In Colorado, during the 1970s Chicano Movement, Juan Espinosa launched a newspaper called La Cucaracha in Pueblo.

“We were looking for a name that was a little catchy, maybe a little ironic or humorous, and La Cucaracha just stuck,” he told Rossana Longo Better of Colorado Community Media. “That was 49 years ago.”

The paper was short-lived, and Espinosa took a job at the Pueblo Chieftain where he worked for nearly a quarter century. La Cucaracha went on a four-decade hiatus. But now it’s back as a digital publication and Espinosa says he and a small team are in the process of building it back up.

“That’s my focus these days — getting the next generation involved so we can keep telling the stories that matter,” he said.

This week, Longo Better interviewed the pioneering Chicano journalist for the bilingual publication La Ciudad. Here’s an excerpt from the Q-and-A:

I realized Pueblo needed more local news, more stories about our own people that weren’t being covered.

That’s when I decided to launch La Cucaracha as a quarterly newspaper [in 2023]. We were just getting into our first year when the press in Pueblo shut down. It didn’t just affect us; it hit a lot of other papers too. At one point, there were six Spanish-language newspapers being printed in Pueblo, and they all lost access to the press.

Rather than search for a new printer, I took La Cucaracha online. Today, we publish at La Cucaracha News and we go live with a story whenever we have something ready. Sometimes we publish 10 stories in a week, sometimes just one. On average, we try to keep it to about two a week. It’s not huge, but we’re consistent.

Below are some more nuggets from the interview:

• “I really believe that strong, consistent journalism makes public officials better at their jobs.”
• “When The Chieftain went downhill, it hurt. Now it’s being printed in Denver and shipped back to Pueblo, with a 2 p.m. deadline. That means if something happens after two o’clock in the afternoon, it won’t get reported for two days.”
• “I’ve heard Pueblo described as a news desert, and it’s not far off. We have two or three TV news stations in the area, but they’re all based out of Colorado Springs. And the only thing they tend to report on about Pueblo is crime.”
• “When we started La Cucaracha, our reporting was very focused on the Chicano community. I’m a product of the Chicano Movement, and we were fighting for civil rights, for equity, and for the power to tell our own story, on our own terms. We did the best we could with the small budget we had.”
• “Right now, we’re working hard to make La Cucaracha more bilingual. Spanish-speaking communities are under attack under the current administration, and they need representation more than ever. They also need reliable information, about their rights, their protections and how to navigate these times.”
• “Right now, I’m teaching a journalism class at the university in Pueblo. It’s just three Saturdays in a row, and I’ve got six students. I’m training them in the basics of reporting, and I’m hoping that maybe one or two of them will want to come work with us.”
• “Honestly, I’d like to reach the point where I can pass the paper on. I’m looking forward to retiring — this time for real — but I’d still love to contribute to La Cucaracha as a writer.”
• “Journalism defends democracy. It is democracy in action.”

Find the entire interview here.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet says ‘we must defend’ the ‘vital role’ of local journalists

Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet this week helped lead a group senators on a resolution that designates April 2025 as Preserving and Protecting Local News Month.

“Local news that holds officials accountable and engages citizens is foundational to our democracy,” Bennet said in a statement. “As local news and journalists continue to face financial and political pressures, we must defend their vital role in preserving the truth through a free, robust, and independent press.”

A statement from Bennet’s office noted that the resolution “underscores the vital role of local journalism in American democracy, especially as the First Amendment faces mounting threats from the Trump administration.”

Bennet, who is reportedly exploring a run for governor, rolled out a federal bill in 2021 called The Future of Local News Commission Act.

“There are no silver bullets to any of these problems, but I know that we can’t just wait around for the situation to resolve itself,” Bennet told a Zoom full of Colorado journalists at the time. “If we do that, we’re going to wake up one day in an America without local news, and we can’t let that happen.”

Communities control ‘destiny’ of Colorado newspapers in the CherryRoad Media chain

CherryRoad Media, a national newspaper chain with a handful of titles in Colorado, got a close look from the Wall Street Journal this week.

Reporter Katherine Sayre profiled the company’s founder, Jeremy Gulban of New Jersey, for a story headlined “He Wanted to Fix Local News. It’s Harder Than He Thought.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Gulban bought his first local paper during the pandemic for $195,000, spurred by the feeling that big tech companies like Meta Platforms and Alphabet’s Google had too much control over the flow of information and commerce for local businesses. He scrolled through bizbuysell.com, a marketplace for businesses, and found a small paper for sale on the shore of Lake Superior, more than 1,300 miles away from his East Coast business.

He bought it and dozens more over the last five years through his company, CherryRoad Media. Today, the top 30 or so of Gulban’s newspapers are profitable, about 30 post mediocre results and about 30 are losing money. The company had $30 million in revenue last year and wasn’t profitable overall.

CherryRoad’s chief operating officer is Lee Bachlet, who lives in southern Colorado.

I asked him over email where he’d put Colorado’s CherryRoad papers in those 30-30-30 buckets as described in the Wall Street Journal.

He said he’d put the La Junta Tribune-Democrat and Bent County Democrat, which the company sees as one unit, on the line between mediocre and unprofitable. He’d put the Chronicle-News in Trinidad in the mediocre category.

“Neither is clearly and consistently profitable, but we have worked hard to keep both from being consistently in the hole,” he said.

When it comes to their future, Bachlet said CherryRoad’s community papers in Colorado — like all of its community papers — are only sustainable in direct correlation with their level of community support.

“We need subscribers,” he said. “We need local businesses to advertise. We are fighting a difficult and meaningful battle in a disrupted space. We believe strongly in the importance of community journalism, as evidenced by our investment in community journalism operations across the country. We cannot, however, keep these operations serving their communities without consistent community support. It’s just that simple.”

During its acquisition run, CherryRoad opened several operations in markets that had lost their newspapers.

“When a small community loses its newspaper, the understanding of what that means hits home,” Bachlet said. “But newspapers don’t have to close. Communities don’t have to lose that critical functionality. They control that destiny.”

Gov. Polis sees ‘unfortunate trend’ from lawmakers who ‘impede access to official records’

Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, signed another bill into law that would hide more information from the public. But he wagged a finger in the process.

The bill, in part, makes NIL, or “name, image, and likeness” contracts between public universities and student athletes confidential.

Jeff Roberts, who runs the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, flagged what Polis had to say about the bill. Here’s an excerpt from his story:

“These exceptions move transparency in the wrong direction and any other proposals that further prevent or delay public access to information will be carefully reviewed,” the governor wrote in a statement to state lawmakers. “I encourage my colleagues in the General Assembly to consider transparency across all public institutions and to balance legitimate reasons for exceptions with the public interest.”

Roberts added this important context:

Earlier this session the legislature passed, and Polis signed into law, a bill that shields the identities of ranchers and others who seek and get state compensation for property damage caused by wildlife. In 2024, lawmakers expanded the number of public school employees whose evaluations are not subject to public disclosure, also hiding their disciplinary records if they are used to prepare those evaluations.

The House is on the verge of sending Polis Senate Bill 25-077, which expands Colorado Open Records Act response deadlines for requests made by the public and businesses (not the news media). The measure, which representatives approved on second reading Thursday, would give records custodians up to 15 working days to provide records if “extenuating circumstances” apply, even though there is little if anything requesters can do when the statutory deadlines are missed.

Meanwhile, the legislature has not addressed skyrocketing CORA research-and-retrieval fees. And last year, it exempted itself from major portions of the Colorado Open Meetings Law, allowing unlimited conversations among lawmakers via email and apps such as Signal, which can be set to automatically delete messages.

Read the whole piece here.

New state GOP chair is favored by founder of new conservative Colorado media outlet

Colorado Republicans this week chose former Routt County Treasurer Brita Horn of Steamboat Springs as their party’s next chairperson.

The new head of the state’s minority political party comes after the tumultuous tenure of its previous leader.

One fan of the party’s new head honcho is the founder of the relatively new Rocky Mountain Voice, a statewide news and commentary outlet run by former GOP gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl.

Ganahl had endorsed Horn, who she called a friend — though she said she did so “personally, not as the President of RMV.”

In a column this week, Ganahl, who has made no secret of her disdain for other Colorado media outlets, wrote about a tension that can occur when someone who runs a self-described “reputable news organization” gets involved in politics.

In her column, Ganahl said Rocky Mountain Voice had received a recent tip that one of Horn’s rivals for GOP chair, Darcy Schoening, had racked up campaign finance violations for political groups she ran.

“Another news organization was about to break the story,” Ganahl wrote. Here’s more:

With the lack of balance in our Colorado media, we were concerned this would be a one sided “hit piece” so we decided to write our own piece to approach it in a fair way.

Because Ganahl had endorsed Horn, “I removed myself from any involvement in researching and writing the story to preserve RMV’s stance of impartiality concerning the GOP Chair race,” she wrote.

But when Ganahl reached out to the subject of the story, things went awry.

“Prior to any story being written, and within a short time of me reaching out in good faith to her, Darcy chose to send out a text message from her campaign to the entire State GOP Central Committee attacking me and the Rocky Mountain Voice,” Ganahl wrote.

Read the whole SNAFU here.

‘They don’t want their intimate details in the newspaper’: Gazette scrutinizes ‘private judges’

Investigative reporter David Migoya published an exposé this week that revealed Colorado has something of a two-tiered justice system.

Here’s the lede of his story headlined: “Private judges suppress cases at greater rate than regular courts”:

Private judges hired to handle divorce cases in Colorado suppress them from public view at far greater rates than in cases that rely on district court judges, leaving some legal experts wondering whether affluent clients are simply buying their way into secrecy.

The newspaper found that some private judges have suppressed cases nearly routinely, while having barely utilized that tool when they served on the district court bench.

Private judges? Apparently. Colorado is one of the states that allow for that.

Migoya’s story about divorce case suppression is part of an investigative package, four months in the making, that the Gazette is calling “Privately Judged.” Another story for the series came with this explosive lede:

For nearly two decades Colorado has quietly maintained two judicial systems: One that the public makes use of regularly, and the other a lesser known, almost secret variety relied on by the rich, famous and well-to-do. …

Unlike a district court judge, who is paid by taxpayers, a private judge is paid directly by the litigants, who also cover all the other expenses typically borne by the government. The judges can even walk away from a case at any time if the litigants run out of money or fail to pony up funds whenever the judge demands it.

In instances where some people with the means get a “private judge” and have their cases suppressed, the public cannot even see why, Migoya reported.

Another excerpt from one of his stories:

The cases suppressed included high-profile people, such as world-famous musician James Hetfield, the founder and lead guitarist of the rock band Metallica, elected officials like Douglas County Commissioner Abraham Laydon, high-level government employees, such as Colorado Deputy Attorney General Steven Kaufmann, and the former U.S. ambassador to Austria, Alexa Wesner.

The reporter found one particular law firm that retained more private judges for clients than any other in the state.

Why the secrecy?

“You can go to divorce court and read all sorts of things about people’s lives, and those of high worth are concerned for their safety and their privacy,” a lawyer for the firm told Migoya. “You can accuse a CEO of being a sexual abuser. They don’t want anyone to know of it. True or not, it’s their private business. They don’t want it shown to the world. They don’t want their intimate details in the newspaper.”

“Are people buying their way into secrecy?” Migoya asked on social media where he teased his latest story.

Find out by reading the series here.

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

Tomorrow, on Saturday April 5, 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 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,” “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

🦋 I’ve created a list of Colorado local news outlets that have Bluesky accounts here. Let me know if you know of others by responding here.

💨 This week, Carol McKinley “put a -30- on her -40- year journalism career as an investigative, human interest and breaking-news reporter,” the last four with the Denver Gazette, the paper’s John Moore wrote. “Carol has covered a wide range of stories from the war in Iraq to ‘at least’ 30 mass shootings to polygamous cults to Western water wars to the JonBenet Ramsey murder.” A group gathered at the Denver Press Club to say goodbye. Moore wrote about it on social media.

☀️ Applications are open for the Colorado Sun’s summer “Rise & Shine” journalism camp for high schoolers. The Sun “encourages students from underrepresented and diverse communities to apply as well as students who have thought about a career in journalism and who want to understand how their skills could transfer to a newsroom,” wrote reporter Erica Breunlin.

🆕 Delilah Brumer, a bilingual journalist and student at Los Angeles Pierce College, will join Colorado Newsline as a 2025 Capital Reporting Fellow. “Her reporting has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CalMatters and other local news outlets across her home state of California.”

🏆 The Denver Public Library recognized photojournalist Kevin Beaty “for his work in journalism and historic preservation,” the library wrote about the latest Eleanor Gehres Award award winner. “His reporting at the Denverite and Colorado Public Radio are crucial resources for the Denver Public Library’s Special Collections and Archives Department, which integrates his work into its collections.”

👩‍⚖️ Those who donate $25 to the progressive nonprofit Colorado Times Recorder digital news and commentary site will get an “I ♥️ Federal Courts” or “I ♥️ Federal Judges” bumper sticker. “Federal courts and federal judges are the single most effective defense we have right now against attacks on our democracy,” wrote founder Jason Salzman.

🆕 As predicted, former Boulder Daily Camera reporter Mitchell Byars has taken on the role of leading the new Axios Boulder newsletter.

🐘 The Colorado Republican Party selected a new chairperson this week, former Routt County Treasurer Brita Horn of Steamboat Springs. “Reporters weren’t allowed at the party’s reorganizational meeting Saturday,” Jesse Paul reported for the Colorado Sun. “Instead, they were forced to watch the event on a livestream.”

📞 University of Colorado Boulder journalism student Lincoln Roch earned a profile by Hannah Stewart for a campus publication. “I was impressed at his skill at working the phones,” said journalism professor Chuck Plunkett. (#Protip to young journalists: be like Lincoln. Make phone calls!)

📰 “In the next edition of my op-ed we’ll discuss Montrose County Republican Chair Monte George using public comment period for party business, as well as his over use of the term ‘Local Liberal Media,’ which is so 2016 and also just strange,” wrote Montrose Daily Press Publisher Dennis Anderson.

📻 Michael Roberts rounded up the “Twelve Best Radio Stations for Music in Denver” for the alternative weekly Westword.

🆕 James Burky has left the Sentinel in Grand Junction and is set on April 8 to become the Boulder Daily Camera’s new city reporter. “I’m beyond thrilled about this new challenge, and I look forward to earning the trust of the Boulder area,” he said.

💨 Nathaniel Minor is leaving Colorado Public Radio as its transportation and growth reporter to join the Minnesota Star Tribune’s politics team covering the Capitol. “Denver, Colorado and CPR have all been wonderful to me since I arrived more than a decade ago,” he said. “I’ll miss this place dearly.”

💻 “Two bills aimed at protecting kids on social media have divided Colorado’s attorney general and the governor,” CBS News Colorado reported.

📺 “I was recently asked if our Word of Thanks microgiving is ‘activism,’ which is often used pejoratively regarding journalism,” said 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark. “I’ll let others decide labels but I do want Colorado to be a better place. Journalism is one form of active civic engagement to better a community. Supporting non-profits that make an impact is another.”

📲 Denver’s 5280 magazine will pay $55,000 for an audience engagement editor to join its digital team. “This entry-level staffer will help develop and lead 5280’s social media and short-form video strategy while contributing to 5280.com’s daily content output through assigning, editing, and writing.”

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.