On Thursday, inside a hotel conference ballroom in Northglenn, a packed room of journalists, funders, media advocates, and community members heard an opening salvo in what could be a major upcoming public policy push.

Before leading a panel discussion about it, Kyle Huelsman, an organizer who is working with the nonprofit Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, set the tone.

The Media Project, he said, is working on drawing together a coalition of voices around one fundamental issue — “and that is public funding for [the] local news ecosystem in the state of Colorado.”

That work builds on five years of research, planning, and analysis.

In 2019, a year after its creation, Colorado Media Project had published a report stating its leaders “believe that public funding can add another slice to the revenue pie for local journalism and help inject innovation into the industry.” The group also hosted a panel discussion on the topic that I’d moderated at CU Denver.

Five years later, Huelsman said he wanted to facilitate a discussion about how the landscape looks today, the shape of potential policy proposals, and different approaches to coalition building. And he asked those participating and in attendance to think long-term, not so much in the span of years but of decades.

Here are some takeaways from the discussion, which took place at the Colorado Media Project’s 2024 Summit in conjunction with the Colorado Press Association’s annual convention:

• “The reality is that there’s not enough money from philanthropy for the structural change we’re trying to see,” said Teresa Gorman, the associate director for Democracy Fund’s Public Square program. She noted one recent national model that showed creating a thriving local news ecosystem that’s truly served and led by BIPOC communities would cost $71 billion annually. (Not a typo.) “This is about structural systems change,” she said. She added that it took about a decade of work for New Jersey to eventually create a Civic Information Consortium that pumps millions of public dollars into quality journalism and information sharing. “Philanthropy has to be patient, has to invest that work into that infrastructure, and a lot of that work was community engagement, was building up the hubs and the backbone so that they would be ready when the law was passed.” And then there’s need on the backend to help make sure those distributing the money are doing it equitably.
• Anna Brugmann, the director of policy at Rebuild Local News, said she is encouraged by New York’s pioneering refundable tax credit for partial journalism salaries that could total up to $300,000 per newsroom. “That creates the right incentive structure,” she said. If she could pick one policy to pass in every state or at the federal level tomorrow, “that would be it at this stage,” she said. “Because I think it addresses the problem: we need more journalists in our communities, we need more general operating dollars in our newsrooms.”
• “The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 makes it possible for this last year $524 million to come into thousands of public media organizations across all 50 states,” said Amanda Mountain, the president and CEO of Rocky Mountain Public Media, adding that there are lessons we might draw from how that federal law came about. For instance, it was rooted in philanthropy and a grassroots coalition of community members that “reflected public will.” Foundations applied political power to make it a priority. They built off established legislation instead of starting from scratch. They identified representatives of key community coalitions that were also “really good storytellers.” (Think Mr. Rogers testifying in Congress.) Finally, the language of the act was “broad but it was clear” — no inside baseball, just representing “the public needs and good from their perspective.”
• Brittany Winkfield of the Colorado Ethnic Media Exchange said she appreciated former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2019 executive order that directed city agencies to channel half their print and digital advertising budgets to community media. “I do know that this industry is tough and no matter if it’s mainstream or not, I think we do have to start thinking bigger,” she said.
• “Where I live in California, there is a program where UC Berkeley gets public funding to place fellows in different newsrooms,” said Christina Shih, Press Forward’s associate director. She also noted that “philanthropy moves slow, making policy moves slower, and it’s not fast enough for journalism, but we’re all trying to sit in the middle and see how we can help connect the dots and move into that direction together.”

For those who might be skeptical about government influence or interference when talking about public support for local news and to what extent there could be any guarantees about protecting journalism from that, Brugmann of Rebuilding Local News said such questions are important when crafting a public policy.

“Our nightmare would be creating public policy that undermines independent journalism,” she said.

She went on:

But I think it’s important to remember — I think what we’ve all articulated in different ways — that we’ve always done this. This has always been a part of the United States. We have always made decisions that we were going to support a free and independent press. When the United States was founded, it took a different track than any other one of its comparable countries at the time and it didn’t tax advertising, it created infrastructure to spread journalism across a very disparate territory, and it subsidized the production of that news — that was a choice that no other country made that we did and it’s reflected in the diversity of our local press today. And so many of those policies still exist: postal subsidies, discounts for print, all of those things. But obviously technology has changed, our industry has changed. We need to make some new and creative and really intentional choices to create a local press that brings us into this new era of local journalism.

At the Colorado Capitol, there’s a “deep protectionist fear” around supporting local news, Huelsman said. Some lawmakers might question why they would support journalists who are losing jobs in a declining industry if they don’t do that in other sectors.

“The work that we have in front of us is to fundamentally shift that conversation to ‘this is not about supporting an industry, this is about supporting people on the ground,’” he said.

More from Huelsman

“That local news is a fundamental institution to our democracy, to our economy, to our local communities. And that supporting local news is supporting the diversity of people in the state — of Democrats and Republicans, of rural and urban — that bringing a diverse group of people together and centering their voices is so essential to where we need to go so that this isn’t a conversation about industry, this is a conversation about the most fundamental institution that we have to protect.”

“If you want to learn more about joining the policy coalition,” he said, “We want you, we need you.”

6 takeaways from the Colorado Press Association annual convention

From authentic inclusion to artificial intelligence, better election coverage to higher-ed collaborations, and dozens of other issues, media professionals gathered just outside Denver this weekend for the 146th annual convention of the Colorado Press Association.

Here’s what half a dozen attendees said were their biggest takeaways from the conference:

• “I was excited to hear attendees of the conference talking about how to get more marginalized communities represented in journalism, in both newsrooms and in the stories that come out of newsrooms and how hiring, for example, journalists of color, journalists from Spanish-speaking communities, can help increase representation,” said Brenna Swift, who teaches journalism at CSU Pueblo. “That wasn’t something that was discussed widely when I was in journalism school.”
• Hector Paniagua Morales, editor and publisher of Enterate Latino on the Western Slope, said collaborating with the Ethnic Media Exchange and getting to meet in person was a highlight. “It’s going to mean more reach, especially for advertising,” he said about how the networking would benefit his particular independent publication.
• “There are so many more people here,” said Joey Young of Kansas Publishing Ventures. “Kansas is just kind of overrun with just giant corporate media so they don’t send a lot of people to our convention.”
• Senior CSU Pueblo journalism student Holly Ward appreciated the rotating roundtable format that facilitated networking. “I think coming from a young aspiring journalist perspective it’s really inspiring to see experts in their field being able to offer that forward-thinking advice,” she said. “Learning about different topics that I wasn’t aware of was really interesting,” said fellow journalism senior Quinna Rollings. Both said some of the best advice they received was that working in the industry takes a lot of passion.
• Richard Ballantine, a newspaper publisher in Southwest Colorado who has been going to the state’s press association conferences since before he was president of the organization in 1999, said his biggest takeaway from this year’s was youth. “It is wonderful to see so much youth involved — and speaking up, too,” he said. “The setting was particularly good with multiple tables and multiple topics to encourage everyone to speak up, and the young people spoke up.” Some of what they spoke up about, he said, was a variety of interests from how to be successful in the communications field and “all of the technology that’s taking place.”

Organizers said roughly 400 people registered for the CMP Summit and CPA conference, which began Thursday and runs into Saturday, Aug. 23.

It juuuust keeps gooooing: Coach Prime vs. the Denver Post

University of Colorado Boulder football coach Deion Sanders has opened another front in his war with local journalists.

The Denver Post this week reported that the school’s athletics department told the newspaper Coach Prime would no longer take questions from the paper’s columnist Sean Keeler.

From Post reporter Matt Schubert:

In a statement provided to The Post’s editors on Friday, department officials said the decision was due to what it perceived as “a series of sustained, personal attacks” in Keeler’s coverage of the football program.

When asked for specific examples of how Keeler personally attacked Sanders and the program, a sports information staffer cited his use of phrases such as “false prophet,” “Deposition Deion,” “Planet Prime,” “Bruce Lee of B.S.,” “the Deion Kool-Aid” and “circus”

“After a series of sustained, personal attacks on the football program and specifically Coach Prime, the CU Athletic Department in conjunction with the football program, have decided not to take questions from Denver Post columnist Sean Keeler at football-related events,” the CU statement read.

The statement did not specify how long Keeler would be unable to ask questions, but a spokesman later clarified that the action was indefinite.

Elsewhere in the story, Schubert reported that Sanders has “specific language in his contract that requires him to speak only with ‘mutually agreed upon media’ as part of his employment with CU.”

More from the piece:

CU athletics began barring Keeler from asking questions the week of Aug. 12, days after Keeler wrote a column critical of Sanders’ behavior at the university’s fall sports media day. Neither The Post nor Keeler were informed of the action until after Keeler attended a football practice on Aug. 13.

Read the whole thing at the link above.

One person reacting to the news on social media said: “Every reporter should skip his press conferences. Report on other stuff with the team. But, totally ignore DS. Bet if they did that, suddenly everything would be fine.”

Colorado Springs Indy editor takes on newspaper ownership and news coverage conflicts

Following its purchase earlier this year by two local developers and businessmen with major financial and political interests in Colorado Springs, the Indy bi-weekly newspaper inevitably had to confront how such ownership intersects with its news coverage.

This week, the newly developed outdoor Ford amphitheater in Colorado Springs, which cranked up this summer with a series of concerts and generated positive attention about the marquee performers and negative attention about noise complaints from neighbors, was on the Indy’s cover.

The news story, by Cannon Taylor, benefits from access to the man behind the amphitheater who also owns the Indy, but doesn’t shy away from some of the local criticism about the new venue. The story mainly focuses on the developer’s nationwide ambitions for a string of similar amphitheaters in cities across the nation.

In a personal column in this week’s print issue, Indy editor Ben Trollinger wrote this under the headline “Disclosures and discourse”:

Yes, the cover story is about the new Ford amphitheater. Yes, JW Roth, the man behind it, is the co-owner of the Colorado Springs Independent. And yes, our other co-owner, Kevin O’Neil, is an investor in the project. But no, they didn’t put us up to this.

I confess that covering a story like this feels a bit awkward from a public relations perspective. It would look odd if we just ignored it (hey, what about those noise complaints?). But if we opt to write about it, we run the risk of confirming fears that the publication is a mouthpiece for our owners. For me to assure you, the reader, that the latter is decidedly not the case — that the owners have been assiduously hands off — could even create more doubt, not less. “Of course he would say that,” a skeptical reader might think.

The best path, in my view, is to be transparent and let the chips fall where they may. The owners of this company are involved in a host of major projects, from music venues to high rises. News coverage in the Independent is inevitable. From the start, our guiding principles have been simple: Cover stories that matter to the city; play fair and abide by common ethical and journalistic standards; don’t play favorites, and disclose any potential conflicts of interest that may arise.

Read both the column and the news story when they eventually come online at the Indy’s website here.

Lawmakers who exempted themselves from open meetings law get ‘free press’ award

There was unusual grumbling among some journalists Thursday evening at the Colorado Press Association convention after the organization bestowed “Defender of a Free Press” awards to certain lawmakers this year.

That’s because some who earned them, notably Colorado Democratic Senate President Steve Fenberg and Democratic House Speaker Julie McCluskie, shepherded a bill earlier this year that exempted lawmakers from the state’s open meetings laws.

Not only that, but Democratic lawmakers in the majority chose to do so, of all times, during Sunshine Week, which is the national seven days on the calendar dedicated to transparency in government. And while they invited input from the Colorado Press Association and Colorado Broadcasters Association, they didn’t consult the state’s preeminent open government organization, the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

Just last week, Democrats relied on their new secrecy law to deny journalists access to their caucus meetings in the lead-up to a special session of the General Assembly.

News organizations took notice.

The Denver Post’s editorial board slammed Democrats for it. Quentin Young, editor of the nonprofit Colorado Newsline, wrote that Colorado Democratic lawmakers are “increasingly hostile to open government” and have “learned that they will pay little or no price for drawing a curtain around their work.” Colorado Sun reporter Brian Eason wrote a detailed Aug. 23 story about how “closed meetings and backroom negotiations” ahead of the special session have frustrated open-government advocates and some lawmakers.

So, you can imagine some journalistic eye rolls upon learning about those “Defender of a Free Press” awards. “You have got to be kidding,” said Marianne Goodland, who is dean of the Capitol Corps and reports for Colorado Politics, when she learned on Friday that Fenberg had earned such an award.

Each year, the Colorado Press Association and its lobbyist work with lawmakers during the legislative session on potential new laws. Press Association CEO Tim Regan-Porter acknowledged from the stage when giving Fenberg his award that the open meetings bill “didn’t end up exactly where we wanted” but also called it “a much stronger bill” than what it could have been.

Notably, because of a quirky mishap, if it wanted to, the press advocacy organization could kind of play both sides on this one. The awards plaques were misprinted with the year 2023 on them instead of for the 2024 legislative session. “It’s a mistake,” the CPA could tell lawmakers. And to any grumbling journalists, it could also say the plaque doesn’t technically say it was for the 2024 session.

But that’s a stretch, Regan-Porter said in an interview Friday.

He said the CPA, of which I’m a member and has advertised in this newsletter, made the award decisions prior to the recent press-blocking caucus meetings — and the organization is upset about that lack of transparency. He said he understands why some members might take issue with the awards, which he said are about more than any one bill.

The organization plans to urge lawmakers to do something about the state’s open meetings laws in the next legislative session, he said.

More Colorado media odds & ends

♽ UP Venture Media, a “content marketing company” that states it is “eager to expand into news content,” announced it is reviving the Longmont Leader” digital site with aims to “grow it bigger and stronger than ever before.” (The Canadian-owned Village Media had nuked the Leader earlier this summer.)

⬆️ Andrew Kenney of Colorado Public Radio is slated to become editor of Denverite starting in the middle of next month. “I’m very excited — great people, great paper,” he said on social media about the digital outlet that operates under the auspices of CPR.

🗣 Current, the outlet that covers the public media scene, profiled Colorado’s Above the Noise initiative. Led by Rocky Mountain Public Media, the effort is “helping newsrooms across the state foster civil discussions about topics that matter to the communities they serve,” Owen Auston-Babcock wrote.

📸 A now-iconic photo of Kamala Harris at the DNC foregrounded by one of her young grandnieces that captured the nation’s attention has a Colorado connection. The New York Times photographer who took it, Todd Heisler, is an alum of the Rocky Mountain News where he won a Pulitzer.

🗳 Speaking at the Colorado Press Association conference, prominent NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who has touted his “Citizens Agenda” approach to covering U.S. elections, told attendees he was “crashing” their party “because 37 newsrooms in Colorado have signed up to participate in the Voter Voices project,” which he called “unprecedented as far as I know.” He added: “I want the project to succeed.”

⚖️ A district court judge has “ruled that Boulder government officials cannot charge Yellow Scene Magazine nearly $3,000 for police body camera and dashcam footage from an officer-involved shooting,” last year, Amber Carlson reported for the Boulder Daily Camera. “Magazine representatives sued the city in April after it refused to promptly release an unedited version of the footage. The lawsuit alleged that the city attempted to charge the magazine $2,857.50 for the footage.”

🎙 “Part of the reason I got into this business is because I want to tell people what they don’t always hear in other aspects of media outlets,” said Michael Lyle, Jr. of KUNC.

⛰ Swift Communications, which owns a string of mountain town newspapers as a brand of Ogden Newspapers of West Virginia, is “launching a regional reporting team to cover the most pressing issues on Colorado’s Western Slope,” Nate Peterson of the Swift paper Vail Daily reported. “The strategic move aims to deliver more in-depth analysis and reporting on the intersecting issues facing the mountain communities where Swift operates nine publications and employs more than 40 journalists.” The team includes Andrew Maciejewski, Elliott Wenzler, Ali Longwell, Andrea Teres-Martinez, and Robert Tann.

🇨🇳 Colorado Chinese News celebrated 30 years in business. “We’re still hanging in there,” publisher Wendy Chao said of the print publication that collaborates with other members of Colorado’s Asian community.

📰 “It was a scary time for us in media,” wrote Allie Seibel, the editor of the Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper at Colorado State University. “There were a few days where we simply weren’t sure we’d have a printer, and we felt like we were being forced into a decision we didn’t want to make.”

👍 The national Press Forward local news fundraising campaign has more than 35 chapters so far, said its incoming network manager Melissa Davis, who noted Colorado’s chapter is a “model” for others.

📺 9NEWS anchor and reporter Marc Sallinger is moving from the morning desk to the evening desk on weekends. “I’ll just be setting my alarm clock a little bit later now,” he said on air this week.

📚 The Elizabeth School District in Elbert County is “pulling 19 books from their school library shelves for parental review that officials deemed too controversial, including a book entitled ‘It’s Your World — If You Don’t Like It, Change It: Activism for Teenagers,’” Elizabeth Hernandez reported for the Denver Post.

🆕 “KRCC, the southern Colorado public radio station operated by Colorado Public Radio, announced … the hiring of a new local host of ‘Morning Edition.’ Kendra Carr joins KRCC and CPR from Interlochen Public Radio, and listeners in southern Colorado can expect to start hearing her in the coming weeks.”

🏴‍☠️ “You wouldn’t steal a local sports broadcast,” wrote Catie Cheshire in Westword this week. “Piracy, it’s a crime. But owing to the ongoing dispute between Altitude TV — the Stan Kroenke-owned television channel that holds the local media rights for the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche — and Comcast and DISH Network, many of us have become criminals by illegally streaming Nugs and Avs games. This weekend, that streaming went dark. When sports fans attempted to visit the original StreamEast website, they were greeted with a notice that the domain had been seized by law enforcement.”

🗣 Colorado First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg has written an article for the American Bar Association that “presents a decidedly ‘audience-centric’ approach to what the First Amendment protects” and “places the greatest emphasis on the individual autonomy rights of listeners, readers, and viewers of speech.” The article is based on a chapter in a book called “Why Books Still Matter.”

📺 KRDO13 announced this week that the TV station in Colorado Springs is “poised to bring viewers live College and Local High School Football Fridays and Saturday’s this season on KRDO Plus 13.3. KRDO Plus 13.3 is the KRDO Network’s new 24-hour news, sports, and entertainment television channel that you can only get over-the-air with an antenna on channel 13.3 or 13-3 on some TVs.”

🥇 “KUNC News has won the prestigious national 2024 Edward R. Murrow Award in the Podcast category for a journalism project produced last year about the environmental challenges facing the Colorado River.”

❓ Speaking to an audience at the Colorado Press Association conference, Johanna Ulloa Girón, the advocacy program manager of the Colorado Trust, asked why Colorado journalists say “ethnic media.” What, she said, “do you mean by ethnic?” noting that there are some white people who consider themselves ethnic. “The way you talk makes reality,” she said of journalists.

🔊 Rich Laden produced a detailed story in the Colorado Springs Gazette about noise complaints related to the city’s new outdoor amphitheater, which is economically benefiting the owner of the Gazette as the ticketing vendor along with the owner of the revamped bi-weekly Indy newspaper in the Springs who developed the venue.

🆕 The Colorado Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has chosen “two new co-presidents and a secretary of its board, welcomed new and returning board members, and said thanks and farewell to departing board officers.”

🎬 “More than 60 people attended and participated in a discussion about [a] film and brought together individuals from various walks of life and opposing perspectives” for an Above the Noise event in Salida hosted by Colorado Media Project, Colorado Press Association, and Colorado State University’s Center for Public Deliberation, per a news release from RMPBS posted at the digital nonprofit Ark Valley Voice. The project screened “Undivide Us,” a documentary that “aims to foster healthy national discourse leading up to the 2024 election.”

🏆 “Colorado Public Radio is the recipient of a prestigious 2024 Edward R. Murrow Award. The national award recognizes “A Year Since Club Q,” an audio documentary that tells the individual stories of four people who were present for the November 2022 shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs that killed five people,” the station said in a news release. “A team of people at CPR News and KRCC contributed to the documentary: Abigail Beckman reported and produced it; Andrea Chalfin and Rachel Estabrook edited it; and Pedro Lumbraño contributed mixing and sound design.”

I’m Corey Hutchins, co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I’ve reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Colorado Media Project is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab, both of which I sometimes write about here. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter hit me up.) Reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.