp., owner of the Daily Reporter-Herald, the Longmont Daily Times-Call and the Canon City Daily Record.

“We do a lot of business in Fort Collins and Greeley,” Lee said, referring to her ad-sales position at the Daily Reporter-Herald. “And there’s been a real void for a long time; there’s been no regional news source. There are exciting things going on throughout the region, but generally people don’t know what’s happening outside their own city.

“From an advertising perspective, I’ve known for some time that there is an unserved market that extgends from Larimer and Weld counties all the way to Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyo.,” she said.

Today’s Business will be published on the first Monday of each month, Lee said. Craig Young, who has been with the Daily Reporter-Herald for 13 years, most recently as city editor, will serve as editor of Today’s Business.

Another new business monthly to make its debut this fall is Northern Colorado Business, published by Joe Lewandowski, former business editor at the Coloradoan in Fort Collins.

“It’s a great region,” Lewandowski said. “Business deserves more coverage and more service from the media.”

The Northern Colorado Business Report traces its lineage to an established Colorado newspaper. A new project of the ownership group of The Boulder County Business Report, The Northern Colorado Business Report will be edited and co-owned by Christopher Wood. Wood is a former assistant editor for the Boulder County paper and more recently worked as managing editor at The Denver Business Journal.

Jeff Nuttall, formerly an advertising sales representative for the Business Journal, is co-owner and director of sales and marketing of The Northern Colorado Business Report.

Like Lee, Wood said he had been struck for some time by the lack of business coverage in the Northern Colorado region. He noted that every other metropolitan area in the state was served by a business newspaper, including Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver, Durango, Grand Junction and Pueblo.

Until now, he said, Northern Colorado has had no vehicle by which businesses here could communicate with each other.

“The business coverage in the Northern Colorado region has been limited to light profiles of area companies,” Wood said. “And that’s not a business paper. We will be covering breaking news in business, doing in-depth articles on individual companies and analyses of trends and issues important to business. We’ve also found that there’s a great thirst for economic statistics here, and we’ll be providing that as well.”

Like Today’s Business, The Northern Colorado Business Report will be a newsprint tabloid and will be published at the beginning of each month. Both papers will be free and will be distributed by mail as well as at newsstand pickup points around the region.

Unclear is whether Fort Collins’ daily newspaper, The Coloradoan, will increase its business coverage in the wake of the competition. Publisher Dorothy Bland would not comment on whether the proliferation of business papers would force her paper to expand its business coverage.

But, according to Terry Gogerty, president of Fort Collins-based Metro-West Publishing, it would be surprising if The Coloradoan didn’t respond to the situation with more and better business coverage of some kind.

“I can’t see how The Coloradoan is not also going to jump in,” he said. “That’s their nature; they’re very protective of the region.”

Metro -West had published Business World in Fort Collins for 12 years but stopped publication in September in the face of an avalanche of new competition.

“We’re just going to sit back and maybe pick up the pieces after everybody else has spilled their blood,” Gogerty said. Metro-West publishes local papers in seven eastern Front Range towns such as Brighton and Commerce City as well as the Triangle Review in Fort Collins.

How will the business newspaper competition shake out?

“It’s hard to say what’s going to happen,” Lee said.

The Northern Colorado Business Report’s Wood agreed. “There’s a great market for business coverage in this region,” he said, “but it’s not big enough to support three.”