The owner of The Denver Post will pay the city that shares the newspaper’s name $13.5 million to end its master lease in a downtown building under a settlement announced Tuesday.
DP Media Network LLC has agreed to pay that settlement to terminate the company’s master lease for its namesake building, which it no longer occupies, three and a half years early. That is the legal name for the newspaper, whose parent company is MediaNews Group, owned by Alden Global Capital.
The company and the city, which now owns the building, have been negotiating how to end the lease since DP Media Network stopped paying its $650,000-per-month rent last August, saying it wanted to end the lease.
That settlement is less than 40% of what the company would have paid the city under its original lease, which was set to end in 2029. If the company had continued paying that rent through the remainder of the lease, it would have paid the city $34.5 million, including the missed rent since 2025. That count doesn’t include any late fees incurred during the missed rent payments.
But the city says it will still be made whole by the arrangement because of the transfer of control over building parking revenue and existing leases.
Under the agreement, the newspaper’s name will also be removed from the building.
Mayor Mike Johnston called the agreement “a great deal for Denver” in a news release.
“When we said we would recover every cent owed, we meant it,” he said. “We look forward to forging a new future for the property that serves the city and preserves this building’s iconic place downtown.”
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An attempt to reach Marshall Anstandig, general counsel for MediaNews Group, for comment was not successful.
While the building has continued to bear The Post’s name, the newspaper hasn’t used the space at 101 W. Colfax Ave. in more than eight years. In 2018, The Post moved its employees, including the newsroom, to offices at the paper’s Adams County printing facility. MediaNews Group moved its final corporate employees out of the building in early 2020.
The Post has remained responsible for the master lease payments for several floors. It subleased space to other tenants, including some city agencies that had moved into the building.
The city purchased the building from owner Kayan LLC in 2024 for $88.5 million with plans to convert the building into a courthouse. The city pursued the deal with the understanding that the lease would last through 2029, making it financially feasible, a city spokesperson said in October.
The 11-story, roughly 306,000-square-foot building opened in 2006 as the base of operations for both The Post and the Rocky Mountain News — though neither newspaper ever owned it. The Rocky closed in 2009.
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