A national media company's sweeping restructuring plan is reshaping local television news in Colorado Springs, with layoffs and a newsroom consolidation affecting two of the city's longest-running broadcast outlets.
E.W. Scripps Co. is laying off 268 people — about 12% of its overall workforce — as part of a national restructuring that will also see the company launch a 24-hour streaming platform enabled by artificial intelligence, according to Deadline. Fifteen of those positions are at two of Colorado Springs' oldest television stations, KKTV and KOAA. Layoffs also hit Denver7, known by its call letters KMGH.
In addition to the 268 layoffs at the national level, the company eliminated 432 positions and 126 open jobs, according to Deadline. Of those 268, the 15 local to Colorado Springs included reporters, producers, and photographers. Several of those affected took to social media to share news of their departures and said they are looking for work.
KKTV was transferred to Scripps in April as part of a station swap agreement with Gray Television, a move that created a Scripps duopoly in Colorado Springs, as the company already owned KOAA. Though Scripps said it is still "working through operational details" while integrating the two newsrooms, the company confirmed both will operate out of KKTV's building.
A Scripps spokesperson said local television is facing "significant changes" in how audiences consume news and framed the company's goal as preserving "strong local journalism for the long term." "In Colorado Springs, the integration of KKTV and KOAA gives us an opportunity to build one strong local news operation serving southern Colorado," the spokesperson said.
The consolidation is intended to "reduce duplication in daily coverage" and focus more reporting capacity on "original reporting, enterprise journalism and coverage across the communities we serve," according to the spokesperson.
One study by the Chicago Booth Review found that in some instances duopolies have strengthened local news coverage, and noted that what matters most is who owns the combined stations — a factor that affects the media market more than the duopoly structure itself. Gray Television "made minimal changes" in markets it controlled, according to the study, though E.W. Scripps Co. was not included in the research.
How the merged KKTV-KOAA newsroom will function day-to-day, and what the full operational integration will mean for local coverage, remains to be determined as Scripps continues working through details of the consolidation.