The Colorado Sun has built an award-winning newsroom — without a physical newsroom.
Since it was founded in 2018, the Denver-based Sun has won several local and national honors, including a 2025 national Edward R. Murrow Award. It dominated the four-state Top of the Rockies competition this year, including earning the Public Service award for the second year in a row. Despite such successes, the Sun’s founders — most of whom came from The Denver Post — began to think something was missing. As they reflected, they realized that their journalists are scattered across the state and don’t experience the informal learning and connections that were common in the Post newsroom.
“We miss the social values of the physical newsroom, where you were in community with the people who worked next to you,” said Sun editor Dana Coffield, who spent nearly 15 years in various editing positions at The Denver Post. “This environment helped encourage team feelings and promoted an understanding that none of us were on an island.”
“We do not have the luxury, now, of inviting someone to roll up a chair while their story is edited,” Coffield said.
Scholars have been tracking the decline in local news outlets and journalists for years. The Medill School’s 2026 State of Local News report detailed the increase in newspaper closures, growth in news-desert counties and loss of journalism jobs over the past year. But there’s another loss in local news diminishing the connection between communities and their outlets: physical structures.
Media offices are more than a place where a daily news report is, or was, assembled by colleagues working in close proximity. For decades, many such headquarters symbolized the presence and stature of local news in their communities. Newspaper offices sometimes served as places where copies could be acquired and, as known locations, implicitly reinforced an outlet’s brand to consumers. That presence is evolving as newspapers across the country close — now at a rate of nearly three a week, Medill reported in October — and digital outlets, often with extremely small staffs, emerge. Many outlets are shrinking or abandoning physical newsrooms as staffs dwindle and the cost of maintaining office space becomes harder to justify.
As pandemic-era safeguards that necessitated working from home waned, some have championed the technological advances that allow many journalists to report, edit and publish from basically anywhere with stable Internet access. But the cost savings from a smaller or nonexistent physical presence isn’t the only consideration. Less clear-cut is the impact on the elements of journalism that never appear on budgets, such as the training absorbed from looking over someone’s shoulder or the institutional knowledge gained and passed by working in proximity to others over time.
Downsizing Becomes the Norm
Downsizing has become common among prominent regional newspapers as their audiences have shrunk. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reduced its footprint in its longtime headquarters from 160,000 square feet to about 10,000 square feet before leaving the building in spring 2025, CoStar reported last October. The Chicago Tribune left Tribune Tower in 2018 and moved to nearly 140,000 square feet at One Prudential Plaza. In 2021, it relocated again, moving its newsroom and offices to its Freedom Center printing facility just northwest of downtown Chicago. (Tribune Tower has since been converted into condominiums with ground-floor retail.)
When the Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting this year for coverage of the federal immigration surge known as Operation Midway Blitz, journalists crowded into a small conference room in its space in a downtown office building to celebrate.
In Toledo, The Blade left its longtime downtown headquarters this year, moving most employees to remote work. (The Blade’s owner, Block Communications, announced in September that it was exploring a sale of the Blade’s assets and that if a buyer is not found, its final edition could publish in December.)
Patrick Ferrucci, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado who studies newsroom culture and organizational connections, said journalists can produce good work without a shared physical workspace. But the newsroom still provides distinctive culture, particularly for younger journalists learning the profession, he said.
“People learn from doing and seeing other people,” Ferrucci said. “A lot of people stay in journalism primarily for the community or for the mission, and if they don’t get either, it makes it a lot easier to leave. It’s harder to do it for a long period of time and harder to keep people doing it.”
In southern Illinois, The Southern Illinoisan’s longtime building on North Illinois Avenue in Carbondale is now a U-Haul rental office. Marilyn Halstead, who has spent nearly 34 years at The Southern and is now its editor, remembers when the newsroom had 14 reporters and eight editorial assistants, news clerks and other staff. Today, the newspaper has two full-time and one part-time reporter, she said in a recent interview.
A physical newsroom is not necessary to do the daily work of journalism, Halstead thinks. Reporters can write from home or a coffee shop, she said, noting that “most working journalists have written a story in their car, or on a cellphone.”
Staff at the Southern worked remotely after Covid-19 hit in 2020 and stayed remote until the paper was sold to Paxton Media Group in 2023.
But after the sale and The Southern’s move from Carbondale to Marion, Halstead said, many people who live in the area thought The Southern was gone altogether, even though it had relocated only about 17 miles.
“That’s what we are fighting right now,” she said, “just letting people know we’re alive and kicking.”
The details might differ at locations around the country, but the dynamics are much the same. In Connecticut, Randall Beach spent much of his career at the New Haven Register, where the newsroom was downtown on Orange Street. That location made it easy for reporters to walk to City Hall, Yale and other prominent New Haven locations, Beach said. Subscribers also came into the building to place advertisements or death notices.
The newsroom gave reporters more than a place to write, Beach said. It was itself a way to know the city.
At later locations, including one on Sargent Drive, Beach said, the paper felt further removed from New Haven. The newsroom had fewer people, and he could no longer walk out the door and immediately be in the city.
Today, what remains of the Register’s newsroom is in a strip mall in Meriden, he said, or about 20 miles from New Haven.
“What’s been lost is the connection to the community,” Beach said. “The ability to connect with New Haveners, city officials downtown, the street people.”
He still believes in face-to-face journalism, Beach said. Reporters could come into the newsroom, read the paper and talk about each other’s stories. They could bounce story ideas and leads off one another.
That kind of interaction is harder to quantify than rent.
Jim Prendergast, a Chicago-based design director and principal at Gensler, one of the world’s largest global architecture, design and planning firms, said the same tension exists in workplaces beyond journalism. The practical value of office space is easy to calculate. Meanwhile, the “alchemy of knowing and being with one another” and the cultural tissue of an organization, as Prendergast put it, are less tangible but still have their own value.
For news organizations, he said, physical workplaces can provide meeting space, areas for training and collaboration, room to socialize, and informal learning.
“The counterpoint to people saying that we don’t need a newsroom is you’re cutting at the fabric of the organization,” said Prendergast, who designed the CBS News Chicago newsroom in 2006 while working with another firm. “You do that at your own peril.”
Nik Usher, whose research has examined the changing physical spaces of news organizations, has watched the retreat from newsrooms for years.
Usher, an associate professor at the University of San Diego, tracks an issue more visible in communities than news organizations consolidating printing operations or redesigning their workplaces around digital production: the loss of buildings themselves. Many once served as prominent markers of newspapers’ place in their cities.
Some examples: The former Chicago Sun-Times headquarters, completed in 1958 at 401 N. Wabash Ave. along the Chicago River, was widely regarded as an eyesore before it was demolished in 2004 to make way for Trump Tower. In Milwaukee, the former Journal Sentinel headquarters was converted into affordable student housing in 2021 and apartments in 2022. In Philadelphia, the building that housed The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1924 and the Daily News beginning in 1965 became the headquarters of the Philadelphia Police Department in 2022. In Miami, demolition of the former Miami Herald headquarters at One Herald Plaza was finished in 2015, two years after the newspaper moved to nearby Doral. The 15.5-acre waterfront site was largely idle apart from temporary events, according to 2023 reporting by the Miami Herald.
Newspaper buildings once put journalism into the physical landscape of a city, Usher noted. Their disappearance can make newspapers less visible to the public at the same time that their staffs are becoming less visible to one another.
On a recent architecture-focused boat tour of Chicago, Usher was stunned that the guide never pointed out the historic Tribune building from the Chicago River. “These are diminished physical reminders, from no longer getting print to not seeing news buildings in the sky of their city,” Usher said. “There are these branding things that happen without people noticing.”
Making Up for Lost Space
It’s not clear yet whether the digital tools that have replaced physical newsrooms can reliably replicate the learning and camaraderie that happened in physical workspaces. There are also practical losses: Older newsroom buildings often contained archives, photo studios and other facilities that are less likely to exist when journalists routinely work from shared desks, their homes or other non-centralized locations.
Today, it’s common for journalists to collaborate through Slack and Zoom. They report, edit and publish without sharing a building address. Newsroom leaders can meet the community in public libraries or other similar spaces. But research on how people learn the profession still points to the importance of watching other people work.
One of the foundational studies of newsroom culture, Warren Breed’s 1955 research, found that journalists learned professional norms through social interactions in the newsroom. More recent research has reached similar conclusions. A 2014 study found that discussions between editors and trainees about story ideas helped newcomers learn the craft and internalize newsroom culture. In a study published this year, Ferrucci found that journalists in virtual newsrooms can struggle to understand organizational norms and develop a sense of belonging.
That kind of informal learning can be harder to reproduce when no one is sitting nearby.
In Colorado, the Sun is making efforts to create that learning environment.
The nonprofit organization has added monthly, staff-directed training sessions and meetings focused on journalism skills.
At a recent staff meeting, investigative reporter Shannon Mullane presented what she learned in a short course on vertical video funded by the Pulitzer Center, including the equipment required and the time involved in producing social videos.
The discussion aimed to help colleagues distinguish between quick, informal vertical videos and more polished pieces produced to accompany longer stories. It prompted a request for additional one-on-one training from the Sun’s social producer, which was quickly arranged.
Future sessions are scheduled on writing shorter stories, a format the newsroom is increasingly asked to produce, and ways to bring investigative techniques into daily reporting.
Coffield, the editor who is one of the Sun’s founders, said the effort reflects the Sun’s broader commitment to staff development. As a worker-directed nonprofit, the organization expects employees to contribute to its advancement, including by sharing knowledge and helping colleagues develop new skills.
The goal is to build the kind of teamwork that was inherent in newsrooms where reporters could watch an editor work through a story or listen to how colleagues handled a difficult source, she said. The Sun is also thinking about succession, she said, and how to develop the next generation of editors and newsroom leaders.
“The tiny newsrooms where we literally learned how to work are few and far between, and the midsize publications, where we learned our potential career paths by watching others, are equally scant,” she said. “So it is up to us to actively nurture, skill people up.”
Clearly, journalism can survive without a newsroom. The question is what has to be rebuilt when the newsroom is gone.
At The Southern, in Illinois, Halstead is trying to make sure people know the newspaper still exists.
At The Sun, Coffield is trying to create learning and teaching opportunities for staff. In Connecticut, Beach still drives to the communities he covers as a freelance writer because he wants to see the people and places he writes about.
None of those things requires a particular building. But all of them require someone to decide they matter.
