With a mission to include more female voices in local media, Aspen Public Radio is launching what it calls the station’s first Women’s Desk.

The initiative “will seek to understand the status of women through economic, sociocultural, regulatory, technological and news-making contexts,” the station reported.

“The more we’ve talked about this new role coming into our newsroom, the more we’ve realized the wide range of issues this reporter will be addressing,” Aspen Public Radio’s executive director, Breeze Richardson, said in an email.

From the March 21 announcement:

Challenging the reality that men remain the vast majority of quoted experts and sources throughout traditional media, this reporting effort will aim to uplift women’s voices to create a more diverse and inclusive news landscape.

While women make up more than half the population in our country, and worldwide women are expected to outnumber men within the next 50 years, the underrepresentation of women in news and media results in the perspective of women often missing or misunderstood, whether that’s when reporting on issues of health, education, politics, environment, or the arts.

Aspen Public Radio held a launch party at the Little Nell Hotel in downtown Aspen last Friday.

“The underrepresentation of women in news and media results in the perspective of women often missing or misunderstood, whether that’s when reporting on issues of health, education, politics, environment, or the arts,” a statement from Aspen Public Radio read.

Journalist Sarah Tory will run the desk. She has written for Aspen Journalism, Mother Jones magazine, and Colorado Trust, among other publications.

“My experience as a journalist has consistently looked to lift up women’s voices in meaningful ways, and I look forward to expanding my storytelling skills into audio production and broadcast journalism,” she said in a statement.

The desk is “entirely funded by women in our community,” Richardson said in an email.

Richardson, the Aspen Public Radio executive director, added that she believes there has been “such strong support for launching this initiative because we’ve promised to bring our audience local news stories that are directly relevant to women’s lives and to better lift up women’s voices. This is about so much more than reproductive rights and pay equity.”

The new Women’s Desk also comes with a collaboration between Aspen Public Radio and the national digital news site The 19th.

The news organization gets its namesake from the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Its goal is to “empower women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly those from underrepresented communities — with the information, resources and tools they need to be equal participants in our democracy.”

More from Aspen Public Radio:

And in addition to other opportunities for regional and national distribution, stories produced on the women’s desk will be translated into Spanish, archived online as part of Noticias en Español, and provided at no cost for publication in our region’s weekly Spanish-language newspaper, Sol del Valle, to make this reporting widely available for Spanish-speaking residents, as well.

The Aspen Public Radio announcement stated that Tory plans to follow in the footsteps of Social Justice Desk reporter Eleanor Bennett and “immerse herself in diverse communities of women from Aspen to Parachute to develop meaningful collaborative relationships with sources.”

Tory’s work, the station reported, “will be driven by the experiences and insights of women who are impacted by today’s biggest issues — and the innovative solutions being explored to address them.”

A women’s desk isn’t completely novel in local journalism.

In 1977, the newsroom sitcom “Lou Grant” explored tension between a local newspaper’s women’s section and its city desk in a very doesn’t-hold-up episode called “Henhouse”:

Meanwhile, Trump and allies take aim at public media

The timing of the move at Aspen Public Radio to ensure more inclusive coverage is bold.

The new initiative comes as the administration of Republican President Donald Trump seeks to rollback efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, known as DEI. And it also comes amid the administration’s targeting of public media broadcasters on multiple fronts.

In Colorado, public media outlets are on alert.

This week, Republicans grilled the leaders of NPR and PBS during a congressional hearing organized by Marjorie Taylor Greene. The conspiracy-prone Georgia Republican Congresswoman called both broadcasters “radical left-wing echo chambers” that published skewed news reports and indoctrinated children with LGBTQ programming, the New York Times reported. (The station heads said that wasn’t true.)

On Tuesday, journalist Kyle Cooke at Rocky Mountain PBS wrote an explainer about the hearing. He noted that Project 2025, “a right-wing blueprint for the Trump presidency that the president’s actions have been closely aligned with, also calls for the end of federal support for public broadcasting.”

Trump’s FCC chair is currently investigating NPR and PBS, and Cooke reported that Trump advisor Elon Musk’s DOGE has “worked to axe government spending by ending funding for programs deemed incompatible with the president’s agenda.” Cooke added that there are “concerns” that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is next.

“Public media has earned steady bipartisan support from Congress for over five decades. Our audiences self-identify as equal thirds Republicans, Democrats and Independents,” Rocky Mountain Public Media President and CEO Amanda Mountain said in a statement. “With 40% of Colorado’s kids missing formal preschool, it’s RMPBS who stands in the gaps to ensure our children have a head start in school and in life. The work of public media is not partisan. We strengthen the civic fabric for all of Colorado regardless how much money you make, who you vote for, or where you live. That’s worth fighting for.”

Following the congressional hearing, Colorado Public Radio CEO Stewart Vanderwilt told Rocky Mountain PBS that “The reality of a loss of federal funding would be to weaken or shutter locally owned independent stations particularly in remote and rural communities.”

In addition to Colorado Public Radio, more than a dozen public radio and public television stations in Colorado rely on this funding “to deliver news and information to communities around the state,” Vanderwilt added. “There is nothing partisan about a Colorado Postcard illuminating our state’s history; a real-time tornado warning; informing parents of a delay in the start of the school day during a winter storm; or information about a fast-moving wildfire threatening lives and property. In parts of Colorado, public radio is the only available, free, over the air broadcast service delivering this information.”

On TV, a new CBS Colorado project seeks to get more young women into journalism

While Aspen Public Radio launches its new Women’s Desk, in the commercial TV arena, CBS Colorado is rolling out a new initiative to “empower girls to pursue journalism careers.”

To do so, the Denver-based TV station is partnering with Colorado Girl Scouts. The new project is called CBS Colorado Young Reporters Workshop.

Here’s what the station reported about its inaugural event last weekend:

The girls learned how to tackle stage fright and face the camera with confidence from CBS Colorado First at 4 Anchor Mekialaya White, a former Girl Scout herself.

As part of the day, girls learned how to give news reports in front of and behind the camera, record their own podcasts, and present topics in a board room.

About 30 young women took part in the event. At the end, they earned a custom blue-and-yellow patch that features the CBS Colorado logo and three women TV reporters that they can sport on their scout vest.

“The goal is to give young girls confidence to overcome stage fright and learn how to use their voice and body language to improve their presentation skills,” White said in a broadcast.

Colorado Community Media’s owner gets a close national look

Last month, this newsletter took a critical deep dive into Colorado Community Media, the nonprofit string of newspapers in the Denver suburbs owned by the nonprofit National Trust for Local News.

The piece revealed that the chain had planned to close two of its newspapers and couldn’t rule out closing more, isn’t profitable, and was doing a top-to-bottom assessment about its future. The subtitle for the story was “What is the future of CCM and the National Trust for Local News?”

This week, Sarah Scire, the deputy editor of Harvard’s Nieman Lab, which covers the media business, took a hard look at the National Trust along with her colleague, staff writer Sophie Culpepper.

From the piece:

We found a well-intentioned nonprofit with the resources, scale, and community goodwill to make a lasting impact on local news in the U.S.

We also found an organization reflecting and reorganizing after some missteps and failures: Multiple once-profitable papers that are now in the red, a lack of transparency that has alienated some employees and local partners, and a number of local journalists working without health benefits even as national executives were awarded substantial raises.

Issues with the Trust were simmering among the rank and file in Maine and Colorado where it runs newspapers until they publicly boiled over in the last two months.

“The recent cuts and departures have shaken loose some closely held criticisms of the Trust,” the Nieman Lab journalists reported.

But until now, what was happening in Georgia, where the Trust also owns papers, has remained an enigma. (Georgia doesn’t have a state-based media reporter like Colorado does. New England has multiple media reporters, which is likely why the issues in Maine became public.)

In their inquiry into the National Trust for Local News, the Nieman Lab pair found a dueling narrative about the organization and the way it deploys philanthropic dollars.

“We haven’t used philanthropy, generally, to provide cushion for [our] operating expense base,” said Will Nelligan, chief growth officer of the National Trust for Local News. “We’re trying to build state trusts that stand on their own two feet and use national philanthropy as catalytic capital to bring the business to maturity.”

But former Maine Press Herald Executive Editor Steve Greenlee, who resigned last year for a journalism professor job at Boston University, said he believes the “two main reasons for a newspaper to go nonprofit are to remove the profit motive and to be able to draw on a third tier of revenue — donations. … If philanthropic fundraising cannot be used to support the journalism, then newsrooms will be forced to continue to manage the decline.”

Here are some more nuggets that jumped out at me from the well-reported piece:

• “The nonprofit has saved dozens of beloved community newspapers from closure or predatory ownership.”
• “The Trust also uses philanthropic funds to pay executive salaries. But philanthropic dollars, as a general rule, are not used to support newsroom operating budgets or fund local journalists’ salaries or benefits.”
• “For us, philanthropy is a bridge to stronger local journalism and the community support that will sustain it for the long term. We use philanthropy to invest in that future. Then we work really hard to ensure that investment pays for itself within a few years through audience and [earned] revenue growth.”
• “Another cause for concern is that employees at the National Trust’s 19 newspapers in Georgia do not receive health benefits. This is true even at the new newspaper spun up from scratch by the Trust itself, The Macon Melody, Nieman Lab confirmed.”
• The “most common source of frustration was a lack of transparency from the Trust. Without it, local news executives who knew their communities and businesses felt stymied and underutilized. Some have been annoyed by suggestions to take actions the newspaper was already taking, or by questions with answers they felt should be obvious to anyone with glancing familiarity with their news sites. Some of the ‘efficiencies’ the Trust said it would implement to save costs, for example, were already in place.”
• “The contradictory pillars the Trust embraces as its mission — conservation and transformation — place it in a bit of a bind. When an organization that defines itself as a rare force for local newspaper conservation makes cuts in service of local news transformation, it can sting for people who were won over by the hope of conservation — and feel as if it’s just one more broken promise from a national actor claiming to champion local news.”

“We learned some hard and important lessons in 2024,” said Chief Portfolio Officer for the National Trust for Local News Ross McDuffie in the story. “Part of being a nonprofit is speaking openly about that.”

As Colorado Community Media’s new executive director does a top-to-bottom assessment to determine CCM’s staffing needs and how to better position it for the future, we ought to hope to hear more open discussion about that soon.

Where’s Walter? U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet wants a return to a bygone media era

Across the country, members of Congress who are willing to confront an anxious public are holding town hall-style events in their states and districts.

This week, one of our Democratic U.S. senators held one, and media became a focus.

This was Megan Neary’s lede in a story about the event for the progressive nonprofit Colorado Times Recorder site:

At a Greeley town hall meeting on Tuesday, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet said social media and the internet destroyed journalism, and it’s time to figure out how to use technology “not to destroy our democracy but to reinforce it and to strengthen it.”

Bennet has close familial ties to journalism.

Michael Bennet’s father, Douglas, was president of National Public Radio in the 1980s. Michael’s brother James was editor of the Atlantic magazine, then ran the New York Times editorial pages, and now is a columnist at the Economist.

Five years ago, Michael Bennet introduced legislation called The Future of Local News Commission Act, to examine, among other things, the “potential new mechanisms for public funding for the production of local news to meet the critical information needs of the people of the United States and address systemic inequities in media coverage and representation throughout the country.”

This week, however, Bennet lamented the current state of affairs of the media landscape.

Here’s another excerpt from Neary’s story:

Asked by a member of the audience at the University of Northern Colorado about efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation, Bennet said, “I do know this for a fact: If tonight we ended our day by going home and watching the local news for half an hour and then — this part becomes really hard — and we all watched some version of Walter Cronkite for half an hour, none of this would be happening. None of this. Do you think we would have a president saying he was gonna make Canada the fifty-first state if he had to answer to Walter Cronkite tonight? Do you think that he’d be talking about building hotels in Gaza or about, yeah, the Gulf of America? I mean, and I’m serious about that.”

Bennet said the Walter Cronkite era wasn’t perfect. Still, he lamented the “destruction” of journalism by social media and the resultant loss of a “shared understanding of the facts, some sense of, you know, where the boundaries were in terms of reality.”

Asked about the status of the Future of Local News bill, Bennet’s deputy communications director, Eric V. Jones, deferred to the office of its lead sponsor, Brian Schatz of Hawai‘i, about possible reintroduction.

Jones said Bennet “would most likely cosponsor the bill again if it were reintroduced.”

‘Fundamentals and the Future’ is the theme of the April 5 regional SPJ conference in Denver

Next week, journalists from across New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado will gather in Denver for the Top of the Rockies awards.

The event, held at the Slate Hotel in Denver on Saturday, April 5, coincides with the Society of Professional Journalists regional conference.

The theme of this year’s all-day conference, hosted by the Colorado Pro Chapter of SPJ, of which I’m a board member, is “Fundamentals and the Future.”

Panels include “Social Media: A Changing Landscape,” “How to Get a Job,” “Pitch Perfect with Freelance Pros,” “AI Ethics and the Newsroom,” “Reporter to Editor: How to Make the Jump,” “Photojournalism in Focus,” “How to Get a Job,” “Neutrality in a Divisive World,” and “Walking the Beat: How to Strike Journalistic Gold.”

College students might also appreciate a panel called “So You Started a Student SPJ Chapter. Now What?”

The keynote speaker is Kevin Flynn, longtime Colorado journalist, author, and politician.

See the event schedule here. Get tickets for the event here.

More Colorado media odds & ends

😱 “The $25,000 cost estimate ‘shocked’ Lisa Bigelow when she received the response to her Colorado Open Records Act request earlier this month, but then her friends told her to read the email more closely. The bill from the Pikes Peak Library District in El Paso County wasn’t $25,000. It was $25 million. More precisely, it was $25,377,971.43.” That’s the eye-popping lede from Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition this week. Read the story here.

📢 Boulder Reporting Lab Founder Stacy Feldman “says that there’s likely a correlation between reputable news declines and authoritarian government,” reported Mary-Beth Skylis in a story for Yellow Scene magazine about independent local media. “I think that you could create a throughline to that phenomenon — the decline of local newspapers, to algorithms filling the void, to the rise in fascism,” Feldman said.

🤖 Writing for Complete Colorado, the news and commentary arm of the libertarian Independence Institute think tank, columnist Ari Armstrong used ChatGPT to help research a March 25 column about a proposed Colorado ballot measure. He linked to his chat with the bot in the piece. “I figure this reveals when and how I’m using ChatGPT in my work,” Armstrong said in an email. “Seems highly transparent. ChatGPT will generate a link to a conversation; I don’t know if other LLMs do that.”

🪦 Norm Clarke, “a journalist with a trademark eyepatch whose colorful career included a lengthy stint in Denver as a sportswriter and on-the-town columnist, died in Las Vegas on March 20,” Michael Roberts wrote for Westword. “He was 82. But he lived long enough to see a copy of The Power of the Patch, a memoir that he spent the last eight years writing, detailing more than ten times that span filled with fun, frolic and much more than a dash of spice.”

☀️ “We are of the highest and best use when we, in our coverage and, hopefully, someday, in our staff, look more like the community that we cover,” said Colorado Sun Editor Dana Coffield in a piece by Alison Frankel at Ethics & Journalism’s Decoder. “The way that we can help advance equity in our communities is to make sure everybody is included in our coverage.”

🎬 “A fresh perspective on the newspaper industry’s past, present and future, Goldsmith’s film acknowledges the essential research and advocacy of journalists, standing up for truth against greed,” Mikaela O’Brien wrote for the Daily Californian about Rick Goldsmith’s documentary “Stripped for Parts,” which was inspired by events in Colorado.

📖 Sharon Udasin will speak about and sign her new book, “Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America,” on Tuesday, April 8 at 6:30 p.m. at Boulder Bookstore. “She will be in conversation with environmental activists Mark Favors and Liz Rosenbaum for this special event,” an announcement reads. “Tickets for this event are $5 (plus a small processing fee) and are available on Eventbrite HERE.”

🎒 Rampart High School’s “award-winning broadcast and journalism program” in Colorado Springs invited Alasyn Zimmerman, Bill Folsom, and Chief Photographer Adam Knapik of KOAA to spend a couple of hours sharing ideas with students this week.

🗣 Filmmaker and journalist Mike Shum will deliver the keynote address at the May 18 commencement ceremony at his alma mater, Colorado College. “Shum is presently serving as a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University where he is exploring the future of journalism and examining how storytelling can forge public trust and accountability through documentary film.”

🎥 The Sundance Film Festival is officially leaving Park City, Utah, and is coming to Boulder. “House Bill 1005, which is still being considered by lawmakers, would add $34 million in tax incentives to the large pile of grants,” Parker Yamasaki reported for the Colorado Sun.

👻 Denver Mayor Mike Johnston “and 14 of his top advisors, appointees and lawyers nicknamed themselves ‘Strike Force’ and communicated about the city’s migrant crisis through an end-to-end encryption app,” CBS News Colorado reporter Brian Maass wrote. “The app, Signal, proceeded to automatically delete their initial conversations.”

🎙 Jon Murray, the public affairs editor of the Denver Post, appeared for a video interview with Jon Caldara, who runs the libertarian think tank Independence Institute.

⚙️ McKenna Harford publicly announced leaving Colorado Community Media to join City Cast Denver where Harford writes the Hey, Denver newsletter.

🗣 After the Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers in Colorado Springs agreed to let the Colorado Republican Party host a dinner with Steve Bannon as a speaker (other venues declined following pushback), “some of Bannon’s critics called for a boycott of businesses owned by J.W. Roth, which in addition to Phil Long Music Hall … includes Ford Amphitheater and the Colorado Springs Independent,” the Indy bi-weekly reported in a staff report. “Roth was unmoved by his online critics and said the GOP fundraiser would go on as planned. “I’m also not going to be pressured by the far left not to rent my venue to a legitimate far-right cause that’s holding a private event,” he told the paper he owns. “I will not participate in cancel culture.”

🙏 Thanks to Editor & Publisher and Harvard’s Nieman Lab for highlighting a recent newsletter edition.

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute 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, where I’m an advisor, 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.