The last trace of The Denver Post’s brand will be removed from the building it occupied on Civic Center — part of a multimillion-dollar settlement to be paid by the newspaper’s parent company to the city.
In all, DP Media Network will pay $13.5 million to the city to settle a legal dispute over the property, which is now owned by the city. The company stopped making payments last year on the lease it still held for the building.
The company also will remove “The Denver Post” signage from the top of the 11-story building by the end of the month.
From the voice of an empire to a city-owned building
The building at 101 W. Colfax Ave. was once the headquarters of the “Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire.”
Built in 2005 at a cost of $84 million, it was first known as the Denver Newspaper Agency building, hosting both the Post and the Rocky Mountain News.
The Rocky shuttered just a few years later, and The Denver Post moved its journalists in 2018 to its printing plant in Adams County.
The city government bought the building in 2024 from its longtime owner, Kayan LLC, an affiliate of American Properties. It planned to use the building to house courts and other city offices. The $88.5 million purchase was controversial at the time, with several council members questioning whether the city was getting a good deal.
But that deal still left a newspaper-affiliated company, DP Media Network, locked into a master lease for the building, which the city took over. The company owed monthly rent of $650,000 to the city, but it stopped paying in August, according to the city.
Now, DP Media Network will pay $13.5 million to get out of the lease. That covers roughly 21 months of rent, but not the full outstanding obligation of the lease, which was set to continue three more years and now will expire this month.
A new opportunity for the city
However, the city also expects to make millions more from the deal because it will now control the building’s parking structure and will inherit the leases that DP Media Network was operating to other organizations within the building.
“Everything they’re releasing through 2029 now returns to the city — all of their revenues, all of their leaseholding. The money they were collecting from parking now flows to the city, the tenants there who were tenants of The Denver Post now flows to the city. All of that flows back to us and it also frees up leasing availability on the areas they might have controlled,” said Jon Ewing, a spokesperson for the mayor.
“It gives us the opportunity to control the destiny of that building,” he added. Roughly half of the deal’s value is cash, while the other half comes from the city gaining control of the building sooner.
“And we’re now out of The Denver Post business. We still have a subscription and will continue to have one,” Ewing said.
Representatives for The Denver Post and its parent, MediaNews Group, didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
