Business Excellence Award Winner Spotlight

Medium Business of the Year: Summit Daily News

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the 2026 Business Excellence Awards!  We're proud to spotlight our winners and share their successes.

Congratulations to Summit Daily News for winning Medium Business of the Year!

At Summit Daily News, everything we do is centered on serving the Summit County community, including our readers, local businesses and area nonprofits. Here’s how we earned the recognition of Medium Business of the Year in connection with our work.

Listening to our readers: We value communication

• Reader survey: We made a renewed effort to solicit feedback about what we’re doing well and where we can improve. To do that, we ran a survey to ask how much trust readers have in Summit Daily, how much they value the work we do, and how we could better serve the community. More than 6,000 readers gave overwhelmingly positive feedback. Still, our focus was on hearing from readers who felt we could be better, and perceived bias in reporting was a concern the newsroom wanted to address.
• Letters to the editor: Another way we hear from our readers is through Letter to the Editor submissions. Each year, we publish hundreds of submissions from readers who live, work and play in Summit County.

Supporting local businesses: We value buying local

• Best of Summit: One of the biggest things we do each year to support local businesses is running the Best of Summit readers’ choice contest. With hundreds of categories and hundreds of thousands of nominations and votes, the contest is fundamentally about celebrating and supporting great Summit County institutions by raising their profile and helping them gain new fans.
• Buying local: Summit Daily prioritizes spending with local businesses, even if it costs a little bit more. This includes our local printing, coffee supplies and auto work in addition to storage rental, shop supplies and having a little fun at local restaurants and businesses.

Lifting up nonprofits: We value volunteerism

We support nonprofits through membership, fundraiser sponsorship and donations.

• Volunteering: Summit Daily staffers volunteered hundreds of hours with 16 local organizations and events.
• Giving: Summit Daily totaled more than $90,000 in in-kind donations through sponsorships. In addition, we ran our annual campaign to raise money for FIRC’s food market ahead of the holidays.
• Partnerships:
• La Voz de Summit: This Spanish-language newscast, produced alongside Mountain Dreamers, helps ensure our immigrant community has access to important community news.
• Give: Our annual end-of-year giving guide, produced alongside Summit Foundation, supported 25 nonprofits.
• Playhouse Project: This fundraiser, hosted at Copper Mountain Resort, raised $15,200 through the auction of refurbished chairlifts. The funds were donated to Oso Outdoors, which aims to increase access to the outdoors for immigrants.
• Digitization: We invested $10,000 as part of our effort to digitize historic Summit County newspapers in partnership with the library.

We use our profits from advertising to produce a free paper and website. There is nothing we do that isn’t done with the community in mind. We exist solely for this community — it's in our name.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re short staffed, the power has gone out and all the roads are closed — we produce and deliver a free community paper.

It’s a huge undertaking, but there’s no other job we’d rather have!

Click here to learn more about Medium Business of the year winner Summit Daily News.