Westword editor and founder Patricia “Patty” Calhoun will step down from her stalwart alternative newsweekly in July, she announced Wednesday.
While Calhoun is retiring as editor-in-chief — having just overseen the newly published, 43rd edition of Best of Denver — she’ll stay on as editor emeritus to contribute a column and lead Westword toward its 50th anniversary on Sept. 1, 2027, she said.
“Oh, I’ll have plenty more to say in the next three months… and after,” she wrote in an email to The Denver Post. “But right now, we’re celebrating the Best of Denver, which is much more interesting than I am.”
But . “In so many ways, the best is yet to come,” she said. “In the meantime … I’ll also be writing the stories I’ve been meaning to get to when I wasn’t distracted by cranky politicians and big protests and projects like the Best of Denver.”
Calhoun brought a face and a level-headed ferocity to the city’s culture that has gone far beyond Westword’s cheeky brand, its literary, long-form journalism and its in-depth coverage of Denver nightlife, said U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, a longtime friend who met Calhoun after he opened the Wynkoop Brewing Co. in 1988.
“More than anybody else I know in Denver, she was a moveable feast in that true kind of Parisian sense,” said Hickenlooper, who also served as Denver mayor and governor of Colorado. “She has no limits, and Westword embodies that. Plus, how many people are that fun to hang out with?”
Westword’s award-winning investigations, edgy or absurd cartoons, unapologetic columns and reviews, and detailed event listings have been a landmark for readers, according to a by former Westword columnist Gustavo Arellano.
Calhoun blazed trails for women journalists at a time when newsroom equality was rare, and women’s voices were often shut out of news media. She bucked those stereotypes, instead appearing as a rough-and-tumble presence at Western events. She also wrung the best from her writers, and as a loyal Denverite who saw trends coming from miles away, gave young writers a chance to influence the city’s conversations.
“What I love is that she doesn’t approach her work emotionally, and invites criticism. In fact, she loves it,” said Bree Davies, a former Westword writer who now hosts the City Cast Denver podcast. “The reason she knows everybody here is because she gets the facts, writes really interesting stories, doesn’t hold grudges, and is fun to be around.”
“I read an article that said women in business should not drink beer because it wasn’t professional,” Calhoun told late Denver Post columnist Bill Husted in 2010. “And I am enough of a contrarian that I decided to embrace beer with a vengeance. And itap easier to keep track of your drinking because, unlike wine where they keep filling your glass, you can count the beer bottles or the limes.”
“She basically invented the ‘drinks on the table’ concept, which is part of how she got so much (access),” Hickenlooper said. “We’d always share dirt, but if there were a cocktail or bottle in front of you, it was all off the record.”
While major alt-weeklies such as the Village Voice (which became part of Westword’s parent company ) and smaller papers have closed in recent years, Westword has found a way to hang on in both print and online. Among her dozens of national awards, Calhoun was named the inaugural recipient of the Association for Alternative Newsmedia’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, according to Westword.
Greg Moore, former editor in chief of The Denver Post, said Calhoun is a towering figure in journalism and has no Colorado peer. Her dogged reporting and way with politicians, celebrities, sports stars and fellow writers has helped define Denver’s culture.
“I don’t know that there’s an editor in Denver who’s had a better run, from founding Westword some 50 years ago to running it at a very high level and touching almost every institution in Denver and Colorado,” he said over the phone Wednesday. “I don’t know that there’s a more knowledgeable editor about Colorado history, its culture, its authors, its music, its heartbeat, than Patty. She’s going to be really missed.”
Calhoun started Westword in 1977 with two of her former Cornell University dorm-mates, according to Arellano, “as the winds of Watergate blew through the nation and stoked the alt-press along the way. The partners soon departed, leaving Calhoun as the sole boss until she sold it to what eventually became the largest chain of alt-weeklies in the United States.”
“She was kind of like a boss from a movie,” said Laura Bond, who worked as a music editor and writer at Westword from 1999 to 2005. “She was brilliant, larger than life, fashionable, hilarious, sometimes tough. Her high standards were always rooted in a respect for both truth and storytelling, in service of a city she loves and knows better than anyone.”
As editor emeritus and a columnist, Calhoun plans to “finally finish that article about the status of Rocky Flats today, and why people visiting whatap now a ‘wildlife refuge’ might come out with a certain glow,” she wrote. “I’ll dig into why there are so few live music venues downtown, when culture is a key to bringing people back there. And I might even write about the time I met with Joe Rogan — yes, that Joe Rogan — who wanted to be the Westword pot critic.”
Calhoun also previewed “side obsessions” in her announcement Wednesday, promising to dig deeper into the 15-year-old Colorado Music Hall of Fame and revisit “the much more elderly World’s Wonder View Tower, a roadside attraction that turns a hundred this summer.”
“A crew of history-loving Denver cronies and I bought it a decade ago,” she wrote of the structure, “then created a nonprofit to carry it into the future because we didn’t want to see another Colorado Classic wiped off the map. Like Westword, itap ready for the future.”
Westword, which is distributed free to newsprint racks around the metro area, currently has more than 1.5 million monthly active users and an estimated 278,000-plus monthly print readers, .
