The free press is under fire.

That was the theme of a public discussion in Colorado Springs about the ways in which the local journalism industry operates during a time of, shall we say, disruption.

On the panel was Gazette Executive Editor Vince Bzdek, former Denver Post Editor Greg Moore, Rocky Mountain PBS CEO Amanda Mountain, Colorado Sun reporter and editor Jesse Paul, and KOAA News5 investigative journalist Alasyn Zimmerman.

Will Stoller-Lee, the program chair for the Greenberg Center for Learning and Tolerance, moderated the discussion at the Ent Center for the Arts on the campus of UCCS.

Topics ranged from bias and diversity in newsrooms to attacks from Republican President Donald Trump and concerns about media ownership.

At one point, Moore said he couldn’t remember how many court cases he lost during his 14-year run leading the Denver Post that ended in 2016.

“The judiciary was turning against journalism way before Trump, OK?” he said. “You just could not win in court. You could not get access to phone records. You could not get access to transcripts of meetings and things of that nature. So, the ground had already shifted beneath our feet. We were losing more cases.”

The situation was so bad, he said, that when the paper lost one case, other journalists in Colorado begged him not to take it to the State Supreme Court for fear that it might set a bad precedent and hurt everyone.

“So we didn’t do it,” he said. “The ground has shifted on us, and it’s just shifted more aggressively against a free press in the years since then.”

The discussion lasted about an hour and a half. Here were some nuggets from it:

• “The attack on public media is about more than just our industry overall,” Mountain said about congressional and Trumpian threats to cut funding. “It is about wounding our access collectively to a shared set of facts and information, and it’s about removing local journalism as a structural investment as taxpayers,” she said. “And once that happens it’s very hard to recover from that and it hurts everybody.” Public media is especially important, she noted, because it is in places, often rural, where there is “no commercial incentive to be there.”
• “We have an obligation to our viewers and our readers to hold those, especially those in elected office, accountable,” Zimmerman said. “You’re going to have people that have a perception, though, based on their opinions, that maybe you’re going too hard.” (The moderator pointed out that KOAA has just one investigative reporter. “That just gives you the sort of lay of the land in terms of some of the headcount,” he said. “Or maybe there’s something else.”)
• Sometimes, Paul said, people look at journalists as “bloodthirsty” individuals who just want to take people down. “That’s not why I got into this,” he said. He added that it can be difficult sometimes to have those “tough conversations with people” when they’ve done something wrong. “It is part of our job, though,” he said, adding that he hopes people realize journalists are just trying to “shed light on things.”
• Moore said he worries that when news companies suffer downturns, some of the most diverse members of the staff might be the first to go because they were the latest ones hired. He said newsrooms “have to redouble our efforts” to make sure their staffs reflect the diversity of their audience.
• Bzdek said what sets journalism apart from other kinds of media is that “we have editors and those editors spend a lot of time trying to get balancing voices, both sides, plug holes.” He said he spent a month recently trying to get more voices in a story from government officials who won’t talk. “Usually, it’s not two sides, it’s like five sides.”
• Paul said as a nonprofit funded by readers, the Sun is beholden to them. “Sometimes our readers don’t like what we write,” he said. He added that he believes the roughly 15,000 members who support the Sun tend to be more liberal. “As an equal opportunity reporter, when I write a hard story about Democrats, there are readers who will unsubscribe,” he said. “But we can’t be afraid of that.”
• Bzdek said he rarely ever sees his paper’s owner, the conservative Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz. “He likes to check in and see how we’re doing, but he has a lot bigger businesses than ours,” he said. “And it’s really kind of a stupid investment for him to invest in newspapers. So he does that because — and said this to me — ‘Well, I want Colorado Springs to be a very vibrant, good town, and I think a good newspaper helps that.’” He said Anschutz “very much sticks to the editorial page, so I’m lucky in that sense.” He said if there was any effort to sway what he does, then he would leave. “Our owner does influence the editorial page,” he said. “And that seems to be where he seems to want to have his influence.” Bzdek said Anschutz “kind of gets the idea that the more the newspaper is independent of him and his investments and businesses, the better.”

At one point, the moderator read the results of a poll of audience members who responded to a real-time survey from a QR code on the screen.

He didn’t say how many of the more than 100 in attendance (who trended older) answered, but of those who did, 15% said they “absolutely” trust the media, 75% said they “mostly” did, 5% said “mostly not” and the remaining 5% said “definitely not.”

Obviously, that’s a self-selecting crowd who would show up to an event like that in the first place — and I’m personally glad they did.

Now, a message from Gary Community Ventures…

✍️ Request for Grant Proposals to Fund Reporting on Child Care

Colorado’s child care system faces an inflection point. On average, the Denver Post reports, parents pay $13,000 to $20,000 a year per child on child care. And despite charging some of the nation’s highest tuition rates, the Colorado Sun has reported many of our state’s child care providers struggle to remain open due to increasing operational costs.

We’ve seen great reporting on how this dilemma impacts rural communities, grandparents, businesses and even our military. Yet many Coloradans remain unaware about how our state’s child care issues directly impact them.

This is why Gary Community Ventures, alongside the Colorado Media Project, seeks to fund journalism projects capable of reaching Colorado audiences frequently left out of the child care conversation. Learn more and apply by Aug. 3. ✍️

Boulder Weekly‘s implosion ripples into second week

While this newsletter offered the most comprehensive coverage of what went down at Boulder Weekly last week, other media reported on the story over the weekend.

Some included inaccuracies, like reporting the “entire” staff had been “fired” or “laid off” (one was fired, one quit, two were let go), while others illuminated some more details.

Brendan Joel Kelley, who used to work at Boulder Weekly, reported for Westword about some correspondence between the former editor, Shay Castle, and owner, Stewart Sallo, as well as details from a meeting between the two from Castle’s perspective. (Sallo didn’t comment for the story.)

Reporter Rhea Jha had a story for Denver’s 9NEWS where she interviewed Castle, a contributor, and a local. (Sallo didn’t comment for the story.)

At the end of her broadcast, Jha offered her own commentary.

“As a journalist myself, I can tell you that a lot of us aren’t in this for the money,” she said. “It’s about the mission, and when ownership decides to make deals like this behind closed doors it’s the community and local journalism that suffers.”

Kyla Pearce reported for the Denver Gazette that Castle said Boulder Weekly had about 20,000 email newsletter subscribers and its print distribution had about 25,000 readers, as of its last analysis in 2020.

A fundraiser Castle set up last week to help those affected “with priority being given to the lowest-earning (and therefore the highest need),” had brought in about $4,000 by July 16.

While Sallo, Boulder Weekly’s founding owner since 1993, declined to comment to many of those who reached out, other than this newsletter, he sat for a friendly YouTube interview with Jann Scott of Boulder who runs a web video business. “My days of running a news organization are coming to an end,” he said. Here was some other news from it:

• “I, of course, don’t blame any of them for filing for unemployment,” he said of the departed staff.
• He said he has been dealing with an “onslaught” of media organizations wanting to talk to him and wanting to “sensationalize” the story, of what he called, “mostly the editor vs. publisher drama.”
• “I’m sure there’s a lot of people who would love to be the editor or write for Boulder Weekly, in fact, I know there are. People have already stepped forward and said that. But we have to be really ready to get back at it 100%, and that probably means having a new publisher.” (He’s looking to retire.)
• Asked if he could sell the paper, he said he’s looking at it “and there are several options that I’m looking at where that’s concerned.” He particularly would like a young person to buy it.
• “We don’t intend to be either liberal or conservative. We intend to be truthful,” he said about the paper’s editorial direction. “And it just so happens that the truth is found more on the liberal side of things than on the conservative side of things, in my opinion and in the opinion of many. And so we do tend to lean left. I think we may have leaned too far at times.”
• “I hope the Boulder Weekly will continue on,” he said. “I think it needs to happen under new ownership.”

Watch this space for whatever, if anything, happens next.

‘Colorado as a way of figuring it out’: How our state was useful to a big new national report

Last week, a major new report from the nonprofit Rebuild Local News and the tech platform Muck Rack illuminated a “severe” shortage of local journalists nationwide.

I wrote about the report for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. But because that was a national story, I didn’t get into much detail about a key Colorado connection.

Scott Yates, a former Colorado journalist and startup founder, was instrumental in the report. He was an early supporter of Rebuild Local News and is on its advisory board. You might know him as interim executive director of JournalList, the caretaker of the trust.txt standard, which is an online way of strengthening local news online. (Colorado Press Association, the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, and the Colorado News Collaborative were early adopters of it.)

Below is a Q-and-A with Yates about Colorado’s connection to this new report, which made some big news this week. It’s edited for clarity.

This report was your idea in part, and you did a lot of the legwork on it. Why is this work important?

Yates: The idea was actually Rebuild Local News founder Steven Waldman’s.

He had been going around to conferences and telling everyone that we really needed some way to count the actual number of journalists still working. The News Desert report and all of the news mapping is awesome, he would always say, but in addition to knowing about the outlets he wanted to know how many actual humans were doing the work. It’s the one thing AI just can’t do: go out and ask questions, take pictures, find out what’s going on, and then publish that to the community.

I took some long walks to think about that challenge. First, I thought about trying to build a crawler to visit the About page of every news outlet in the country. That would be crazy hard. Then I thought about the fact that several companies already do essentially that — the PR software companies including Muck Rack, Meltwater, and Cision. What they sell, essentially, is the ability to reach the right journalist at the right time, so they work really hard to know about every journalist everywhere. So I reached out to all three, and Muck Rack got back to me right away and we had the outlines of a deal quickly. My proposal to them was simple: Give us access to a slice of your data. We don’t need contact info or even names, we just need the outlets they work for, how much they publish, and the location of those outlets. Together with Rebuild, we could then analyze the data by every U.S. county, and then issue a report counting the working journalists.

Then, I worked with the Muck Rack data team and built most of the methodology, and then we revised the methodology about a zillion times based on feedback from everyone involved, and a bunch of other friends of Rebuild, academics, and others.

Why is this kind of research important?

Yates: My personal view is that every human has a need for news.

Marshall McLuhan famously said that we don’t read the newspaper, we slip into it like a hot bath. We have a fundamental human need for information about the world around us. If there are no local journalists, that tub isn’t filled with news, it’s filled with crap. And that’s how society falls apart.

You used Colorado to create a methodology. Walk us through that.

Yates: I used my understanding of Colorado media to spot check all the time.

I’d check other places, too, of course, and we had staff and advisors checking from all over the country, but because I knew Colorado, I would look at how a certain formula would change the counts, and then check that against what I knew. For example, with one set of formulas we showed zero journalists in Huerfano County. The irony for me is that huérfano means orphan in Spanish and I didn’t want to orphan the great journalists that I knew existed there in Walsenburg. So, we went back and forth with Muck Rack to make sure we’d get them counted, and when Huerfano County looked right, I figured that other counties with similar outlets would also be right. I did lots of checking, but Huerfano was key.

The other big time we used Colorado was for our metro area adjustment.

This is a bit complex, but in short, it makes the counts match the real world much better. The idea is that a journalist in Denver working at, say, 9NEWS, covers Denver, but also covers the suburbs and, to a lesser degree, the rest of the state. My initial assessment was that we should assign 65 percent of an FTE to the core city, 25 percent to the suburbs, and 10 percent to the rest of the state. Well, Steve and I presented our methodology at a conference of academics involved in local news, and one of them said that to avoid getting pushback, I should base those percentages on something externally verifiable. Fair point.

So, I used Colorado as a way of figuring it out because Colorado is pretty typical in urban/suburban/rural distribution and again because I know it pretty well.

I got access to 28,000 snippets of online versions of stories from all the Denver TV stations, The Denver Post, The Colorado Sun, Colorado Public Radio, KOA and maybe one or two others. I then used a database of town names to look for matches of the times the stories mentioned towns or counties in Colorado. (I had to filter out some names, like the SLV town of “Center” because that word appeared in other contexts, so if someone from Denver did a story about someone in the town of Center, that was lost — but I don’t think we missed much.)

The end result was that my initial assessment turned out to be pretty good as the stories about the suburbs of Denver ended up at 26 percent and the rural areas at 13 percent. We then used those percentages nationwide.

What did you learn about Colorado’s local media scene in the process?

Yates: Colorado is a bit above the national average in terms of journalists per population, but the average is so bad. We could add 1,000 full-time journalists in Colorado and still be behind where we were in 2002.

More Colorado media odds & ends

📣 The Denver Association of Business Economists is hosting a panel discussion at the Denver Press Club tonight, Thursday, July 17, titled “Paying Attention: The Economics of Journalism in Colorado.” Panelists include Tamara Chuang of the Colorado Sun, Ben Markus of Colorado Public Radio, and me. We’ll talk about the economic pressures that have shaped newsrooms, balancing a newsroom’s mission with the demands of the “attention economy,” algorithms, AI, and more.

💰 Colorado news organizations are benefiting from the latest round of Press Forward grants as part of a national campaign to help support local news. Rocky Mountain Community Radio Coalition will get $1 million for a program that “addresses a shortage of broadcast engineers by hiring a shared staff in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, establishing an equipment pool for emergencies, and coordinating services across stations. The program will also develop an apprentice program to continue building the talent pipeline needed to run these stations.”

📡 High Plains Public Radio will get $750,000 from Press Forward to “launch a regional information service to cover Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Colorado by partnering with local outlets in rural areas and recruiting community contributors.”

Sponsored…

💵 A $1.5 million grant to “provide worker-owned media collaboratives with back-office shared services, lowering their costs and increasing their sustainability” counts the University of Colorado Boulder as a co-applicant. MuckRock, and other transparency groups including the National Freedom of Information Coalition, directed by Colorado FOIC head Jeff Roberts, got $1.25 million in funding.

📰 Jason Salzman of the progressive Colorado Times Recorder nonprofit digital site wonders why Colorado Politics still prints a weekly newspaper. “The newspaper has few ads and, apparently, is mailed to only 700 people as of mid-May,” he reported. While he has his own theories (“effective propaganda for the newspapers’ conservative political agenda”), publisher Chris Reen said, in part, “Much like the Gazette in Colorado Springs, we’re committed to printing Colorado Politics as long as our customers want us to.” (It was nice to see a Clarity Media executive actually engaging with Salzman for once for one of his stories about the company.)

🎙 Bree Davies, the host of City Cast Denver, will talk about her journey to the microphone at the Denver Press Club this Friday, July 18, as part of the ColoRadio series.

🔥 “We are unable to get this week’s edition printed tonight at the press in Montrose, due to power outages related to the wildfires in the region,” the Ouray County Plaindealer told readers this week. “This is completely out of our control. We are doing our best.”

✂️ Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper spoke with KVNF in Paonia about Trump and congressional Republican threats to funding for public media. “I’m spending most of my time talking to moderate Republicans and trying to convince them that this is reckless and dangerous,” he said. He added that GOP senators are under “unbearable” pressure from Trump’s White House, though, likening it to blackmail. “They have a lot of leverage,” he said.

❓ If you’ve ever wondered how Colorado Public Radio journalists decide how to pronounce something, the station’s John Daley looked into it for a piece this week. “I had to do a little digging in my own newsroom to find a good answer,” he said.

⚙️ The Colorado Hometown Weekly, which is financially controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund, is hiring “an experienced journalist to serve as the East Boulder County beat reporter” and will pay that person $15 to $18 per hour.

🤖 A new policy at Law360, the LexisNexis-owned legal news site with a presence in Colorado, now “requires that every story pass through an AI-powered ‘bias’ detection tool before publication,” Andrew Deck reported for Harvard’s Nieman Lab. Meanwhile, Axios, which runs newsletters in Denver and Boulder, “is changing its editorial policies to be more friendly to AI use. In a recent note to staff, Axios said it was revising its AI language,” Semafor’s Max Tani reported. The company, whose previous language stated “There will be NO AI-written stories” now says it was “written years ago and was unnecessarily limiting.”

🗣 Colorado Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is running for governor, is “encouraging the University of Colorado’s Board of Regents to reconsider its censure of CU Regent Wanda James,” saying she has a First Amendment right to free expression, Micah Smith reported for Denver7.

🆕 The inaugural edition of SoCo Insider, which will replace the Colorado Springs Independent alt-weekly under new ownership, is out this week.

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute, advisor to Colorado Media Project, and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I 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. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter, hit me up.) Follow me on Bluesky, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.