Opinion: Rocky Mountain Post is on hold indefinitely
I’ve recently put RockyMountainPost.com and its sister site, RealVail.com, on the back burner to let them simmer while I ramp up to full boil as business editor of the Vail Daily.
I’ve had a few Rocky Mountain Post readers and supporters reach out wondering what that means for the site that’s been up and running continuously since 2013. First, if you’re a monthly donor, thank you very much for your support over the years. It helped cover some of the hosting and tech costs associated with running a news site, and I greatly appreciate you. I also passed along some of your money to the content-provider, nonprofit news sites I worked with as a freelancer.
But yeah, you should cancel that donation for the foreseeable future. I’m still paying to keep the sites alive, because I feel as if its archive delivers some public benefit and I like to link to my own stories, but I will not be posting on a daily basis, so it’s unfair to ask folks to keep contributing.
Second, I’ve been very transparent where I stand politically on RealVail.com (not as much on RockyMountainPost.com), calling out the current rush to dictatorship, destruction of democracy, rampant illegality and overall bigoted, violent corruption coming out of Washington these days. I am not being paid to write opinion pieces for the Vail Daily, but I may still feel compelled to weigh in here once in a while.
For instance, most decent human beings should feel obligated to strongly denounce the fatal shooting of a former Colorado woman by masked ICE agents in Minneapolis Jan. 7, just as the illegal military intervention in Venezuela (our Constitution grants Congress the sole right to declare war), the blowing out of the water of stranded mariners, and the increased use of our very expensive military on domestic soil against U.S. citizens should be condemned by us all. And by the way, a new law required the full release of the Epstein Files weeks ago. Where are they?
Now, back to my move back to the Vail Daily after all of these years. I started RealVail.com and later RockyMountainPost.com in part as my own personal archives and repositories for some of my freelance work, and then over the years they became actual alternative news sites in their own right. I’m a big believer in the alternative press, but after a quarter of the 21st century has flown by, it’s clear that the alternative press in many places has just become the press.
It’s hard to draw a mainstream media distinction when newspapers in so many Colorado communities are just shutting down and leaving vast information deserts that are being filled by Big Tech with unvetted, inaccurate, divisive and disruptive social media platforms. First they soaked up all the ad revenue, and now they’re soaking up all of our brain cells.
So community journalism means a lot to me, and I’m glad we still have a vibrant and influential local newspaper focused on making the lives of the people who live in the Eagle River Valley and beyond better. People on the outside think we all must have trust funds to live here, but so many of us just came here to work and ski and contribute positively to a place we are privileged to call home. In other words, there are a lot of “real” people here struggling with their “real” lives the Rocky Mountain West.
The Vail Daily offers a wider audience, a much bigger platform, and an amazing opportunity for me to work with the small businesses that make this place great, to tell the individual stories of people who believe passionately in outdoor recreation, tourism, conservation of our public lands and preserving our mountain lifestyle for future generations.
That, and I needed health insurance. Our very high-deductible Anthem bronze plan, with the ACA’s extended premium tax credits, cost us $900 a month for our family of four last year. One of our sons got his own insurance, but the price for three of us without the credits is $2,500 a month in 2026, with an even higher deductible. That’s what we just paid on Jan. 1, and our friends and neighbors are having to make even tougher decisions, as I wrote in the Vail Daily today (Jan. 8).
Finally, freelance just doesn’t pay. Nor is it very lucrative running your own news site. I’ve been impressed with what some individual journalists are accomplishing on Substack, such as the MeidasTouch network, which includes a lot of former Washington Post and New York Times writers, but I have no idea if those folks are making enough to live on of if they’re just burning through their savings after working for decades in “legacy” media.
I haven’t really made anything close to what I was earning at newspapers in the 90s and 2000s since about 2008. That was when ski and travel magazines still had decent budgets, Denver still had competing dailies, and editors appreciated and paid for skilled journalists who had accumulated expertise on certain topics. When the housing bubble burst and Big Tech really ramped up social media on our smart phones, that seemed to be the turning point for freelance.
The Denver Post stopped buying freelance, at least from me, years ago. The Colorado Sun that I haven’t worked for and the Gazette publications I have worked for have talked good games about expanding statewide freelance networks, but the work is too sporadic to live in a place like this, or even in Denver these days, I suspect. Half of your time freelancing is spent pitching stories and getting rejected, but your bills come in on a monthly basis while you’re taxed at 25%.
The individual health insurance market is just one more symptom of a diseased business climate that disincentivizes self-employment, sole proprietorships, contract work and entrepreneurial small businesses in general in favor of corporate consolidation taxed at 15%, if the big conglomerates even pay that much after their armies of tax lawyers get through with the IRS.
So thanks for reading Rocky Mountain Post over the years, be sure to continue supporting the Vail Daily and other forms of community journalism, and remember that a free press is vital to maintaining our fading freedoms in the face of growing authoritarianism at home and abroad.
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