Swift Communications

Swift Communications Inc. is an American digital marketing and newspaper publishing company based in Carson City, Nevada. Swift's primary markets are resort town tabloid newspapers and websites as well as agricultural publications. Swift Communications has been noted for "being outside of the mainstream" and "drawing national attention inside the industry" for disabling commenting and implementing paywalls on most of its online newspaper's websites. Many of Swift's newspapers are heavily composed of paid advertorial "sponsored content".

Swift Newspapers was founded by Philip Swift in 1975. Swift, a former executive at the Scripps League of Newspapers, exchanged his equity interests in the company for ownership of two daily newspapers. After dozens of acquisitions and mergers over the years, Swift amassed a large number of print publications and in 1991 the company began concentrating on the resort sector by launching Tahoe.com and Reno.com. In 2006, the company changed their name to Swift Communications. Swift also prints advertorials, catalogs, realtor magazines and phone book advertising.

In November 2009 Bob Berwyn, a journalist for the Summit Daily News (SDN), wrote a column which criticized the marketing practices of Vail Resorts, one of the paper's largest advertisers. He left the SDN shortly after the writing the article for reasons unrelated to the column. This action was widely derided in the Colorado media.

"It's unfortunate but, especially in this economy, some advertisers feel like they can flex their muscles when there's commentary that they don't like," says Ed Otte of the Colorado Press Association. "Newspapers need to withstand these kinds of threats."

In May, 2011 after gathering analytics, metrics and revenue data on their commenting platform investment, Swift reviewed the data and decided to remove the user-generated content (UGC) platform Pluck from all online newspapers owned by Swift Communications. The ability for readers to leave comments about articles was removed. Editors with Swift felt the inability of their content management software to restrict comments they did not approve of was impacting newsroom productivity and civil community conversation.

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