A picturesque town at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park will be the latest setting for a new digital news outlet angling to “fill a void” left by a shrinking legacy newspaper.
The community just needs more journalism, said editor Patti Brown, founder of the emerging Estes Valley Voice, in a recent interview.
Brown formerly served as executive editor of the Estes Park Trail-Gazette, which is financially controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund known for gutting its newspapers. When Brown took over in 2022, the newsroom was “basically a skeletal staff,” she said.
Brown left and decided to start up her own thing. This week, she announced the Voice would go live later this summer.
“As the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, with four million people crossing our threshold, we have so much money that goes through our taxing organizations,” Brown said. “You have to have watchdog journalism.”
A new digital outlet launching in Northern Colorado tracks a broader development of startups sprouting in communities where Alden-owned papers are shrinking, as well as those where a retrenching Gannett-owned newspaper is leaving coverage gaps. (One such startup, Lookout Santa Cruz, just won a Pulitzer this year.) In many cases, journalists at the hedge-fund newspapers are producing solid work, they just lack the resources to create enough of it. In an emailed announcement Wednesday, the Voice stated it is “launching this August to fill a void in local journalism.”
This newsletter has reported previously on the Colorado Switchblade, a local Estes Park Substack newsletter and podcast authored by Jason Van Tatenhove. He had also left the Trail-Gazette as a contributor but recently returned as a freelance columnist.
“Locally owned. Independent. Objective. Thorough.”
That was the message from the Voice this week in an emailed announcement that listed fellow Trail-Gazette alum Suzy Blackhurst as senior editor. More from the announcement:
The Estes Valley Voice is a digital newsroom that will publish breaking and important news as it happens. You will be able to read our content without a paywall, but Estes Valley Voice subscribers will receive a newsletter in their inbox three days a week featuring our headline and feature stories along with our commentary and opinion pieces and our community calendar.
Notably, the Voice chose a public benefit corporation as its business model. That’s how the Colorado Sun had operated for a few years before recently converting to a nonprofit.
“News is a public good and the media should contribute to the life of a community by prioritizing people over profits while also aiming to stay in business,” reads part of the Voice’s launch page. “And that business is the news.”
Some more nuggets from the announcement:
- “Why digital? The printed page is still an important medium, but like a rotary dial telephone, newspapers — what many people call ‘dead tree technology’ — are an outdated mode of providing people with the news.” (Editor’s note: not everyone believes that!)
- “We believe the news should be accessible to everyone without a paywall, but we know that quality journalism is not cheap, and journalists are professionals who deserve to earn a living wage for the work they produce.”
Alongside its launch, the Voice has produced a 15-page document outlining its purpose, mission, and values that seeks to build trust with its audience. The package includes an ethics policy, explains journalism terms, and how its journalists will conduct themselves. The Voice promises it will “not print a press release verbatim as news.” The outlet will have a five-person editorial board, and “none of our editorial board members are advertisers.”
“It’s time to turn the page to better journalism in the Estes Valley,” the new outlet stated in its May 22 announcement. “Over the next several weeks, the Estes Valley Voice will begin to unveil samples of our news and columns, and information about our news team.”
*A previous version of this post indicated the Estes Park Trail-Gazette was a “daily” newspaper. It does not come out every day.
‘Back from Broken’ could come back after CPR and Vic Vela resolve their dispute
Four months after Colorado Public Radio fired him, Vic Vela has settled a messy discrimination dispute with his former employer.
In March, the popular weekend host who earned accolades and a national reputation for his “Back from Broken” podcast about drugs and alcohol recovery, had formally accused CPR of violating his rights under disability laws. He said the station had cashed in on his personal story of drug addiction for nearly a decade but cast him aside when he needed workplace accommodations.
Colorado Public Radio executives pushed back — hard — against Vela’s narrative. They said the station fired him for being “hostile” and “abusive,” and for “erratic behavior” that he did not correct after “ample opportunities.”
Vela’s accusations made headlines beyond industry trade publications in outlets as far away as the U.K. Daily Mail.
For the past couple months, the former host was able to keep the dispute in the news — and CPR on the defensive. He and his veteran employment attorney, Iris Halpern, sustained pressure on social media. Meanwhile, Vela hit the public speaking circuit, and his friends launched a GoFundMe campaign to help him out financially. He testified about recovery legislation at the state Capitol. Then, last month, nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers signed and sent a letter to CPR’s board of directors expressing their support for him.
“I have the public and prominent lawmakers in my corner and that means the world to me,” he wrote at the time.
The public nature of the dispute, which came just after the rapidly-growing statewide outlet announced it had laid off 15 people from its podcasting division, led the station to try and calm donors and supporters.
Because Vela had filed a complaint with Colorado’s Civil Rights Division, the agency would have spent at least six months investigating his claims. Two months in, CPR and Vela have privately put it to rest.
“I am pleased to announce that the dispute involving me and my former employer, Colorado Public Radio, has been resolved,” Vela said in a May 17 public statement. “Additionally, and with my gratitude, CPR is supporting me and my efforts to produce future episodes of the award-winning podcast, ‘Back from Broken.’”
Vela told media he couldn’t say more about the details of the settlement; CPR told media they encourage him in his future endeavors and are done talking about it.
Vela told the Colorado Sun, which first reported the news, that he will announce his plans for “Back From Broken” sometime in the future.
Colorado is now the ‘first state’ with a law regulating the AI industry
This week, Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, signed a new law he said is “among the first in the country” to attempt to regulate the artificial intelligence industry “on such a scale.”
Media outlets went further. Reporters for Politico and Forbes used the word “groundbreaking” in headlines to describe the new law.
“Colorado becomes first state with law regulating potential consumer harms of artificial intelligence,” was the topper on a Colorado Sun story by tech and business reporter Tamara Chuang.
Here’s what the law does, according to the Sun:
Senate Bill 205 aims to reduce discrimination consumers could face when applying for a job, a loan, housing or other services when a machine-based AI system is used to make a “consequential decision.” While other laws exist to protect people of any race, color, gender or other characteristic from intentional discrimination, this law regulates AI systems regardless of intent. A concern is that generative AI systems popularized today by companies like OpenAI don’t always provide accurate answers.
Colorado Newsline also went with the “first state” framing.
“Developers and deployers will have a responsibility to avoid algorithmic discrimination and report any instances to the attorney general’s office,” wrote Sara Wilson for the nonprofit digital site. “There are also reporting requirements from developers to consumers.”
The law won’t go into effect until Feb. 1, 2026.
Some in media outlets indicated the law, promoted by Democrats in the legislature and backed by Phil Weiser, the state’s Democratic attorney general, might have run into a buzzsaw once it hit the governor’s desk.
Tech industry organizations were angling for a veto, and business leaders were urging caution. (Disclosure: I own stock in Microsoft, which funds OpenAI, and Nvidia, which makes AI hardware, along with QQQ, a tech fund that likely includes other AI companies.)
Dean W. Ball, a research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, authored a guest column in the Colorado Springs Gazette saying the new law is “a well-intentioned attempt at mitigating AI risks, but it’s a far broader bill than its authors likely intended.” In a May 16 headline, Axios Denver’s John Frank wrote the governor “may veto” the bill.
But Polis, a free-market multimillionaire tech guy who plays video games and posts in neoliberal and libertarian Reddit forums, kept his veto pen dry on this one. He signed the law May 18, though he expressed some reservations.
“I appreciate the sponsors’ interest in preventing discrimination and prioritizing consumer protection as Colorado leads in this space,” he wrote. He added: “I am concerned about the impact this law may have on an industry that is fueling critical technological advancements across our state for consumers and enterprises alike. Government regulation that is applied at the state level in a patchwork across the country can have the effect to tamper innovation and defer competition in an open market.”
In the end, according to the Sun, Polis told reporters he is “confident” that the two-year grace period will leave “ample time for any improvements that need to be made prior to it becoming effective.”
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, recently wrote that news coverage — “often uncritical” — has helped build up the AI hype. “Research suggests that reporting tends to be led by industry sources,” he wrote, “and often takes claims at face value.”
For more than a year, Colorado newsrooms haven’t just been reporting on artificial intelligence tools, they are actively using them in various ways.
🔎 Sponsored | Spotlight: Colorado | Colorado Media Project 🔍
Colorado Media Project believes our democracy works best when the public has transparency into powerful institutions. That’s why accountability journalism is so important to our civic infrastructure. We chose to sponsor this section of Corey’s newsletter to showcase some of the important watchdog work Colorado journalists and their news organizations have been producing recently. Corey chose which ones to spotlight.
Recent Colorado accountability coverage
- Allison Sherry and Zack Newman at Colorado Public Radio held our state government accountable when they meticulously examined the extent to which a new law aimed at cracking down on dishonest police officers is working. To do so, the pair reviewed “hundreds of pages of internal affairs investigative documents” and found that officers “were frequently fired or allowed to resign when caught not telling the truth but not then reported to state authorities as being untruthful.” Or, they were reported, but state officials didn’t decertify them. This allowed them to keep the certification to work as a law enforcement officer somewhere else.” (“We blanketed the state with dozens of records requests for a year,” Newman said on social media about the collaboration with Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab.)
- Jenny Deam and Christopher Osher of the Denver Gazette dug through piles of homeless provider contracts, invoices, performance outcomes, and federal data, to find out that despite the Mile High City spending $274 million to mitigate a crisis involving people experiencing homelessness, the issue “has worsened and become among the most acute in the nation.” Their conclusion: “In Denver, the spending that flowed through the city’s Department of Housing Stability, known as HOST, has relied disproportionately on emergency shelter beds and temporary transition services, records show. Homeless advocates and federal officials say the city should instead prioritize ‘housing first,’ an approach that calls for securing long-term permanent housing as the best and most cost-effective way to help those on the streets.”
- Jennifer Brown of the Colorado Sun identified a “gap in the system” in Colorado that allows a child protection caseworker who “gets caught falsifying records or lying about checking on children in one county” to “get a job in another county. And then another.” Under state regulations, “if there is no criminal case, no one has to know about the past behavior — not the caseworker’s potential new employer or even the children and parents whose records were falsified.”
- Chris Vanderveen of 9NEWS and John Ingold of the Colorado Sun collaborated with COLab and KFF Health News on an investigation that uncovered that in the past five years, UCHealth had sued patients 15,710 times for money owed to the state’s largest hospital system, a nonprofit that “recorded $839 million in total profits last year” and is exempt from paying taxes. Because most of the lawsuits were “filed in the name of debt collectors working for the hospital system,” many of them “are shielded from public scrutiny through a system in which collection companies working with UCHealth file lawsuits in their own names.” Until the journalists exposed this, “no one outside UCHealth knew how many lawsuits the system had actually filed, though, due to the collections practice UCHealth has adopted.”
To submit a local accountability story for consideration in the future, send me an email. If you or your organization would like to sponsor a recurring newsletter section like this, hit me up.
POLL: What day would you prefer to get this newsletter?
For the past several years, this newsletter has gone out on Fridays. Recently, a loyal reader said he believed it would get more engagement if it hit inboxes in the middle of the week.
“So often I get it on Friday and don’t read it until the next week,” he said. “Friday is just the worst day to send.”
This week, I decided to send it out on a Thursday and see if the open rate, views, republishes, media pickups, or other feedback was any different.
I’ve always thought of this newsletter as an end-of-the-week-type thing, but moving forward, I thought I’d put it to you, the audience who matter more than what I think. So…
More Colorado media odds & ends
☀️ The Colorado Sun has introduced a new kind of content: the “fact brief.” The statewide digital news organization has partnered with Gigafact to “ferret out the truth on viral claims in bite-size fact briefs.” These items will provide “a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, backed by facts, in a succinct 150 words,” wrote the Sun’s membership and audience engagement director, Lauren Whynott, in an email to members. “We do not weigh in on opinions or address claims for which no definitive sources are available, or that lack a clear answer.” Sign up here to get fact briefs in your inbox on Mondays and Fridays and see how some recent ones look.
🆕 Tramese Byrd is the new director and salesperson for the Colorado Ethnic Media Exchange. She’ll work with the Colorado Press Association and COLab. “We hope her work can benefit not only members of the exchange but also newsrooms across the state,” read a joint CPA/COLab announcement.
🪦 Bill Hosokawa was “one of the first editors of color at a metropolitan newspaper, the Denver Post,” and spent his life writing about Japanese Americans “even after he was shipped to an incarceration camp by the federal government during the war,” Jonathan van Harmelen and Greg Robinson reported in the “Overlooked” obituary series in the New York Times.
⚖️ A former Colorado Republican secretary of state is suing a local nonprofit-owned newspaper on behalf of a conservative activist over election-season coverage about “furries,” reported Erik Maulbetsch of the progressive Colorado Times Recorder site. “The judge has allowed only two of the three pleaded claims to go forward based only on his review of the pleaded allegations, taken as true,” First Amendment Attorney Steve Zansberg who is defending the paper, told CTR. “Plaintiffs must now file an amended complaint, and the judge will then take up our anti-SLAPP motion, which should bring this case to a close.”
🎙 Morning Edition host and reporter Eleanor Bennett reflected on her four years at Aspen Public Radio. All Things Considered anchor and reporter Halle Zander conducted the Q-and-A for the station. “I think my favorite part of the job is getting to know our community better and using my reporting to make it a more equitable and sustainable place to live,” Bennett said.
🤑 Denver’s alternative free weekly newspaper Westword, which has been around since 1977, has launched its “first-ever spring membership drive.” The paper hopes to raise $12,000 for its newsroom by June 7. “Trustworthy, bipartisan local news like ours spurs growth, fosters relationships and helps to ensure that everyone is informed about the issues that matter most — which is essential to a healthy democracy,” wrote editor Patricia Calhoun. (Typically, we hear news organizations identifying themselves as “nonpartisan” so perhaps this is notable.)
🦏 RINO Watch, “an upstart website, was attacked relentlessly by virtually every media outlet in the state of Colorado,” wrote Glen Richardson in the Cherry Creek Chronicle.
🏈 Writing for CU Boulder’s Colorado Now magazine, Joe Arney profiled alum Brent Schrotenboer who is an investigative sports reporter with USA Today. “I’m so happy with where my career turned out,” Schrotenboer said. “But it’s not where I had ever imagined myself, so I think it’s important to always say, yes, and to be open minded.” About the current work climate, he said, “it’s tough out there. But there are still people doing great work. A lot of people are trying hard and fighting the fight for journalism.”
🧐 Colorado has plenty of small independent newsrooms, sometimes consisting of just one person. But these indie journalists also keep local legacy media in the mix.
📈 University of Northern Colorado journalism graduate Zvi Gutierrez “will be breaking into the Denver media market thanks to hands-on experience at UNC,” the school stated. “I want to stop the spread of misinformation, so giving people the actual accurate sources is something I’m passionate about,” Gutierrez said in an Instagram post.
🏆 Ken J. Ward has won an Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication award “honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2023” for his book “Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition Between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.”
📈 Colorado Community Media’s Sportsland newsletter has surpassed 2,000 subscribers, said CCM sports editor John Renfrow.
🗞 Mike Blinder chatted with Colorado’s Lee Bachlet, the chief operating officer of CherryRoad Media, on Editor & Publisher magazine’s E&P Reports podcast. The New Jersey-based tech company has been buying up small newspapers across the country, typically from Gannett. The company now has titles in 18 states including three in Colorado.
🍻 The Denver Press Club has been averaging about 25 guests “and about $400 from the bar,” for the past two Saturdays as it tests out whether to continue to open on that day. “We will open again this Saturday and then decide,” the club told members in an email.
🎓 Thanks to Chatwan Mongkol who writes The Nutgraf newsletter about student journalism for including my advice in a useful roundup of journalism professors offering words of wisdom to graduating college students.
I’m Corey Hutchins, co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute. 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. Follow me on Threads, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.