Why the Vail Tribune Exists
Eagle County deserves a newspaper that answers to its readers, not to a distant chain. This is our founding charter.
The Vail Tribune begins with a simple observation: the most important decisions shaping life in Vail and Eagle County, from housing approvals to land-use rewrites to hospital expansions, are made by local bodies, and they deserve sustained local scrutiny.
That scrutiny has grown thin. The Vail Daily, the valley's free seven-day tabloid with about 15,000 circulation, is owned by Ogden Newspapers of West Virginia, which acquired Swift Communications at the end of 2021. It became Eagle County's paper of record in 2025 after the Eagle Valley Enterprise closed. Every mountain daily in Colorado, from the Summit Daily to the Aspen Times to the Steamboat Pilot, answers to the same out-of-state chain.
Chain ownership is not an abstraction. In 2009, the Summit Daily fired journalist Bob Berwyn after he criticized the marketing practices of Vail Resorts, one of the paper's largest advertisers, an episode widely condemned in Colorado media. When the company that owns the press also depends on the valley's largest businesses for revenue, coverage of those businesses carries a structural question mark.
The independent alternative has flickered and dimmed. Real Vail, David O. Williams's independent digital outlet, paused indefinitely in 2026 when he rejoined the Daily as business editor, leaving the independent digital voice in Eagle County vacant. Aspen Daily News has shown since 1978 that the independent resort-town model can work, but no equivalent stands in this valley today.
The gaps extend beyond print. Colorado Public Radio's Mountain West News Bureau keeps no daily desk in Eagle County. The Denver Post's mountain beat has been gone since 2018. A 2021 Colorado Trust study of 153 Colorado journalists documented the Western Slope coverage gap. Too often, the high country makes the news only when something burns, slides or shuts down the interstate.
What we will be
The Vail Tribune is an independent digital newspaper for Vail, the Vail Valley and Eagle County, under Tribune Publications. We cover the Town Council and the county commission as a beat, not an afterthought. We treat Vail Resorts as what it is, a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and cover its earnings, its pass and its development moves with the seriousness the mountain economy deserves.
We write for year-round residents first: workforce housing, health care, schools, the I-70 corridor, water. Visitors are welcome to read, but they are not the constituency we serve.
We will publish our ownership, correct our errors in the open, and never let an advertiser shape a story. The chain papers cannot make that promise structurally. We can, and we will hold ourselves to it.
This is day one. Judge us by the work.
