Vail Daily Editor Nate Peterson is moving on to his next big challenge after a 7-year run leading the newsroom

After seven years leading the Vail Daily’s newsroom and nearly four years serving as the director of audience growth and content for Swift Communications’ 11 mountain resort publications, Nate Peterson is logging off. 

Friday is his last day with the company, where he has spent 14 years working as a reporter and editor over two stints. Peterson has accepted an offer to become the next sports editor at The Denver Post — a natural transition for a born-and-raised Coloradan who has spent most of his career in sports. 

With the championship window wide open for the Broncos, Nuggets and Avalanche, and Lindsey Vonn back winning World Cup races at 41 and on course for another Olympics, it’s the perfect time to tackle the next challenge.

Still, Peterson said he’ll miss the reporters, editors, photographers and designers he worked with during his tenure leading the Vail Daily’s newsroom and serving as the lead editor for its group of sister publications. And he’ll miss being at the center of the community, striving, each day, to live up to the mission statement that sits beneath the Vail Daily’s flag: “Bringing Communities Together.”

His last week on the job exemplified his tenure at the Vail Daily. After a local judge issued a gag order to prevent the paper from reporting on an ongoing criminal case involving local teens, he swung into action to have Steve Zansberg, a prominent media attorney in Colorado, file a motion to lift the gag order.

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(In the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that Peterson has been my editor for the last seven years, and I was the reporter who prompted Judge Rachel Olguin-Fresquez to issue her ruling through my coverage of the hearing.)

Also this week, Peterson wrote a great piece about three longtime town of Vail employees retiring after a combined 126 years of service. 

Both of these final-week efforts were essential to Vail Daily readers, Peterson said. 

Staying connected

Peterson left CBSSports.com after eight years to become the Vail Daily’s editor in 2019, just as Vail was experiencing one of the most significant controversies in the town’s history.

“Forget Booth Heights — just call it Wuthering Heights for how stormy this whole ordeal has been,” he wrote in a column about the ongoing saga in East Vail over a proposed Vail Resorts’ employee housing development that divided the community. “Good luck finding any middle ground in Vail these days.”

It had been years since anyone from the Vail Daily had been awarded for column writing in the Colorado Press Association’s annual Better Newspaper Contest before Peterson was recognized in the contest’s “Best Serious Column Writing” category for that piece.

The Vail Daily racked up awards under Peterson’s leadership, including winning two General Excellence awards — the highest honor in the state — from the Colorado Press Association in 2022 and 2024. The newsroom also received an Editorial Excellence award in 2024.

Peterson saw the awards, especially a prize in the 2021 contest for reporting produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, as recognition for doing the essential work of crafting honest community news. 

“It feels good to see all the hard work we did in such a challenging stretch be recognized,” he said at the time. “I especially loved the judge’s comments for our Shining Through series on the first year of the pandemic, which took home second place for Best Series or Sustained coverage. They called it ‘a true staff-wide effort to bring light in darkness. The broad coverage and depth of these articles shows a fierce commitment to community.’ That’s us, always — fiercely committed to our community.”

While the Booth Heights ordeal stretched the community to its limits, finding any middle ground became increasingly complicated after a global pandemic shut down the valley’s prized ski resorts and its visitor economy. 

More than anything, Peterson said he is most proud of the work he’s done to keep the Vail Daily’s newsroom intact and to keep the communities it serves together during a time of extreme divisiveness.  

That work went beyond just reporting on community news. Peterson said some of his favorite days on the job were staff build days in Gypsum’s Stratton Flats neighborhood with Habitat for Humanity or monthly staff ski outings during the winter. He also took over managing the Vail Daily’s softball team from David Hakes, the paper’s beloved former circulation manager, after Hakes retired to a part-time role. 

Peterson constantly pushed the journalists working under him to get out into the community and get to know the people they were covering. And he constantly pushed readers to have civil conversations in the Vail Daily’s opinion pages, moving away from national politics to focus on the local issues right in front of them. 

A whole year before the onset of the pandemic, Peterson reorganized the Vail Daily’s newsroom to connect everyone over Zoom, abandoning a disorganized system where communication was scattered between emails, texts and phone calls. 

When the whole world went to Zoom in March of 2020, the Vail Daily’s newsroom had already been using it for months to meet the demands of an increasingly digital audience. As the director of audience growth and content, Peterson also pushed to have the Vail Daily’s sister papers in resort markets in Colorado and California work more closely together.

He helped launch a regional reporting team to oversee coverage of the issues that intersect on Colorado’s Western Slope, such as housing, outdoors and recreation, wildlife, water, the ski industry, transportation, health, education, public safety, equity and immigration, the state legislature and regional politics. 

In an era of smaller newsrooms, the move helped reduce redundancies in coverage and put some of Swift’s best journalists on the toughest stories. 

Moving on

Peterson got his start in journalism as an intern in the sports department at the Boulder Daily Camera, his hometown paper. He’s covered Vonn throughout her career, first at the Vail Daily, then at The Aspen Times and The New York Times — where he was a regular freelancer for two years — as well as during his eight years as an editor at CBSSports.com. There, he spent three years as the website’s lead NFL editor.

He counts writing the story of Vonn capturing her second World Cup overall title for The New York Times as a career highlight, as well as watching her win the gold in the downhill at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Along with reporting from the Olympics, Peterson was at Super Bowl 50 for CBS to see the Broncos claim their third Lombardi Trophy. Ten years later, with the Super Bowl back in San Francisco, Peterson is looking forward to covering another possible Super Bowl run.

Vail Daily publisher Bob Brown, in a recent all-staff meeting, said he has noticed “a common theme among the individuals working with and for Nate — ‘he helps me grow in my work, he challenges me and provides effective feedback demonstrating I know he cares.'”

Brown certainly captured Peterson’s tenure well with that statement. My writing thrived under him. I had never received a writing award before Peterson joined the Vail Daily, and he encouraged me to take on more difficult stories. In 2022, I was recognized for best politics reporting and in 2024, I received what many journalists consider the Colorado Better Newspaper Contest’s highest individual honor — first place for best investigative reporting.

Also, in 2024, I approached Peterson with a story I had uncovered about the namesake of the Gore Range, explaining that the Vail Daily and many other news outlets had been misreporting information about Gore, which had only recently become verifiable through the digitization of 19th-century newspapers. Many editors would have insisted a big story like that should be run in their paper, but Peterson encouraged me to try to get it published as a book. I signed a deal with History Press later that year and the book came out in October.

I’ve also watched as my colleagues, fellow reporters Ali Longwell and Zoe Goldstein, blossomed under Peterson. Longwell and Goldstein won two awards apiece at this year’s Top of the Rockies event, a prestigious competition that includes more than 80 media outlets.

The search is already underway for the next Vail Daily editor, but Peterson will undoubtedly be missed, even though he’s not going far.