Boulder Weekly

About Boulder Weekly

Boulder Weekly is the alternative newsweekly of Boulder, Colorado — a free, independent, locally owned paper that has covered Boulder County with an investigative edge since its first edition hit the stands on August 19, 1993. Founded by Stewart Sallo, who moved to Boulder that year after leaving Santa Cruz, California, the Weekly built its reputation on aggressive alternative journalism: the 1994 exposé of Beech Aircraft toxins poisoning open space that redefined the paper's mission, investigations that reached from Nigeria to the Denver suburbs, and three decades of arts, music, and culture coverage. Published every Thursday and available at boulderweekly.com, the paper printed "free every Thursday" for more than 30 years — until an abrupt newsroom collapse in the summer of 2025 threw its future into doubt and sparked a community effort to revive it as a nonprofit.

History

Stewart Sallo arrived in Boulder in 1993 after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake prompted him to leave Santa Cruz, where he had owned two publications, Summer Santa Cruz and Student Guide. He saw a business opportunity in a city lacking a weekly newspaper, and the first edition of Boulder Weekly appeared on August 19, 1993; the paper incorporated as a business on June 2, 1994. Initially Sallo viewed the paper as a commercial venture, but an article by reporter Joel Dyer in 1994 — "Deadly ground," exposing how Beech Aircraft toxins had poisoned open space — reshaped his view of the newspaper's potential impact, and the Weekly's editorial direction shifted toward a more aggressive, alternative approach to news.

Dyer later became the paper's editor before leaving to write books and publish his own newsweekly, the Fort Collins Weekly, from 2002 to 2007. Succeeding Dyer, Greg Campbell maintained the investigative direction, publishing pieces such as the April 2001 "Eternal flame" investigation of a Nigerian village's suffering at the hands of an Italian gas company; Campbell later authored Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones. Between 1996 and 2000, Boulder Planet operated as a competing publication; the Weekly's survival through that rivalry remained a point of pride for Sallo.

Ownership and leadership

Boulder Weekly has been owned and published by founder Stewart Sallo since its inception — a locally owned, independent paper backed exclusively by readers and local small businesses, with no corporate donors or owners. Sallo's independence was the paper's defining asset: while the Daily Camera, Boulder's daily, suffered under the ownership of Alden Global Capital's cost-cutting, the Weekly could pitch itself as the truly local alternative.

As Sallo approached retirement, the paper explored a transition to employee ownership. In late 2024, with editor Shay Castle at the helm, the staff launched a fundraising campaign to explore buying the publication and converting it to an employee-owned newsroom or cooperative — an effort framed by the question "Who owns the news?" and inspired by the example of the Daily Camera's hedge-fund ownership.

The 2025 collapse

The employee-ownership plan never came to fruition. In the summer of 2025, after the publication of the July 3–9 issue, Sallo abruptly fired editor Shay Castle and laid off most of the staff — an implosion that stunned Colorado's media community. "The newsroom is gone," Castle said. "All four of us are gone." The collapse came just as the nation's alternative-weekly publishers were convening their annual conference, and the paper's future was left uncertain.

Six months after the meltdown, a revival effort took shape: Todd Chamberlin, executive director of the nonprofit Sopris Sun in Carbondale, along with Colorado Press Association partnerships manager Rachel Pickarski and veteran media executive Brooke Warner, began a fundraising campaign to bring Boulder Weekly back as a nonprofit. The group estimated it would need to raise about half a million dollars to restart the three-decade-old publication. Sallo, who had been seeking to sell the paper he founded more than 30 years earlier, met with the group in the fall of 2025, and the trio decided to pursue the nonprofit route together.

Editorial approach

From the mid-1990s onward, the Weekly's editorial identity was investigative and adversarial — the paper that would publish the stories Boulder's other outlets wouldn't. Its journalism ranged from local environmental exposés to international investigations, from coverage of private equity's spread into childcare to the Naropa University campus sale and the fallout from renter-protection laws. The paper was the only outlet to cover local elections in every Boulder County city, and it ran a regular column focused on people with disabilities found nowhere else in the market.

The Weekly's independence allowed it to take positions and pursue stories without corporate constraint — a freedom its editors cited as the reason the paper could produce "one-of-a-kind, 100% independent journalism" for three decades.

Coverage and sections

Boulder Weekly covered Boulder County news and politics, arts and culture, music, film, food, and the outdoors. Its news desk handled city and county government, the University of Colorado, development, and environmental issues; its arts coverage included exclusive interviews with artists and filmmakers and deep dives into the county's cultural life — from the death of dinner theater to the changing character of towns from Lyons to Nederland.

Special editions marked the paper's anniversaries and the county's calendar, and its 30th-anniversary edition in 2024 featured stories on North Boulder's transformation from "Dogpatch" to arts district, a historic Boulder building's 150th birthday, and the minds of the Boulder Future Salon.

Readership and distribution

The Weekly was distributed free every Thursday at racks and businesses across Boulder County, with a circulation of 35,000 in its later years and a weekly print run reported at 110,000 copies during the employee-ownership campaign. Its tagline — "Free every Thursday" — appeared on the front of every edition, and the paper claimed it had not missed a Thursday in 30 years.

The free-distribution model made the Weekly ubiquitous in Boulder: coffee shops, libraries, grocery stores, and newsstands across the county carried it, and its readership spanned the university community, the city's progressive political class, and the broader county.

Digital presence

Boulderweekly.com carries the paper's journalism, archives, and event listings, and the paper maintained an active social media presence for breaking news and cultural coverage. The website's archives preserve three decades of Boulder County history — the investigations, the anniversary editions, and the cultural writing that defined the paper.

The digital operation was part of the paper's pitch for employee ownership: a newsroom producing web-first journalism alongside its Thursday print edition, with the website serving readers between print cycles.

Awards and recognition

Boulder Weekly was a longtime member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (now the Association of Alternative Newsmedia) and a perennial winner of state and national alternative-press awards for its investigative reporting, arts coverage, and design. Its editors and reporters — from Joel Dyer to Greg Campbell to Shay Castle — built careers on the paper's investigative reputation, and its alumni have written books, founded publications, and staffed newsrooms across the West.

The paper's 30th anniversary in 2024 was celebrated as a milestone for independent local journalism — a free, locally owned weekly that had outlasted competitors, ownership crises at the daily, and the industry's digital disruption.

Challenges and outlook

The 2025 collapse exposed the fragility beneath the Weekly's independent model: a single owner nearing retirement, a small staff, and the economics of free print in the 2020s proved a combustible combination. The abrupt layoffs — described as unceremonious even by the standards of media shutdowns — left Boulder County's alternative voice silenced after 32 years.

The nonprofit revival effort offers a path forward, following the model that has rescued alt-weeklies and community papers across the country. Whether Boulder Weekly returns as a nonprofit, and in what form, remains to be determined — but the community campaign behind it testifies to the paper's standing: after three decades of free Thursdays, Boulder is not ready to let its alternative weekly go.