Inside the News in Colorado

New Colorado newspaper owner feels like ‘stepping into a role of community service’

Corey Hutchins — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:09:58 GMT

During the Colorado Press Association’s recent annual convention held at a hotel near Denver, one attendee stood out for his rakish style.

Tucker Farris, with a large bushy beard, a ruffled scarf, sunglasses, and a safari hat, had a Hunter S. Thompson gonzo lapel pin glinting from a stylish jacket. As one Roaring Fork Valley journalist who knows him remarked, the 32-year-old new owner of the Crystal Valley Echo newspaper is “authentically himself.”

For the past six months, Farris, a fifth-generation local with a background in social theory who is the museum chair of the Redstone Historical Society, has been running the monthly Echo as a first-time newspaper owner.

“It feels really like stepping into a role of community service that I have a family history of doing in this valley,” he said in an interview. “So, it’s really feeling like it’s my turn and my ability to put stuff back into the community.”

In February, Farris took over the Echo from Gentrye Houghton who had run it since 2019. A previous owner had started the paper in 2003 with a grant from a local charter school.

The development is an example of succession planning that can keep small local newspapers in local hands. In recent years, some papers in Colorado have closed or have threatened to blink out because an exiting owner couldn’t find someone in the community willing to take up the mantle.

The Crystal Valley encompasses Redstone, Marble, and Carbondale. With the Aspen Daily News now owned by Hoffmann Media group, the Echo can claim the title as the last independently owned for-profit newspaper in the valley.

“We are beholden to no one,” said Farris, who grew up across the road from Hunter S. Thompson in Woody Creek before moving to Carbondale.

In 2023 and 2024, the editor produced journalism in the valley by reporting dispatches from Lithuania and France about the war in Ukraine for the Carbondale-based nonprofit Sopris Sun newspaper. Once back in the area, he bird-dogged the Roaring Fork school district for the Sun.

Now as the new owner of the Echo, he and a stable of about eight staff writers, some correspondents, and a photojournalist have sought to pack the paper’s 32-pages with long-form regional journalism, community happenings, news briefs, and local features.

“We’re not trying to cover breaking news, we’re not doing a weekly report of local government,” the editor said. “We have a month to do really good long-form content. We serve a different niche in this environment.”

A statement on the newspaper’s masthead proclaims that it is 100% human-created and does not condone the use of generative artificial intelligence. That extends even to advertising.

The first edition Farris put out since taking over the paper came around the 45th anniversary of a deadly mining explosion above Redstone. The front cover was stark — a list in black and white of the names, ages, and professions of the 15 miners who had died. The staff-written story, about the tragedy and the community’s response to it, ran 6,000 words.

Reaction from readers was positive, Farris said. He described a note from a 97-year-old woman whose son died in the accident that said she’d never read anything more beautiful in a newspaper. Six months later, he said about the piece, “people still talk about it.”

Thus far, the newspaper is not profitable. A bridge closure that hampered tourism in recent months impacted advertising sales with local businesses. High print costs are an issue like they are for many newspaper owners in Colorado.

Farris said when it comes to long-term sustainability he doesn’t want to self-fund the paper. But the new newspaper owner said he believes the community would rally around the Echo and keep it from closure.

He was encouraged when the paper recently launched a scholarship that sought to raise $2,500 from readers to buy laptops so two students could study journalism — and wound up bringing in $6,000 from readers in two weeks.

“The reality is,” Farris said, “that this paper has lasted for 23 years because the readership is extremely dedicated.”

Farris said in an interview that despite the look on his face in the photo, he was happy to take over the Crystal Valley Echo

➡️ This newsletter is proudly sponsored by The Colorado Health Foundation. As a proud funder of Colorado Media Project, the home of Press Forward Colorado, the CHF understands that healthy communities need a healthy news ecosystem.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” Get in touch to see how the data might be useful for any stories you are pursuing — or to learn about potential story ideas. ⬅️

Colorado theater critic John Moore writes his own play ‘The Crime Reporter’

Legendary Colorado arts journalist John Moore has spent 40 years as an “observer” who told “other people’s stories.”

But recently, he “stepped onto the other side of the notebook.” After covering “thousands of stage plays as a Denver arts journalist,” he has now written his own.

From a piece he wrote about it this week in the Denver Gazette:

“The Crime Reporter” is about three people: Flo, a fiercely loving mother and trailblazing suburban journalist who comes to claim her own autonomy; Enid, an aggregate disapproving stay-at-home neighbor on her own journey; and a comically serious teenage version of me.
It’s also about three newspapers of a sort: The Arvada Citizen – the one my mother started with the legendary Denver journalist Harry Farrar in 1966 … The Moore Newspaper … and The Denver Post, which employed my father for 34 years, my mom for six and (long after they were gone), me for 24.

The story, Moore writes, is about “one family at a time of tectonic change in America” — his own.

And it’s likely a doozie. Moore grew up with seven siblings in a newspaper family. In his column about the play, he writes of sitting at the breakfast table with his folks, pounding out a neighborhood newsletter with a candy cigarette dangling from his lips. His mother eventually divorced his father, shocking their Catholic community, but there are no villains in the play. “Ralph isn’t a monster, Flo isn’t a martyr,” he writes in his evocative personal column in the Gazette.

“Ever since I was a teenager, family members have encouraged me to tell our surprisingly funny story in some creative way,” he notes. “As a novel, a film, a play, a TV series, whatever. I didn’t see us as a particularly remarkable family at the time. But we did live in remarkable times, living out a quintessentially American story.”

Here’s the story at a glance, from promotional materials:

Set across the changing landscape of 1970s Arvada, this witty, poignant new play follows two Catholic mothers — and one pint-sized member of the neighborhood press — navigating a decade of shifting suburban rules. Through the comic lens of the town newspaper’s weekly police blotter, their lives collide in a deeply personal coming-of-age story of family resilience, female autonomy, and the power of a clacking typewriter key.

Three world-premiere staged readings will be held at the Bas Bleu Theater in Fort Collins on Sept. 11, 12, and 13.

“This is not a fully produced stage play, with full production elements. A staged reading is a professionally produced and thoroughly rehearsed reading of the script in a kind of radio-play setting, with minimal blocking,” an announcement reads. “This is the first time the words will be spoken out loud for the public.”

Get tickets here.

Colorado students ‘can be expelled for social media posts,’ Denver Post finds

This week, Denver Post reporter Jessica Seaman took an expansive look at student free speech in Colorado schools — an even outside of them — in the age of social media and smartphones.

“It’s unclear how frequently schools discipline students for something they post on social media, as the Colorado Department of Education doesn’t track when their misbehavior takes place online or elsewhere off campus,” the reporter wrote. “But the Post identified more than half a dozen teenagers who were either suspended or expelled in the past seven years over social media posts.”

Seaman’s Sept. 6 enterprise story is deep and thorough. A note at the bottom mentions that she reported it “while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Data Fellowship, which provided funding to support the Denver Post’s project on school discipline.”

Beyond interviews for the story, the reporter reviewed court transcripts, “student handbooks, codes of conduct, discipline matrices and other policies for the 15 public school systems in metro Denver to understand how districts regulate online speech.”

Some policies “were so outdated they still referenced beepers,” she wrote.

‘Remarkably, Colorado newsrooms are holding the line,’ COLab head says

While the demise of newsrooms “certainly has been an oft-repeated storyline in recent years,” one Colorado newspaper editor is “starting to think the reports of journalism’s death are greatly exaggerated. Especially in Colorado.”

That’s according to Vince Bzdek, executive editor of the Gazette in Colorado Springs and Denver and Colorado Politics. He wrote this week that he was encouraged by a recent report from the Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab.

From his recent column:

“Remarkably, Colorado newsrooms are holding the line,” Laura Frank, executive director of COLab, announces in a new survey of Colorado newsrooms.
Nearly nine out of 10 outlets maintained or actually increased the percentage of their coverage devoted to local news from 2022 to 2025, the survey found.
The average media outlet produces 30 original stories a month — nearly a new story every day of the year — with original work representing 85% of its total content.
More than two out of three outlets who described their anticipated finances for 2026 said they were stable or planning expansion.
Our own publications — The Denver Gazette, Colorado Springs Gazette and Colorado Politics — garnered 64 awards at the CPA conference, the most of any media company, another acknowledgment I hope that we, too, are doing our part to keep journalism alive and well.

Bzdek attended the Colorado Press Association’s recent convention and came away with these takeaways:

“‘We are civic infrastructure,’ said Garry [Pierre-Pierre], director of partnerships for URL Media and keynote speaker at the conference.”
“In a separate talk, Amanda Mountain, president and CEO of Rocky Mountain Public Media, underlined that civic mission. ‘Local news is in the business of helping people belong where they live. We’re building a community that happens to contain an audience.’”
“…the great Bob and Gerri Sweeney … were inducted into the CPA Hall of Fame after more than 67 years of sustaining community newspapers across Colorado, which is just about as long as they have been married.”

“As we fight the good fight,” Bzdek wrote, “there’s nothing more fortifying for newspaper people like me than rubbing elbows and comparing war stories with comrades in arms from all across the state at such gatherings.”

Colorado governments are paying content creators to ‘spread their message’

As Coloradans increasingly get their information from a variety of fragmented sources, particularly on their phone screens, content creators will be among them.

Now, some government agencies are acknowledging this new reality in their marketing buys.

“Invoices obtained through an open records request show a Denver-area regional government agency paid a dozen local influencers a combined more than $15,000 over two campaigns this year to promote a bike-to-work initiative, and its ‘Way To Go’ app,” Veronica Acosta reported for Denver7 this week. “A second agency, the Front Range Passenger Rail District, confirms it has its own budget that includes paying content creators.”

Acosta reported that the Front Range Passenger Rail District — the agency overseeing a proposed Colorado Connector rail line between Fort Collins and Pueblo — has an arrangement with creators that is “built into a broader communications contract.”

From the story headlined “Two Colorado agencies are paying local social media influencers to help spread their message”:

“During 2026, the Front Range Passenger Rail District contracted with Bagley Consulting LLC for approximately $260,000 to manage a broad digital communications program informing Front Range residents about proposed intercity passenger train service,” said Tara Trujillo, spokeswoman for the district. “The contract covered website management, email and text updates, Friends of Front Range communications, CRM management, management of FRPRD’s social media accounts, and coordination with 21 content creators. The content creators were one component of the broader yearlong contract.”

The Way to Go program was smaller, but also involved transportation.

Nisha Mokshagundam, who manages the Denver Regional Council of Governments, told the reporter that paying influencers to get their message out is a new strategy.

“We have just started partnering with influencers in advance of our June Bike to Work Day campaign,” she told Denver7. “We’re looking at the numbers. We’re deciding if this is something that is sustainable that we want to continue doing.”

Known as DRCOG, the organization is a policy and planning coalition that determines where some public money flows. Mokshagundam said that so far the metrics look good when it comes to spending it on content creators.

More Colorado media odds & ends

🎶 The Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, of which I’m a board member, is co-hosting a “BYO Vinyl Networking Happy Hour” with Westword at the alt-weekly’s office on Sept. 28 from 6 p.m. to 8.

⚖️ After Greg Adler sued David Cook and Spencer McKnight of the Aspen Daily News in June “for alleged secret negotiations with his son Gabriel over his stake in the newspaper’s parent company, a Pitkin County District Court judge has dismissed the lawsuit,” Genny Gottdiener reported for the Aspen Times. The pair’s attorney, Jeffrey Springer, told the Times that it was “one of the most frivolous cases” he has ever seen.

🎒 SPJ Colorado Pro has a new journalism mentorship program for college students. The program pairs mentors and mentees for a year, and the pairs meet twice a month virtually or in person for feedback and career advice. Learn more here.

🤖 Kaitlin Durbin, a former Colorado journalist, “has accused Cleveland.com — the online home of The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper — of publishing an article under her byline without her consent, knowledge, or approval,” Futurism reported. “The article was generated by the ‘Cleveland.com Express Desk,’ which ‘uses AI tools to assist in producing content’ that the newspaper claims is ‘reviewed and edited by staff.’” The newspaper’s editor called it “a simple mistake, the result of a miscommunication between a couple of editors.”

📺 How did prosecutors learn that a high-profile “murder defendant” had been involved in a hit-and-run in Denver while out on bond? They didn’t “until a local news station aired footage of a man who was later confirmed to be Barry Morphew driving aggressively and then striking two vehicles with his 2013 Ford truck,” Carol McKinley reported for the Colorado Sun.

🗣 Steve Knopper, a journalist and New York Times contributor, said during a recent Colorado SPJ event at the Denver Press Club that the freelancers who last are usually the people who keep seeing stories everywhere, according to a writeup about it by Andy Green for FoxTalk. Knopper compared it to “popcorn popping in their heads,” Green wrote.

🐯 “Many, many journalism classes and published articles later, we’re taking on a challenge slightly bigger than a walk to the bookstore: serving as Co-Editors-in-Chief of The Catalyst,” wrote Sydney McGarr and Michaela Ocko in an introductory column for the independent student newspaper at Colorado College.

🚓 An initiative by the Colorado Springs Police Department “uses social media to keep local cold cases in the public eye — and potentially generate new leads,” Meghan Glova reported for KOAA News5.

🗞 David Hoffmann, the new owner of the Aspen Daily News, penned a column saying he believes “local news can bring communities together.”

🏈 “Colorado is hosting an open practice Tuesday for fans and reporters for the first time under coach Deion Sanders,” David Ubben wrote for the Athletic/New York Times. “The catch: No reporting. And everyone attending must turn in their phones.” The team, he wrote, “has strictly limited media access to practice throughout Sanders’ tenure, with a select few exceptions during spring and preseason camp.”

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 more than 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. Most recently, I’ve been contributing to Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab and The Conversation. I also write the twice-monthly Community Newswire newsletter for the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont. The nonprofit 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.

New journalism film with Colorado ties ‘The First’ about free speech to air on PBS this fall

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:15:51 GMT

About 10 seconds into a yet-to-air documentary about the First Amendment, Colorado’s connections become clear.

Bazi Kanani, a host and reporter for Colorado Public Radio, is the second person to speak in the new film titled “The First: Free Speech at the Crossroads” about the First Amendment.

Kanani then carries viewers through the rest of the 1.5-hour documentary as one of the two hosts. The other is Tom Costello, a senior correspondent for NBC News who grew up in Colorado and worked at KUSA 9NEWS in Denver back in the day.

Even before the two Colorado-linked journalists appear on screen, close viewers might recognize that the filmmaker who created the documentary is a Coloradan himself.

Brian Malone of Castle Rock and his company Fast Forward Films is the director and editor behind “The First.” You might remember Malone from his film last year “Truth Be Told” that demystified Colorado journalism. He is also the creative force behind the statewide “Free Press, Free Country” multimedia campaign. Producers on “The First” are Cindy Malone and Tim Ryan, the former news director of 9NEWS.

This week, the trailer for “The First” hit the internet.

I got a chance to view the film, which counts the nonprofit Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition as its fiscal sponsor and a supporter.

Interspersed with mashups of political figures snapping at or verbally attacking journalists throughout the years are some dives into colonial-era fights, the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, and current events that tested our freedom of speech.

There’s Nixon and McCarthy. Abraham Lincoln sending soldiers to shut down newspapers during the Civil War. Barack Obama charging Edward Snowden with espionage for leaking state secrets.

The job that journalists do is “under serious threat,” Costello says early in the film. Kanani says that’s why she and her co-host stepped away from their daily reporting assignments to “go in search of the First Amendment.”

What emerges over the next hour and a half is part history and civics lesson and part contemporary field report from places like Charlottesville, Philadelphia, Montgomery, and Washington, D.C. It whiplashes through time from the nation’s founding to its present.

The film tackles landmark free speech cases like the 1960s Times v. Sullivan Supreme Court decision that brought libel under the First Amendment and makes it hard to win judgements against the press. Kanani interviews Mary Beth Tinker who won a Supreme Court ruling when she got in trouble at school for wearing a black armband in opposition to the Vietnam war.

The hosts also explore contemporary speech cases including crackdowns on students during Israel and Palestine protests, state-based “don’t say gay” laws, and wars that have played out on the shelves of local libraries. They examine a new Pentagon policy that restricted access to certain journalists.

Some big names in the journalism world make an appearance.

On the ground in Boston, Kanani interviews former Washington Post editor Marty Baron while Costello checks in with former New York Times editor Dean Baquet when he was speaking at the University in Denver earlier this year.

“It’s worse under this administration,” Baron says about presidents and media at one point, adding that he believes the Trump White House is trying to systematically marginalize the press while undermining its economic sustainability and legal position. “It’s all targeted toward media organizations that they themselves just don’t like,” he says.

Baquet says some large U.S. media companies have lately undermined confidence about their independence by how they’ve responded to lawsuits from the Trump administration.

“When some networks fold and pay settlements to the government for cases that are clearly protected by the First Amendment … I think that that undermines, frankly, our power and our authority,” he said. “I think a lawsuit deadens your journalism. A lawsuit makes you afraid. A lawsuit eats up your time. A lawsuit eats up your energy. And a lawsuit can even put you out of business.”

Back in Colorado, the hosts sum up what they learned about the First Amendment and why it exists, and they imagine how those in the future might look back at us now. “What will they think about the decisions we made today?” Kanani asks.

Over the phone this week, Malone said he shot the documentary in three months this spring and summer with a nearly all-Colorado crew.

“I think it’s a timely film for an urgent time,” he said about the impetus for making it. “We need to reexamine and be reminded of the importance of the First Amendment in our country.”

Over email this week, Kanani said she believes many in modern America have been raised with freedoms they often take for granted, including the right to speak their opinion.

“That may get you into trouble with grandparents or friends who don’t like what you have to say, but that should not get you in trouble with the government,” she said. “It’s a core value we’re raised with in this democracy, and it’s crucial to my own ability to work as a journalist.”

She added that freedom of speech still doesn’t exist in much of the world.

“Participating in ‘The First’ documentary has given me more perspective on why that is,” she said. “The history of our own First Amendment reveals that despite a constitutional guarantee, free speech is a more fragile opportunity than you’d guess — frequently under threat.”

The Colorado Public Radio host said she hopes others who watch it will have a new appreciation for how the United States has managed to maintain its constitutional right and “will resolve to make sure it remains solidly in place.”

For his part, once the film is out, Malone said he would like to see teachers showing it in classrooms.

“The First” premieres on Oct. 23 on Rocky Mountain PBS and for free on the PBS streaming app.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

DU journo prof: Gazette ‘ethically obligated’ to disclose financial ties to group it covers

Some in Colorado media circles have noticed the frequency with which newspapers owned by conservative Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz tend to amplify the work of a conservative policy group called the Common Sense Institute.

If the organization puts out a study, you can bet Colorado Politics and the Denver and Colorado Springs Gazette will have a news story about it — quickly and often uncritically.

Now, the progressive Colorado Times Recorder is reporting something illuminating.

According to CTR’s Jason Salzman and Erik Maulbetsch, Anschutz and his son, Christian Anschutz, who sits on the editorial board of the Denver Gazette, have since 2014 given CSI through foundations they control grants “totaling $735,000, including $585,000 since 2021, when CSI began expanding its operations.” Colorado Politics launched in 2016.

Here’s more from CTR’s Sept. 3 bombshell report:

Colorado Times Recorder has published a series of investigations detailing the financial and other connections between Anschutz and CSI — as well as a conservative advocacy organization called Advance Colorado, which also gets money from Anschutz and is behind eight measures on November’s election ballot. CSI frequently issues papers in support of Advance Colorado’s ballot initiatives.
The Gazette chain, in turn, writes lots of articles about CSI’s research. In fact, CSI gets more coverage from the Gazette chain than from any other news outlet in the Newsbank database of 12,000 outlets. Forty percent of CSI’s press mentions between January 2020 and February 2026 were from the Gazette chain. And of news outlets in Colorado, the Gazette is by far the most likely to omit the fact that CSI is conservative.

The Gazette has not disclosed its relationship to CSI, CTR reported. But it should start, according to a University of Denver journalism professor.

Another excerpt from the piece:

“When covering information or directly quoting the right-wing think tank the Common Sense Institute, the Gazette is ethically obligated to disclose the contributions that Anschutz family members and the foundations that bear their name have made to that Institute,” said University of Denver Prof. Lynn Schofield Clark, who directs the Estlow International Research Center for Journalism & New Media Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies. “Such disclosure is consistent with the American Press Institute’s ethical guidelines. Readers want to be able to trust that their news sources are free of bias. When those who own news organizations provide funding for organizations promoting particular viewpoints, we all need to know about it so that we can evaluate accordingly what they claim is ‘news.’

It is not hard to imagine this new reporting causing serious discussions inside the newsrooms of Clarity Media properties. It would be flat-out weird if that didn’t happen.

To be clear, regardless of whether some might have suspected it, Clarity journalists likely did not know how deep of a financial relationship their owner and editorial board member (and perhaps one day future owner?) have with these organizations that are seeking to shape public policy and benefit when local media amplify their work.

But they do now.

I’ll add to what Clark, the DU professor, said by noting that if conscientious journalists at the Clarity chain request the paper disclose when reporting on CSI or other entities with relevant financial ties to their ownership, and management resists, they should stick to their guns. An element of journalism is that “its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.”

Recently, the trio of newspapers announced that executive editor Vince Bzdek will retire at the end of the year and that now all editors will report directly to the business-side publisher, Chris Reen, whose background is in sales and marketing.

Reen and Bzdek did not respond to outreach about the CTR story today via calls, texts, and an email letting them know I planned to write about it. Beyond the opportunity for engagement about the broader subject matter, a general open line of communication can provide an opportunity to dispute elements of a particular story or indicate that there might be more to it and suggest holding off on an item about it.

Despite some self-owns over the years by the local media company when it comes to its ownership and its coverage — including in the disclosure department — the paper’s rank-and-file journalists consistently produce high-impact journalism in Colorado.

That’s what makes these kinds of things, and management’s seeming unwillingness to publicly engage about them, befuddling for some close media watchers, including this newsletter.

Clarity Media management has sought to establish some of its properties as “better” and more “balanced” than some of its competitors, which invites opportunities for evaluation of such statements.

After the Denver Gazette launched a few years ago, it erected billboards around the city that read “Better. Balanced. Denver.” The digital publication also attacked the Denver Post directly in a series of digital advertisements and the Gazette’s executive editor has publicly accused other Denver news outlets of bias.

There has also been at least one instance when a Colorado reporter has pointed to the Common Sense Institute’s research as flawed — and has gotten the group to make changes to a report. In that case, Colorado Politics had amplified a false claim about fentanyl in a lead of a news story even after CSI had altered its public statements in response to criticism. I certainly don’t believe that the Clarity outlet did so on purpose, but the situation might have let on some credulity with which a reporter and editor afforded a dramatic statement by the organization.

Now, something else about all of this.

That the Colorado Times Recorder was the one to flip the floodlights onto this matter of financial interest and nondisclosure at Clarity Media presents an awkward situation of its own. The nonprofit news site does not disclose its donors. Because of that, readers don’t know when its own coverage might intersect with the financial interests and agendas of those who fund its operation.

According to public tax filings, the Colorado Times Recorder received $100,000 from the Gill Foundation in 2024, the most recent available filings online. The foundation gave the same amount to CTR in at least two years prior to that, too.

Asked if Salzman would disclose that relationship if his site covered something related to Gill — or any of his other undisclosed donors — he said he would “try my best.”

Salzman acknowledged such an answer is likely not satisfactory for those who read his criticism of the Gazette. He said over the phone this week that while his outlet has a “code of ethics” on its webpage, he does not purport to “occupy the ethical high ground” when it comes to journalism.

But, he said, he is willing to publicly talk about it.

CSU Fort Collins launches a minor in content creation

This spring, Colorado State University students in Fort Collins will be able to minor in a new discipline: content creation.

Here’s the description from the course catalogue:

The Content Creation minor gives students a strong foundation in social media production and strategic practice. It builds skills in branding, visual communication, communication strategy, and audience engagement. Students gain hands-on experience producing audio, video, photography, and graphic design projects.

The move comes as university programs across the country are acknowledging the changing ways that people are getting their news and information.

Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication made national headlines recently when it launched a new bachelor’s degree major in content creation. That school joined St. Bonaventure University with a major while Syracuse University and Quinnipiac University have minors for it, according to the Associated Press.

Here in Colorado, CSU journalism instructor Jenny Fischer, who proposed the minor, says the development is a response to what students want. The department, she said, sought to create something innovative to serve student needs while playing to the strengths of its journalism department.

The school hopes to promote the minors to students in disciplines beyond journalism, too, like art, business, and STEM, in order to help those students better tell stories about their work.

“It was conceived as a way to kind of think about content creation as an academic practice,” Fischer said. “Also thinking about the work already being done in the journalism department to help people without a communications background and students outside of the communications field to tell their stories in a different and better way.”

Earlier this year, Fischer and I worked on an experimental training course for some Colorado content creators that also involved Colorado Media Project and the media literacy company Ad Fontes Media.

More Colorado media odds & ends

🏆 See who won this year’s Colorado Press Association awards. The state’s press advocacy group announced them during last week’s annual convention in Northglenn.

🗣 On Sept. 14, Colorado Mesa University and CU Boulder are partnering for a panel titled “What Media Literacy, Authenticity and Gatekeeping Mean Now.” CU journalism professor Chuck Plunkett will moderate it. Register here. “This interactive community conversation will include a moderated panel with reporters and researchers followed by audience participation at table conversations to address: what is needed to ensure our communities receive news they trust on the issues important to them,” an announcement reads.

💧 A Colorado Sun reporter became “a city-water tasting expert and brings zero skills to the table,” the outlet reported.

🧪 The nonprofit Boulder Reporting Lab is hiring a managing editor and will pay $90,000 to $105,000 for the role. “The ideal candidate is a highly organized, hands-on editor with strong news judgment who enjoys managing the many moving parts of a growing, modern local newsroom,” the listing states.

💰 The Colorado Broadcasters Association has established an $18,000 annual fund “to assist employees of CBA member stations participate in eligible, broadcast-focused courses and events including continuing education, training programs, conferences, online and virtual training, plus other learning opportunities.”

🐻 “What has failed to come through official and media channels is the obvious, if uncomfortable, fundamental cause of this phenomenon: global warming,” Colorado Newsline editor Quentin Young wrote about recent bear attacks.

🗞 The National Trust for Local News, the nonprofit that got its start in the newspaper business in Colorado, “is acquiring the Vermont Community Newspaper Group in a deal that will close this month,” Sophie Culpepper reported for Harvard’s Nieman Lab.

💼 Jonathan Huang, a journalist in Colorado Springs who writes for the Southern Colorado Business Forum & Digest, is one of 33 journalists across the country selected by the National Press Foundation “to participate in the October 2026 Local Business Journalism Fellowship.”

🎉 I was proud to see Colorado College sponsoring the state press association’s awards this weekend— and even prouder to see a CC student win one.

👀 Independent Colorado journalist Mike Lasusa didn’t get a response from the conservative group Advance Colorado for his reporting about a ballot measure they’re supporting that would increase penalties for fentanyl crimes, but was then surprised to see the group’s president post on social media graphs Lasusa made for his coverage in The Blanket. “It seemed like they were just ignoring me until I saw that they had stolen my graphic,” he said on Instagram. Lasusa said his reporting concluded that the ballot measure “probably wouldn’t reduce overdose deaths and it would cost Colorado millions of taxpayer dollars to lock up hundreds more people every year rather than getting them education and treatment that could actually help.”

🎙 “I hope that no student journalist would have to go through what I went through,” Community College of Aurora student Andy Green told KGNU in an interview about the friction he ran into with administrators while trying to start a new campus publication called FoxTalk.

📲 Michaelangelo Landgrave, a political scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, co-authored a study that looked into how “consuming political content on TikTok” actually affects young people and spoke to Erin O’Toole of KUNC about it.

🆕 “I’m very excited to share that today I’m starting a new contract role as Colorado Public Radio’s new Education Reporter,” Rae Solomon said on LinkedIn.

🗣 Caitlin Walker, editor of the Rio Blanco Herald Times, bemoaned the attention economy in a column, saying that the work that goes into reporting for a community newspaper “unlike a haphazard 10-second viral video of someone falling down stairs, is not free to produce.”

Lawmakers to enforce local news priority in state ad spending by holding agencies accountable

Corey Hutchins — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 02:22:01 GMT

Colorado lawmakers Emily Sirota, Barbara Kirkmeyer, and Rick Taggart speak at the Colorado Press Association convention on Aug. 27, 2026

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A GOP Colorado lawmaker who serves on the state’s powerful budget-writing committee said he will hold state agencies accountable if they don’t prioritize their advertising spending with local Colorado news outlets.

Mesa County Republican Rep. Rick Taggart threw down the gauntlet on Thursday during a legislative panel at the Colorado Press Association’s annual convention in Northglenn.

The Western Slope legislator’s warning stems from a notable footnote that lawmakers this spring voted unanimously to include in the state budget.

The language stated that the General Assembly intends for state agencies and departments that receive an appropriation for “marketing, advertising, or public outreach” to create a plan to spend that money with “Colorado-based members of the media.”

The hope is that doing so can inject some much-needed capital into a struggling industry. Across the nation, public policy to support local news has been taking root in state legislatures. Channeling state advertising dollars toward local news outlets is one way to do so.

In Colorado, the move was modest — it is not as strong as it is in Vermont whose governor signed an executive order, nor is it a mandate — but the development signaled legislative support for public policy that is aimed at helping sustain local news.

The Colorado Press Association lauded the budget note, which it had supported. The national group Rebuild Local News, which is working on public policy around the country, applauded Colorado when Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed the state’s spending plan in May.

On Thursday, Taggart, who led the charge for the footnote, discussed the state budget and local news issues at the media conference along with Denver Democratic Rep. Emily Sirota and Republican State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer.

Each of them serves on the Joint Budget Committee and told the room of journalists and publishers that they were proud of the footnote and hoped it would help.

Tim Regan-Porter, president of the Colorado Press Association, moderated the discussion. He asked the panel what tools lawmakers could use if agencies ignore it.

“I think we from the JBC can make their lives pretty miserable,” Taggart said with a chuckle. “Because they need us.”

Indeed, departments and agencies come to the JBC for additional funding requests throughout the year.

“I know for me — and I can only speak for me — if when we ask for that information of ‘How did you change your media buy per this footnote,’ if they look at us and try to give us the stiff arm and say, ‘Well, we really didn’t do anything,’ I’m going to be pretty honest with them to say, ‘Well, if you’re not going to do that, why am I going to approve any of your requests?’ And I think that’s a pretty powerful tool.”

Taggart, who formerly served as the mayor of Grand Junction and is an adjunct professor at Colorado Mesa University, said he hoped lawmakers would not have to “get to mandates” for agencies.

Sirota, the lone Democrat on Thursday’s panel, whose husband David is a prominent journalist, said she is open to the idea of going further to require that state agencies prioritize local news. Maryland, she noted, has already done so.

“I think I’d like to see what they do first with our request,” she said of Colorado’s state agencies. “But I’m open to digging deeper.”

She added that it is important to recognize a crisis facing the local news industry and how some states are responding to it with public policy.

“Government supports all sorts of industries in a variety of ways,” she said. “This particular industry is pretty crucial to the functioning of democracy in my opinion.”

Kirkmeyer, who just narrowly lost a bid for governor in the Republican primary to Victor Marx, said legislation could be one way to more strongly enforce the footnote’s intent, but lawmakers could also look to the state procurement process.

She suggested that publishers in the room start meeting with the heads of government agencies to talk about agency plans to prioritize local media in state-funded marketing.

Regan-Porter reminded the audience of how drastically things have changed for the local news industry.

“Ten years ago we wouldn’t be having this conversation in this room,” he said. “It makes too many of us uneasy.” He noted that there are important safeguards for editorial independence when it comes to public policy “and we consider that every time we have a talk with legislators.”

Public funding for journalism, while not new, can be tricky, and “it’s easy to see how it could be abused,” he said. “But we fund libraries, we fund lots of public services, and if public media is going away we’re going to be in real trouble.”

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

The state of local news in Colorado: ‘Maximum mission. Minimum capacity.’

Colorado’s newsrooms are facing a “capacity bottleneck.”

That’s the takeaway from a new report by the Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab. Each year, the nonprofit surveys the state’s local newsrooms for an annual checkup.

COLab Executive Director Laura Frank released the report Aug. 27 and presented the key findings after hearing from 164 respondents.

From the report:

The data show a local news system caught in a capacity bottleneck. Colorado newsrooms are still producing substantial amounts of original, local journalism, and many have clear visions of how they want to grow and adapt: build audiences, strengthen revenue, develop new products, use new technology and deepen community engagement. But the same small teams responsible for today’s news are also being asked to build tomorrow’s operation. With too little time, staffing and business capacity, good ideas compete with essential work that already must get done.
Remarkably, Colorado newsrooms are holding the line anyway. That resilience is impressive — and easy to misread. To the consumer, continued output can mask the strain underneath it. The central challenge is not a shortage of mission or ideas; it is the capacity to turn them into durable change. That creates a window to act while news outlets, audiences, trust and collaboration are still in place.

Here are some more nuggets from the annual report:

“The survey included major broadcasters, public media, community newspapers, digital outlets and solo publishers: 101 for-profit entities, 59 nonprofits, two public-benefit corporations and two employee-owned organizations. There is no single ‘typical’ outlet — but much of the ecosystem is small.”
“The picture that emerges from the most recent Colorado News Survey shows an immediate tension: small staffs are producing often increasing amounts of overwhelmingly original journalism while also being asked to build the revenue, audiences and tools that could make that work more sustainable — all without the capacity to do so.”
“For most outlets, the constraint starts with people and time. Among the 123 outlets reporting some editorial staff, 39% had one or fewer [full-time employees] and half had two or fewer.”
“Among 34 outlets with editorial staffing data in all four surveys, between 2022 and 2025, the median fell from 3.75 FTEs to 3.1.”
“The business side moved in the same downward direction. Among 24 outlets with non-editorial staffing data in all four surveys, the median fell in those four years from 2.0 FTEs to 1.5. These are the people responsible for all the jobs that are not directly producing news reports.”
“It’s remarkable how much local news remains. It’s troubling how little supports it.”
“The financial outlook is not one of collapse, but of vulnerability — and that creates a window to act. Among 106 respondents who described their expected 2026 financial outlook, more than half (53%) called their outlook stable and more than one in seven (16%) planned expansion. Another 29% were uncertain and 2% said they were at risk of closing.”
“That is important. It shows despite being stretched thin, Colorado still has a functioning local-news system: organizations, experienced journalists, audiences and community relationships remain. Rather than rescue it after collapse, Colorado would be much better served if we found ways to give it more capacity to adapt while those assets still exist.”

“We have a chance to strengthen this system before we instead have to rebuild it,” Frank said during a Thursday speech at the Colorado Press Association’s annual convention.

While Colorado already has a culture of collaboration, she said, the next generation of collaboration will be “less about sharing stories and more about sharing capacity.”

Read the whole report at the link above.

Boulder Weekly has a new owner and Boulder Voice gets a shakeup, too

A year after a messy meltdown last summer at Boulder Weekly, the three-decade-old newspaper has a new owner.

Meaghan Levy, who also publishes the Berthoud Surveyor newspaper, is now controlling it, according to a story this week by Lucas High in BizWest.

From the piece:

Levy, who is now listed on Boulder Weekly’s Contact Us page as “Owner/ Publisher,” confirmed in an email to BizWest that she has purchased the publication.
Levy, who was also reached by telephone, invited this BizWest reporter to a Friday meeting at the offices of the Berthoud Surveyor, another paper she owns. But, as of publication of this story, she has not provided any details about specific plans for a revived Boulder Weekly, which published its last print edition on July 3, 2025.
Stewart Sallo, Boulder Weekly’s owner during last summer’s implosion, referred questions to Levy when reached via LinkedIn this week. Boulder Weekly’s online staff directory lists Sallo as the paper’s “Founder/ Consultant.”
That directory appears to have been updated very recently. Earlier this week, it still listed employees who were part of the team fired last July.

Levy and former Boulder Weekly owner Stewart Sallo appeared on a KGNU radio program this week to talk about the sale. In the interview, he said that he had hoped to break news of it on the radio program but the story had been “leaked.” As for his own role, he said he is committed for two years but expects his involvement won’t last that long.

News that Levy bought Boulder Weekly might come as a surprise to some.

In January, this newsletter reported that three Colorado media veterans, Rachel Pickarski, Todd Chamberlin, and Brooke Warner, were seeking to take over Boulder Weekly and turn it into a nonprofit.

That didn’t happen, but the trio set out on a project called the Boulder Voice.

The website describes the Voice as a “nonprofit local news initiative created to strengthen civic life in Boulder through trusted reporting, community connection, and public-service journalism.”

Pickarski and Chamberlin, however, are no longer involved with the project, they said this week, but are strategizing a pivot.

“The name may change but the mission and vision stays the same: creating something bilingual for community with community,” they said in a joint statement. “Something that’s needed with innovation and adaptation at the forefront.”

This week’s newsletter is supported in part by the Regional Air Quality Council, the Front Range’s lead air quality planning organization. The RAQC is a great reporting resource for stories about ground-level ozone, the Front Range’s most pressing air quality issue each summer. Visit RAQC.org to learn more and sign up for our newsletter. To learn more about ground-level ozone and the simple steps your audience can take to protect their health and reduce their emissions, visit the RAQC’s SimpleStepsBetterAir.org.

Community College of Aurora clears student journalist of conduct violations

Administrators at the Community College of Aurora this week told student Andy Green that they have cleared him of conduct violations related to a news publication he started on campus.

The college had made local headlines in recent weeks and drew a rebuke from the aggressive national free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE.

Green had told media and FIRE that he was facing disciplinary action after he started a new publication called FoxTalk on the campus that has a fox as a mascot.

From Kyla Pearce at the Aurora Sentinel:

CCA student Andrew Green tried to register his independent student publication, called “FoxTalk,” as an official student organization in March.
In April, the college issued a “sweeping gag order” on him and other students at the outlet, banning them from newsgathering or publishing stories, according to a letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression supporting Green and FoxTalk.
Green claimed the college banned FoxTalk from publishing until students jumped through “countless bureaucratic hoops.”
A college spokesperson said the college was just asking the student to complete the established recognition process that every student organization has to follow.
According to the letter, Green met with a school representative to get permission to seek comment from CCA faculty and staff without going through the school’s communications office.
The school’s dean of student success told Green to pause the publication until a structure was developed.
Students ignored the directive, the letter said, and Green was cited by the school for failure to comply with the lawful directives of a college official.

The community college’s decision to clear Green of wrongdoing in an Aug. 24 letter to him came just days before he was set to speak on Friday at the Colorado Press Association’s convention. His roundtable discussion was titled “Student Newsrooms and Editorial Independence: Lessons from FoxTalk.”

During his roundtable discussion, Green said he didn’t think the college was operating in bad faith.

“I don’t think that the administrators were really thinking about the Constitution or constitutional rights,” he said. “I think that a lot of them probably just didn’t realize what it meant to have a student newspaper.”

He said, however, that he is uncertain about where things stand for him on campus because the college has not officially withdrawn a directive to him not to publish. He is still publishing regardless, he said, but worries about the potential for future conduct cases.

A Community College of Aurora spokesperson said via email that student privacy laws prohibit it from speaking about student conduct cases.

In an interview, Green said he believed the involvement of FIRE had been helpful in the ordeal.

In a statement, Marie McMullan, program manager of FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative, said the group is “thrilled” that Green and FoxTalk “were correctly found not responsible for the crime of committing journalism.”

The restrictions the college “placed on its student journalists clearly constituted a prior restraint of the press that violated the First Amendment,” she said.

She added that FIRE has not received a substantive response from the college to its outreach and is unsure whether it would “engage in these restrictive actions” in the future.

McMullan said that without that assurance, she worried a chill on student journalism and basic newsgathering could remain. “Now’s the time for the college to clear the air and recommit to its First Amendment obligations,” she said.

New journalism fund launches in Four Corners region to bolster local news

A second regional nonprofit has formed in Colorado to raise money to support local journalism, this time in the Four Corners region and anchored in Durango.

The Four Corners Fund seeks to connect and inform “more than 200,000 people” across multiple counties in Southwest Colorado and Northwest New Mexico, an announcement this week reads.

More Colorado media odds & ends

🗣 If you’re thinking of going freelance or are already doing so and trying to make it work, SPJ Colorado has an event for you. Join veteran Colorado journalist Steve Knopper for “No Newsroom Required: The Ins and Outs of Freelance Journalism,” a conversation “about the ins and outs of freelance journalism and creating a sustainable career outside a traditional newsroom.” The event is Sept. 1 at 7 p.m. at the Denver Press Club.

🎙 Retiring Westword editor Patty Calhoun sat down with Ryan Warner for an interview on the Colorado Public Radio show Colorado Matters. She told him she is planning to write 50 columns over 50 weeks about Denver’s history during the five decades that her alternative weekly newspaper has been around. “And, she said, she’s open to doing more.”

👏 Senior Lilly Asano, a Colorado College journalism minor, received The Denver Press Club’s top award this year for her student journalism.

🔥 The editorial board of Colorado Mesa University's student newspaper, The Criterion, ripped Grand Junction High School for treating its journalism advisor position “like a human meatshield” and accused the school of violating the First Amendment and state law when it sidelined the school paper’s media advisor Steve Fox.

📣 Chris Ballantine, the new publisher of the Durango Herald, wrote a note to readers this week saying he is revamping the paper’s opinion pages. “We are seeking a new Perspectives Editor who will promote dialogue and develop relationships with the broad range of voices in our region,” he wrote. “Moving forward, when this editor shares an opinion, it will typically run alongside a counterpoint perspective from a community member with an opposing view who has the background and expertise on the subject.”

🆕 Robert Tann will be joining the Denver Post in September as a politics reporter. “I’ll be covering the state legislature, holding government accountable and telling the stories of how politics and policy affect Coloradans,” he said on LinkedIn. He will be coming from the Swift newspaper chain in Colorado.

👀 At the Colorado Press Association’s convention, GOP State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, who ran for governor, said during a panel discussion that her county’s newspaper, the Greeley Tribune, was printing less and less until it “went to all online.” Denver Post Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo spoke up from the audience and corrected her, saying it prints four days a week. “Oh, so you still do newsprint?” Kirkmeyer said. “I didn’t know that.”

⚙️ The Southern Ute Drum newspaper is looking for a new editor after Jeremy Wade Shockley stepped down in May after nine years to pursue independent photojournalism opportunities.

🗣️ “If we’re serious about becoming audience-centered organizations, cutting the teams responsible for digital storytelling and engagement moves us in the opposite direction,” former Denver7 News Director Megan McRae said on LinkedIn. “I saw that firsthand when some of my former colleagues were recently laid off.”

⛰️ Rocky Mountain Voice, the conservative news source founded by former Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, “reaches roughly 200,000 people through its email distribution,” according to an Aug. 27 column in it by C. J. Garbo. “Publicly reported figures show that its operation has moved well beyond the experimental stage. In 2025 alone, RMV reported publishing more than 800 original articles from 98 independent writers. Its reporting generated 12.5 million social media views, 1.6 million interactions, and more than 46,000 new followers. Its Mountain Minute podcast recorded more than 166,000 downloads after launching in 2025.” The author added: “If our answer to biased journalism is merely to create journalism biased in the opposite direction, we will have accomplished much less than we imagine.”

☀️ “Whether you’re a Colorado high school student reporting stories for your school newspaper or someone who has never considered journalism a possibility for your future, the Colorado Sun wants you to join our corps of student journalists at the next Rise & Shine Journalism Workshop on Oct. 12,” the outlet announced.

🆕 Samuel Jane announced he is “headed to Colorado to cover the Denver Broncos for the Denver Post,” saying he is “excited to cover a storied franchise for a legacy paper.”

💰 “The tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed Wednesday to pay over $17 billion in a nationwide settlement in a case centered on youth social media addiction,” Sara Wilson reported for Colorado Newsline. “The deal includes over $615 million over nine years for Colorado, which was one of 51 states and territories to sue the company in 2023.”

Kyle Clark of 9NEWS bounced from hosting a governor's race forum by Chamber of Commerce

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 21:50:16 GMT

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Colorado’s most prominent TV political journalist is no longer set to host a Colorado Chamber of Commerce forum between the two major-party candidates for governor.

In recent weeks, the statewide business group had promoted Kyle Clark of 9NEWS as the journalist who would ask questions of the Democratic and Republican candidates at an Oct. 8 event.

But this week, the organization stripped Clark’s name from their promotional materials and told him his services would not be required.

It’s not a stretch to wonder if the Chamber is making its event more enticing for the Republican candidate, Victor Marx, to appear, though the group hasn’t answered that question directly.

Marx has said he would not be doing any moderated debates with his Democratic opponent, Phil Weiser, in the run-up to the November general election.

The Republican might not enjoy another grilling by Clark. The journalist has dug more deeply into Marx’s background than many who are covering the race. For his research into him, Clark has reviewed more than 100 hours of the candidate’s “sermons, speeches, interviews, and podcasts over the last 15 years,” according to one recent story.

Clark has also been more willing than some in the press corps to question Marx about questionable campaign finance issues. He is doing aggressive accountability reporting on a candidate who was not well known in state politics outside ministry circles until he ran for governor.

Based on Colorado’s demographics, party registration, and voter behavior, it is pretty unlikely that Marx has a serious shot at the governorship this year.

But in the GOP primary, he narrowly beat a more established candidate, Barbara Kirkmeyer. The result scrambled the predictions of some longtime politics watchers. Colorado Politics executive editor Vince Bzdek, Westword editor Patty Calhoun, and PBS12’s regular Colorado Inside Out pundit David Kopel each said publicly that they believed Kirkmeyer would win.

During his campaign, Marx has made claims about his past that have been hard for journalists to independently verify, like saying he had been able to call in a deadly military air strike against ISIS as a civilian in the Middle East.

Clark, an adept interviewer, conducted a remarkable one-on-one televised Q-and-A with Marx in May that drew a flurry of national headlines. He asked him how many people he has killed, leading to an 11-second pause before a wince-worthy answer. At another point in the interview, Clark asked, “Do you know why so many of your critics think you’re a con man?”

The interview was the kind that close politics watchers, including this newsletter, might call “election-defining.”

Following that sit-down, Marx posted a video on Facebook in which he said he enjoyed the conversation. “As a reporter, Kyle is professional and he’s researched,” he said. “And that you don’t see a lot of in social media, so I appreciate it.” He added that Clark had asked “the hard questions, which I wanted.”

Later, Clark moderated a debate featuring Marx and his GOP rivals.

In recapping that particular rumpus, reporters for Colorado Public Radio called the forum “unlike any political debate in recent Colorado memory” and noted how the “false claims and attacks became so unhinged at times that moments could have been mistaken for a Saturday Night Live cold open, or a spoof reality show like Jury Duty.”

Much of that was because of Clark’s sharp questioning of Marx and others.

Following the primary, Marx made his declaration that he would not do any more moderated debates and challenged Weiser to agree.

Also since the primary, the host of the 9NEWS nightly newscast “Next with Kyle Clark” has become less of a bug for the Marx campaign than something of a feature.

The candidate’s supporters sell shirts with Marx’s dog on them that read “Don’t bite Kyle,” a reference to a portion of the primary debate in which Marx suggested his dog, which he had with him on the stage, might sink its teeth into the reporter. He has brought up Clark multiple times in social media posts, and some of his supporters go after the journalist on platforms like Twitter/X.

As for what the Chamber of Commerce is saying about removing Clark from the event, which it is calling a “moderated conversation,” we might have to read between the lines.

“Due to the nature of our work and needing to organize our events many months in advance, when we plan any programming around elections, we have to be adaptable with our candidates and moderators before we know who the nominees will be,” Cynthia Eveleth-Havens, the chief strategy officer and senior vice president of communications at the Chamber, said in an email.

She added: “In order to find alignment between the two campaigns and to provide the business community with a transparent and open forum, both candidates must agree to a moderator.”

The Weiser campaign did not request a change in moderator, said spokesman Nate Jackson. Eveleth-Havens at the Chamber didn’t respond to multiple follow-ups asking whether Marx’s campaign had.

On Monday, the Chamber announced that Ed Sealover, a former politics reporter who covered business and now works for the Chamber, would moderate the forum.

For his part, Clark said that removing a journalist moderator from an event, either at the request of a political candidate or in order to entice a political candidate to appear, is “unfortunate,” but the event is the Chamber’s to run as they see fit.

“Colorado has a decades-long tradition of meaningful political forums and debates where candidates face questions from moderators who are not of their choosing,” he told this newsletter. “It’s up to news outlets and civic organizations to determine whether they will stand up for that small piece of our democratic process. Voters are best served when they hear political candidates answer direct questions posed by journalists who are not hand selected or approved by those politicians.”

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

Coach Prime irks the media again with press restrictions

There’s a story in The Arabian Nights in which a wealthy man plays a trick on a blind beggar who he invites to partake in a feast — but it’s imaginary. Fake plates, fake wine, you get the idea.

Last week, the Denver Post reported that University of Colorado football coach Deion Sanders appeared to play a little Barmecide with members of the press.

Columnist Troy Renck wrote that Coach Prime “invited reporters to an open practice Tuesday that was closed to reporting.”

New statewide prison newspaper in Colorado is the ‘only one in the Mountain West’

Two years ago, a prison radio program in Colorado mysteriously shut down.

Rocky Mountain PBS reported on the closure and how its newspaper counterpart, the Inside Report, also shuttered. Both were run by the Department of Corrections and the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative.

“Neither party has explained why the contract was not renewed,” Kyle Cooke of RMPBS reported in 2024.

Those living in the prisons were still writing. And this week, RMPBS has a story about a new statewide prison newspaper that has emerged called Messenger Quarterly. The first issue came out in May.

This time, the effort is led by Mercury Mountain Media, the publication arm of Unbound Authors. The Colorado nonprofit runs writing workshops inside correctional facilities.

“Anyone incarcerated in one of Colorado’s 21 prisons can submit a piece of writing for publication — news reports, personal essays or creative pieces,” reporters Carly Rose and Chelsea Casabona wrote. “Out of 22 active prison newspapers in the U.S., Messenger Quarterly is the only one in the Mountain West, according to the Prison Journalism Project’s 2024 directory.”

Here are some more nuggets from their in-depth story:

JoyBelle Phelan, who co-founded and runs Unbound Authors, started Mercury Mountain Media to bring a newspaper program back to Colorado’s prisons. She wrote for the previous newspaper when she herself was incarcerated.
“The inaugural issue, which included 36 contributors, focused on closing the chapter of The Inside Report and looked ahead to the new publication’s possibilities.”
“The CDOC reviews a final draft of each issue and can omit stories deemed unsafe for publication. This includes stories that deal with active lawsuits, that might have a negative impact on victims or that pose a security risk, like promoting an escape plan or otherwise jeopardizing staff safety.”
“Phelan said that the team strives for ‘solutions-based journalism,’ meaning stories that report on challenges should also include potential solutions.”
“The teams rely on technology — tablets, apps and Zoom calls — to make the magic happen. CDOC issues each incarcerated person a tablet, which connects them to educational and writing applications, among other things like games and phone calls.”
“Phelan said the organization doesn’t use the term ‘editor’ to describe the development team because they don’t make changes — they ask questions, make suggestions and leave it up to the author to decide whether they want to work on the piece further. At least three different people on the development team will review each story.”
“Fremont Correctional Facility served as the previous headquarters for The Inside Report, so it has an established culture of support for a newspaper program, Phelan said.”
“Right now, the incarcerated people working on the publication are not paid. For three years, Unbound Authors operated inside Colorado facilities as a volunteer program. This fiscal year, the nonprofit is in the final stages of executing a $25,000 annual contract with the CDOC. The contract supports Unbound Authors’ writing labs, educational courses and the quarterly publication.”

Read the whole story and watch videos about it from inside the correctional facility here.

More Colorado media odds & ends

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🙏 Inside the News in Colorado, the newsletter you’re currently reading, made No. 2 in the Top 50 Newsletters for “news” last week from Sponsor Scout. Check out why it ranked so high here — and thanks for your readership and support that helped!

🗣 If you’re thinking of going freelance or are already doing so and trying to make it work, SPJ Colorado has an event for you. Join us and veteran Colorado journalist Steve Knopper for “No Newsroom Required: The Ins and Outs of Freelance Journalism,” a conversation “about the ins and outs of freelance journalism and creating a sustainable career outside a traditional newsroom.” The event is Sept. 1 at 7 p.m. at the Denver Press Club.

🏆 The Colorado Broadcasters Association has announced its 2026 Colorado Broadcasters Hall of Fame Class, which honors “the extraordinary individuals whose talent, leadership, and dedication have left an enduring mark on broadcasting in Colorado.” They are: Alan Berg, Peter Boyles, Bob Gourley, Stu Haskell, Steve Kelly, Bob Martin, Reynelda Muse, Roger Ogden, and Ron Zappolo.

✂️ Last week’s newsletter reported how layoffs by the national E.W. Scripps Co. were impacting local TV news stations in Colorado. The Gazette in Colorado Springs followed up with a report by Alex Edwards that 15 people caught the ax at KKTV and KOAA.

📺 “A St. Louis public television station has lost access to more than 50 terabytes of its own archive after the cloud vendor holding the files apparently went out of business,” Alex Cooke wrote for Fstoppers. “The material spans about 70 years of programming, and it is now sitting inside a Denver data center that so far has refused to hand it back.”

📡 Ryan Wilson of KFFR/KWTR, also known as Fraser Valley Community Media, is “stepping down as executive director to focus on engineering and operations and to expand the station’s technical capabilities,” Nick Walther reported for Sky-Hi News. “The station is seeking a new executive director with grant-writing, fundraising and leadership skills.”

🤡 🍑 Colorado Springs culinary journalist Matthew Schniper went on a rant in his Side Dish newsletter against AI slop — and the people consuming it. One recent list of “under the radar” local restaurants that he suspects was created by artificial intelligence named a joint that has been closed since 2023. “Seriously, fuck off with this non-edited, non-fact-checked AI slop you clown asses,” he wrote.

🆕 Peter Choi has joined Denver7 as a multimedia journalist.

👀 “Rather than relying primarily on subscriptions or philanthropy, we’re building a sustainable business model through local and national advertising, branded storytelling, sponsored journalism series, and strategic partnerships that align with our mission while preserving editorial independence,” says Laurie Sigillito of the Western Slope-based Local NEWS Network.

❌ Last week’s newsletter misspelled the name of an Aurora Sentinel reporter. It’s McKenna Harford

🏆 Anchor Jaclyn Allen of Denver7 will receive the 2026 Media Professional of the Year Award from the Public Relations Society of America’s Colorado chapter “recognizing her nearly two decades of impactful journalism” where “as a weekend evening anchor and consumer investigative reporter, Jaclyn’s reporting on consumer protection, accountability and public safety has helped drive real-world change for Coloradans,” the organization said.

🆕 Reporter Pierce Sullivan has joined the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent. “A Massachusetts native, Sullivan graduated from Colorado College with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a minor in journalism before spending a year teaching physics at Suffield Academy in Connecticut,” the paper reported. Sullivan said physics and journalism “may seem to be polar opposites, but they both all boil down to figuring out why things happen. I am constantly curious about what is going on around me, and journalism provides a path to turn that curiosity into a career.”

❓ “Should you be able to obtain Flock camera records about your own vehicle in Colorado? A class-action lawsuit in Boulder District Court focuses in part on that question,” Jeff Roberts reported for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

⚖️ Jim Rodenbush, the fired media advisor from Indiana University who refused to censor his students, has re-filed his voluntarily dismissed lawsuit in state court. In it, he claims that since he “relinquished secure employment and relocated” from Colorado State University in Fort Collins for the job, Indiana law states “such independent consideration takes his employment outside the at-will presumption, rendering it terminable only for good cause.”

🏆 KUNC won a National Murrow Award for Overall Excellence in small-market radio, the station reported. “The designation is one of the most prestigious and highly held awards in broadcast and digital journalism.”

Layoffs hit Colorado TV newsrooms (again), Denver7, KOAA, KKTV affected

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:53:21 GMT

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A company that owns several local TV news stations in Colorado is cutting 12% of its workforce as it leans into artificial intelligence and a 24-hour streaming model.

That’s what E.W. Scripps CEO Adam Symson told Wall Street analysts last week, according to the entertainment industry site Deadline.

In Colorado, Scripps owns KOAA, the NBC affiliate in Colorado Springs, which is also known as News5. The company last summer acquired one of its Springs rivals, KKTV, in a station-swap agreement. Scripps also owns Denver7, which goes by the call letters KMGH, along with KKCO and KJCT in Grand Junction.

The parent company “disclosed 268 job cuts earlier this week,” Deadline reported, adding that the CEO said the company eliminated 432 positions and 126 open jobs since the beginning of the year.

Last spring, Scripps swung the ax at local stations around the country. While the cuts chopped into KOAA in the Springs, they missed Denver7 at the time.

This time, the station eliminated a “small number of positions” as it shifts to a hub model for local digital production, said Denver7 Vice President and General Manager Brian Joyce in an email.

“These decisions were not made lightly,” he said. “We are grateful for the contributions of the impacted employees and are committed to supporting them through the transition.” He said the station remains committed to serving its community with the “trusted local journalism our audiences rely on every day, across all platforms.”

The recent Scripps layoffs at local news stations made headlines in Texas and Montana, and cities like Grand Rapids and Tulsa, but have yet to draw any from mainstream outlets in Colorado. Media often report downsizing in local industries when cuts will have an impact on local communities or public services. In Corpus Christi, a married morning-anchor couple lost their jobs.

In Maryland, the Baltimore Banner reported that after recent layoffs there, a Scripps-owned ABC affiliate is ditching live news anchors and reprogramming some of its shows to stream “prerecorded stories in place of live, on-air reporting and live anchors.” The new format, which started Wednesday, “kicked off with a weather segment and was followed by local, prerecorded news stories and national reports from a Scripps team.”

In Colorado Springs, news management is framing the latest visit from Mr. Buzzsaw in a way they say will make the station’s coverage stronger.

Ross White, the vice president and general manager of KOAA and KKTV, confirmed they had eliminated positions, but didn’t say how many when asked.

“These decisions, while difficult, were made thoughtfully and are intended to create a more sustainable operation that can deliver broader local coverage and serve audiences across Southern Colorado for the long term,” he said.

He added that by combining KKTV with KOAA, the duopoly gains what he called “scale and depth” to expand coverage across the market with reporters assigned to more neighborhoods in Southern Colorado and “delivering more of the local news, weather, and sports our viewers rely on to stay informed and connected.”

White said the station is grateful to the talented employees who have contributed meaningfully to KOAA and KKTV and is “committed to supporting them through this transition.”

If you’re wondering how a combined station, but with less staff, can produce more news than before, here’s what the Scripps CEO wrote in a memo:

In markets where we’ve recently established duopolies through station swaps and acquisitions, including Lexington, Colorado Springs and Twin Falls, scale gives us the ability to redeploy resources toward broader local coverage rather than competing for the same finite resources and the same set of stories. In these markets, we are pairing disciplined consolidation and cost actions with a fundamental change in the product: deeper local coverage, a stronger consumer experience and more sustainable operations.

“At a time when many in our industry are responding to economic pressure with cuts alone, our goal is to build a different, more sustainable model for serving audiences,” the CEO said.

I reached out Thursday and today to a news director on the Western Slope about impacts at the stations there but didn’t hear back.

Matt Kroschel, who left KKTV — and the news business altogether — in 2024, posted on social media that a lot of good friends and former colleagues were among those laid off.

“I saw much of this coming, which is why I walked away from the news business a few years ago for something more stable,” he wrote. “Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do now in public relations, but there’s something incredibly special about local news produced by your friends and neighbors. That is disappearing with every corporate restructure and mass layoff.”

The commercial TV news market is contracting across the country. A spate of mergers and acquisitions green-lit by a Trump-friendly FCC already had insiders anxious about a confetti blast of pink slips in newsrooms throughout the industry.

The development has led at least one initiative with Colorado ties, The Local, to seek a novel way to reinvent local TV news in the streaming era.

The bottom line is that the troubling decimation this newsletter has covered in the newspaper industry over the years has now officially come for their local broadcast brethren.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

Community College of Aurora is under fire for thwarting student journalism

Administrators at the Community College of Aurora are drawing national attention for what some see as a crackdown on student journalism.

Student Andy Green told media this week that he is facing disciplinary action after he started a new publication called FoxTalk on the campus that has a fox as a mascot.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a national free speech group known as FIRE, sent a letter last week to the school accusing it of violating the First Amendment rights of students.

Green and FIRE have said the administration sought to block students from conducting interviews and publishing stories until the publication went through a process to become an official student-led organization.

In a statement, a school spokesperson told media that the school supports freedom of speech and expression. “Students do not need the college’s permission to express their views, engage in journalism, or publish independently,” she said.

But the student’s complaints paint a different story, according to the reporting and FIRE.

From reporter McKenna Harford in the Aurora Sentinel:

Green first established FoxTalk as a student-led organization in March, but then received a demand from administration in April to “pause online stories and student outreach” until the operational structure of FoxTalk was formalized, according to emails between Green and school administrators provided to the Sentinel. The CCA school mascot is the fox.
FoxTalk is the first student-led media organization at CCA, to Green’s knowledge.
Administrators also requested FoxTalk send a monthly email “outlining the articles and events you plan to cover,” get waivers for photography and interviews and have all stories get approval from the school’s strategic communications team prior to publication.
Green told the Sentinel he was concerned about the request to stop interviews and publication, which he said “blurs the line between an independent student publication and institutional communications.”
He said he never got clarity on why CCA was concerned about FoxTalk conducting interviews and publishing stories.
“We are a four-month-old student publication and we should not need seven administrators, multiple conduct proceedings and the college president’s office involved just to figure out whether we can publish stories and interview students,” Green said.

A disciplinary process “found Green responsible for violating the student code of conduct and he was issued an institutional warning,” the Sentinel reported. “He appealed and was denied.” He told the paper that several other FoxTalk contributors have also been disciplined.

“CCA’s sweeping censorship of its own students is legally indefensible,” said Dominic Coletti, program officer at FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative, in a statement. “Courts have long recognized the importance of newsgathering to a free press. Government action that so much as chills that newsgathering is constitutionally suspect, let alone a ban like CCA’s.”

The college is reviewing FIRE’s concerns and will respond when the review is complete, the Sentinel reported.

Currently, across the state, Grand Junction High School is in FIRE’s crosshairs after administrators sidelined a media advisor and students there complained about censorship and threats to press freedom.

Watch this space for updates on both sides of the Continental Divide.

Suburban Colorado Axios newsletter reporter bookends CJR story about AI & local news

Axios Local, the skim-friendly and hyper-digestible daily Pez dispenser of local news bullet points in your inbox, has had a presence in Colorado since 2021.

In the ensuing years, the company has expanded to Boulder, the Denver suburbs, and Colorado Springs. (Axios has been looking for a new Springs reporter since its first hire quit in June after about three months.)

This week, Issie Lapowsky published a story in Columbia Journalism Review about how Axios is leaning hard into AI.

A partnership with OpenAI has helped the company grow in Colorado, and the CJR story begins with how AI made the job writing bite-sized news nuggets attractive to veteran long-form 5280 magazine writer Robert Sanchez.

From CJR’s story “Axios Wants to Save Local News with AI”:

Robert Sanchez, a forty-nine-year-old journalist in Colorado, started working in local news before graduating high school—inspired from a young age by Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. At his local weekly paper in Parker, Colorado, he began a type of career that’s rare these days: he covered sports and town hall, then moved to bigger publications. It’s been a gratifying experience. “I love my wife and my kids and journalism,” he told me. And since he and his wife worked on the high school newspaper together, in a way, he owes those first two loves to the third.
But he has also felt the industry sink, dodging layoffs and weathering buyouts. The arrival of AI has brought new worries. Then, early this year, he spotted a promising job listing.
Axios was hiring a writer for two newsletters—one in Sanchez’s own Douglas County, Colorado, and another in neighboring Arapahoe County. The gig was funded by a new partnership between Axios and OpenAI. Under a three-year deal, OpenAI would bankroll the startup of thirteen Axios Local newsletters and give Axios staff free credits to access its enterprise-grade tools, while Axios, in turn, would allow OpenAI to train its models on Axios’s free, published coverage.
Axios viewed the deal as a chance to test whether leaner local newsrooms, armed with all of AI’s efficiencies, could be economically viable, or even a growing business. As Jim VandeHei, the cofounder and CEO of Axios, put it to me: “Could we use AI to basically automate everything you need in a local market other than the journalist and the journalism itself?” Critics saw it as a devil’s bargain, enabling an 852-billion-dollar Silicon Valley giant to choose local journalism’s winners and losers while burnishing its own ailing reputation. To Sanchez, it looked like something else: a life raft in an industry being rapidly pulled under.

This newsletter has reported in the past about how some Colorado newsrooms are using AI, how they are developing policies around the tool, and how AI is making it easy for out-of-state entities to create ostensible news products that look like they might be local. One company even wanted to try “AI-driven personas” on the Western Slope.

In terms of disclosure, the artificial intelligence boom has aided my stock portfolio. I own shares in companies like Microsoft, which invests in OpenAI, and also Nvidia and others in the AI game, so take that for what you will.

At the end of the CJR story, the author returns to Sanchez:

Back in Colorado, Sanchez said he was drawn to the way Axios was thinking about AI. “I want to be one of the people who’s not sitting on my hands like I saw everybody doing when I first started in this business,” he said, recalling the early days of the internet.
Sanchez is now working from home, publishing the Arapahoe County newsletter on Mondays and Wednesdays and the Douglas County newsletter on Tuesdays and Thursdays. All of the local bylines are his. This has been a tremendous task: together, the two regions constitute a geographic area larger than Rhode Island. Competing outlets already have multiple reporters assigned to cities on his beat. “So there are all these built-in challenges,” he said.
But he’s also begun to see how leaning on AI can help meet those challenges. Recently, while researching a story on AI in policing, he used ChatGPT to help draft a document request under Colorado’s Open Records Act and find the right contact for it, and then he ran it through an automated legal filter Axios built to minimize the odds it would be rejected.
Once he got the trove of documents back, he ran it through ChatGPT again to see whether the agency had produced all of the records he asked for. It hadn’t. He had ChatGPT draft another letter saying as much. By the end of the day, he had the three missing files in hand.

Read the whole CJR piece at the link above.

This week’s newsletter is supported in part by the Regional Air Quality Council, the Front Range’s lead air quality planning organization. The RAQC is a great reporting resource for stories about ground-level ozone, the Front Range’s most pressing air quality issue each summer. Visit RAQC.org to learn more and sign up for our newsletter. To learn more about ground-level ozone and the simple steps your audience can take to protect their health and reduce their emissions, visit the RAQC’s SimpleStepsBetterAir.org.

How an FCC rule change could affect Colorado TV news

Last week, the Trump-friendly Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal a national cap on TV ownership.

Caitlyn Kim and Bente Birkeland at Colorado Public Radio reported how the rule could impact Colorado.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet told CPR that he believed the FCC’s move was “blatantly political.”

“Lifting the 39 percent cap will drive further consolidation of the broadcast news market and deprive local communities of outlets that focus on the issues important to them,” he said in a statement. “FCC Chairman Brendan Carr must not be allowed to ignore clear rules that Congress set in statute in favor of an ad hoc review process that opens the door to industry capture and undue political influence.”

Carr has said he believes the rule change would update outdated broadcast ownership laws and, somehow, help local news.

Outgoing Democratic Congresswoman Diana DeGette said she was disturbed that Carr is going around Congress with such changes.

Getting rid of the cap, she said, “would be a death sentence for independent local news in Colorado. It allows out-of-state monopolies to buy up our stations, slash journalism jobs, and replace Colorado stories with nationalized propaganda.”

Earlier this year, the FCC waived the cap to allow Nexstar, which owns Denver’s FOX31, to take over Tegna, which owns 9NEWS. An antitrust lawsuit backed in part by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is likely the state’s next governor, has effectively put the deal on pause as it goes through the courts.

“Many experts expect 9News would be merged into Fox31, resulting in layoffs, including in the newsroom,” CPR reported.

Here’s more:

Josh Shepperd, as social professor of media studies, at the University of Colorado, thinks the cap is currently too big and said increasing it or getting rid of it will not help local newsrooms.
“If that happens, we’re looking at corporate capture in smaller markets where there is only one voice,” he explained. He noted that corporations are focused on profits and sometimes the most profitable thing is beaming in a canned national broadcast.
“It actually is — ironically — a lowering of viewpoint diversity and who will be producing stories and who will have access to produce stories for local audiences,” he said.

Read the full story at the link above.

More Colorado media odds & ends

🎒 Are you a journalism student and want to attend the Colorado Press Association convention mentioned in that ad above? The Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, of which I’m a board member, is sponsoring full-conference passes to five interested students. (Students will also get a year membership to SPJ.) Send 100 words about why this would be meaningful to you in an email to Doug Bell at dgoal@aol.com to apply. (If you’re a journalism professor in Colorado, please pass this opportunity along to your students. We’ll let them know by Aug. 20.)

💰 Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, has announced a new grant opportunity for local Colorado newsrooms. “The 2026 Closing Colorado Coverage Gaps Grant provides flexible support to newsrooms serving Colorado’s BIPOC, linguistically diverse, and rural communities,” the organization states. “These grants provide general operating support to newsrooms with strong, existing relationships in these communities, helping them build on those relationships with their audiences and strengthen their editorial coverage of issues vital to the communities they serve.”

👀 “A Denver District Court judge has given Secretary of State Jena Griswold until Thursday to comply with an open records request, or she could be held in contempt,” Shaun Boyd of CBS Colorado reported earlier this week. “Former Secretary of State’s Office employees tell CBS Colorado there are documents, but they say Griswold refused to take custody of them because they’re highly critical of her and she didn’t want the information subject to open records requests.”

🆕 “Rocky Mountain Student Media Corporation has selected Hans Copeland as its next president and chief executive officer,” Claire VanDeventer reported. “Copeland sat down with the Collegian to discuss his background in journalism, his previous experience with RMSMC and his vision for the organization as it enters the new academic year.”

⛰ Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times reported that the National Trust for Local News is “buying newspapers again,” at least in Georgia. The organization’s new CEO told him the trust is stabilized but a work in progress. “The Colorado-based trust raised more than $30 million since its founding,” he wrote. “Major donors included Fidelity’s charitable arm, George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society and the Knight Foundation.” The Trust’s press in Colorado “is close to breaking even and added 20 publications last year,” he added. “Wiley said it could potentially support the regional news industry with more than just print, sharing local coverage with those newspapers, for instance.”

📧 Last week’s newsletter examined five new niche publications in Colorado. Here’s another, Capitol Commons, by Paula Noonan, which comes out regularly. She calls it “the one stop for all things Colorado politics.”

💨 Justin Adams, who spent eight years at CBS Colorado, is leaving the station. “I’m grateful for the opportunities to anchor, report in news and sports, and tell stories in my hometown,” he said on LinkedIn. “I always wanted to represent the Montbello community the right way every time I was on air.”

🤞 Colorado pet journalist Jen Reeder has five stories as finalists in the annual competition put on by the Cat Writers' Association.

⚖️ Patrick Egan, the 41-year-old taxi driver and Marine who is accused of trying to strangle Ja’Ronn Alex, a young nonwhite TV reporter in Grand Junction, while allegedly shouting about “Trump’s America,” was back in court in recent weeks where “it was announced that Egan’s current lawyer will be leaving the case,” KKTV reported. The court “also discussed looking into whether Egan’s case would be tried by a District Attorney outside of Mesa County.”

🆕 Mackenzie Stafford has joined 9NEWS in Denver as a reporter. She previously worked as the lead reporter at KRDO in Colorado Springs.

⚖️ A Republican county commissioner in Montrose is raising money along with his wife to try and sue Denver news anchor Kyle Clark of 9NEWS for what Clark calls a social media post about the Western Slope public official “creating an image of Phil Weiser with horns.”

⚙️ KVNF community radio in Paonia is seeking a digital and community engagement coordinator and will pay up to $23 per hour.

Five new Colorado niche publications have launched as newsletters, sites, and a podcast

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:33:38 GMT

For years, this newsletter has chronicled the rise of new-media phenomena in Colorado like the ‘one-person local newsroom’ and citizen journalism initiatives.

Such operations have come and gone and exist or have existed in places like Boulder and Greeley, Estes Park, and the Yampa Valley, and in social media feeds.

In recent months, a flurry of them have launched in Colorado with their operators covering topics from antisemitism and transportation to development and a city council.

Most of them are produced by people with backgrounds in journalism, but not all. Together, they represent a growing trend of entrepreneurial niche journalism in hopes for sustainability through direct reader and listener support.

Interestingly, two of them transparently state the way they are using artificial intelligence in their work. Below, after a message from a sponsor, let’s get to know these five new operations in no particular order…

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

‘The Blanket’ by Mike Lasusa

Journalist, editor, and content strategist Mike Lasusa spent several years as a reporter for the respected legal website Law360.

He also served as the deputy director of content at InSight Crime where he oversaw award-winning coverage of organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Now based in Lakewood, just outside of Denver, Lasusa has been publishing news each week for his digital site The Blanket.

He describes the publication as an “independent media outlet that delivers trustworthy, actionable reporting on Colorado’s biggest challenges with a focus on seeking solutions and holding decision-makers accountable.”

The Blanket has about 50 subscribers on Substack and close to 1,000 followers across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

“The harsh reality is that it’s hard to make an independent media company sustainable, so I’m open to experimenting and trying new things,” Lasusa said in an email. “Building diversified revenue streams is really important for any news operation these, so I’m hopeful I can secure some philanthropic funding in addition to audience support.”

A recent story explained how Colorado has become a key battleground over the role of local authorities amid federal immigration crackdowns. Included in the story is a 45-minute video interview he conducted with CU Boulder immigration and constitutional law professor Deep Gulasekaram.

Another recent story titled “Would raising taxes on high incomes hurt Colorado’s economy?” tackles a potential ballot measure for a graduated income tax. In it, Lasusa pokes holes into analysis by the Common Sense Institute, which he called a business-friendly think tank. No one at the organization would engage when he pressed them on certain aspects of their analysis, he wrote.

“I’ve been a journalist for many years and I’ve covered a lot of reports like this. And I have to say, it raises some pretty big red flags that the Common Sense Institute either can’t or won’t defend the central thesis of this report,” he wrote.

While the Common Sense Institute has been dinged by other Colorado journalists in the past, the reports it churns out often get picked up and retailed uncritically by mainstream news outlets in Colorado — some more than others.

Here’s Lasusa doing a video explainer about his reporting:

Other recent stories include headlines like “How to reform prisons in Colorado,” “Colorado’s new immigration jail,” and “Colorado is upgrading a rarely used statewide gang database.”

So, how does a one-man operation like this work?

“A big part of The Blanket’s reporting involves curating great solutions and accountability journalism being done by other Colorado outlets,” he says on his site. “We also add value by digging into public records and data, and talking to knowledgeable, credible sources who can add context or clarification based on professional expertise and lived experience.”

Financial sustainability is the number one goal for the publication, Laususa said in an email.

As for what he considers success, he said he would measure impact by looking at whether the reporting is reaching the right people with the right information.

“That can look different for different stories but you know you’ve had an impact when people actually do things — a law or policy gets changed, a bad actor gets held accountable, a problem gets fixed,” he said.

The Blanket’s general policy is to “minimize our use of AI as much as possible, and to be transparent when we do use it,” the site states in its About section.

“We may use AI for rote editorial tasks like transcription and copy editing,” it goes on. “We may also use it for technical tasks like writing code or creating graphics, or to improve accessibility by providing narration or translation for articles and videos. We will never use AI as a reporter or fact-checker.”

‘The Boulder Bulldog’ by Evan Rowe

Evan Rowe, an adjunct professor in the journalism department of CU Boulder, launched the Boulder Bulldog as a crusading Substack newsletter in June.

“What it covers is the money machinery behind ‘affordable housing’ in Boulder and Colorado,” Rowe said about his publication. “The tax-credit finance side specifically, which almost nobody local touches because it’s tedious and the documents are ugly.”

In some ways, Rowe resembles a digital-era version of a pamphleteering polemicist from the cobbled-streets of colonial times. But, in Boulder, with “road dieting” and bike lanes.

The Bulldog is the author’s preferred platform for grinding axes about what he believes are “utterly punitive and regressive policies” dressed up as progressive.

“There is possibly no city in America more sure of its own conscience, and few whose arrangements contradict it so completely,” he recently wrote of Boulder.

“Much of what I plan to cover is not unique to Boulder or the state of Colorado, but like a football game or an assignment in a football game,” he wrote in a different post, “you have to play the assignment in front of you, not the assignment in the abstract.”

The newsletter grew out of the 2025 collapse of the venerable Boulder Weekly. Rowe had written an editorial about transportation just before the newspaper melted down amid a staff revolt against its owner — and Rowe had hoped to do more.

“I was mid-investigation on the housing and slumlord material when the paper folded underneath it,” he said this week. “So the Bulldog isn’t a first choice — it’s what was left after the venue disappeared.”

Here’s a sense of his voice from his inaugural June 9 post “Welcome to the Boulder Bulldog”:

I understand local politics is important, but I’m generally a macro analyst — large social machines, human aggregates, geopolitical frameworks, a general view from 10,000 feet. I dislike small groups, cliques, interpersonal bullshit, petty rivalries, and just little bullshit of all stripes. I am mostly trying to figure out if the U.S. is trying to deliberately induce an energy crisis and an engineered global recession in order to slow down the Chinese export economy, not deal with abusive (with seemingly total impunity) petty-ass slumlords and dogcatcher-level politicians with fantasies about reducing automobile dependence while having zero control over meaningful transportation alternatives.
With that said, my intended style — and I may just change it up as I go — is going to be a combination of investigative systematic analysis, mixed in with some old-school Hunter S. Thompson gonzo-style reporting to mix it up. The systematic stuff should serve as the broad explainer — and I’ll go n=1 for impact, effect, and axe-grinding/justice-seeking.

Rowe’s background is in international politics and American history.

Last week, he published an essay called “Long the Wrong Regime” that delves into the history of Boulder development and its potential future. In a July 14 post called “The progressive veneer,” he writes, “Systematic corruption sells in Boulder Colorado the way it never would in Texas. From the unemployment maze to the developer boondoggles, it’s time to start thinking about how the machine works.”

Everything on the site will be free to read, Rowe said. Subscriptions are there for people who want to fund the work, and he said he would be open to sponsorships should they arise. He would be open to partnering with other local media, whether that be sharing documents with interested outlets, handing off things he can’t get to, or helping with records requests.

But he wants the ability to write about the ecosystem itself, including funding structures. “That’s a beat I’m working on, and it stays honest more easily if I’m not formally attached to anyone inside it,” he said.

“I use AI as a research and drafting tool, including compiling public records,” Rowe discloses at the end of one post. “I direct the inquiry, build the argument, and verify sources against primary documents; the analysis and the conclusions are mine. AI assistance does not extend to sourcing decisions or editorial judgment.”

Asked how success would look for a project like this, he said it would be if a few of these arrangements he writes about stop being invisible, and “that somebody who wants to argue about Boulder housing has to argue with a record instead of a press release.”

Beyond that, he said he would want it to actually “cost” somebody something. “Most of what passes for accountability journalism ends at visibility,” he said, “and visibility by itself has a poor track record of changing outcomes.”

Right now, the publication is what Rowe calls the “visible tip of a much larger pile of research that isn’t published yet” in the realm of affordable housing.

Because he’s doing it on his own, he can publish when he wishes and when he has something to show for it. As for how he’ll build an audience, his hope is by filling a gap.

“Nobody in Boulder is covering land ownership, the economics of affordable-housing finance, or rental-code enforcement as power, and if you do work nobody else is doing, the people who care about it find you,” he said. “I also expect a fair amount of this to happen in arguments online rather than in posts.”

‘Thompson’s Colorado’ by Nick Thompson

Nick Thompson, who has a background in TV news, moved to Longmont from Kansas City last year.

The self-described cyclist and transit advocate — he’s known around town as “the bike and bus guy” — launched Thompson’s Colorado on July 11.

His mission for the site, he says, is simple: “Provide clear, accessible reporting that helps people understand their communities, discover new ways to experience Colorado, and stay informed about the decisions shaping the future of the Front Range.”

More than 85,000 people watched an Instagram reel of his recent car-free travel from Longmont to Georgetown for a wedding. He also delved into a local tax-increase proposal for child care in Boulder County, interviewing a city councilman about it. For another post, he previewed an RTD hearing. He recently moderated a community forum at a local college about the Colorado Connector Front Range passenger rail project.

Here’s more from his Thompson’s Colorado site:

I launched Thompson’s Colorado to cover the issues, projects, and decisions shaping Longmont, Boulder County, and Colorado. My reporting focuses on local government, transportation, growth and development, public records, and exploring Colorado without a car.
Since moving to Colorado, I’ve become fascinated by how people move around the Front Range and how local decisions affect everyday life. Whether it’s a proposed airport bus, a city rebate program, a trail project, a transit funding debate, or a public records request, I believe local journalism can help residents better understand what’s happening in their communities.

“I think treating this like my part-time side job going forward is sustainable,” Thompson told me when asked whether this would be a full-time endeavor. “Any more and I can’t sustain it. Any less, it loses publishing frequency and impact.”

He is hoping he’ll be able to draw attention to the issues he’s covering, but acknowledged that converting someone who watches an Instagram reel to someone who checks out his website, let alone becoming a paid subscriber, can be brutal.

“It’s all a little self-taught wildfire right now and I’m not sure what I’m doing to tell you the truth,” he said.

As for potential partnerships with other local media in the area Thompson said he has introduced his project to the Longmont Times-Call newspaper and Inside Longmont magazine.

“We’re in talks about some possible collaborative projects or freelance — but nothing definitive yet,” he said.

As for the future: “I hope to demonstrate how public transit creates equity in our region and helps with growth and sprawl,” he said, “while holding the agencies that are responsible for running it accountable.”

‘The Shomer’ by David Flomberg

The word Shomer is Hebrew for guardian or watchman — “the person posted at the gate whose job is to notice what everyone else has stopped seeing and report back to the rest of us.”

That’s according to David Flomberg, an Aurora-based writer, musician, and activist, who says he didn’t pick the name lightly. Recently, he added, he has “never felt more confident it was the right one.”

Flomberg spent years covering antisemitism at the progressive digital Colorado Times Recorder site, but said he was recently let go after a disagreement with his editor about whether to call the Israel-Gaza war a genocide. (Flomberg doesn’t use the term.)

“I don’t think that’s a small editorial dispute — it’s exactly the dynamic The Shomer exists to push back on: antisemitism only counts as reportable when it’s convenient to whoever’s holding the pen,” Flomberg said.

When he started covering the topic exclusively for the CTR, antisemitism was “still very much the far-right dominating the headlines,” he said. But lately he has seen it in some of the far left.

“Antisemitism became fully en vogue again,” he said. “From day one, even though my personal politics lean well left of center, I vowed I would cover antisemitism wherever it appeared. And since Oct. 7, 2023, the horseshoe theory has been illustrated nowhere better than when it applies to antisemitism.”

So, Flomberg has gone out on his own and launched The Shomer July 28 on the newsletter platform Beehiiv. There, he hopes readers will support his work. Flomberg has a full-time job outside of this work, so he will not have to rely on it entirely to pay the bills.

“For me, success will be seeing antisemitism crawl back under the rocks and into the dark holes in which it belongs and my community feeling safe to wear their Magen Davids and kippahs in public again,” he said. “Safe to send their kids back to school without worrying they’ll be targeted simply for the blood coursing through their veins.”

Readers can expect a recurring “Weekly World Antisemitism Watch” roundup of incidents from Colorado and beyond, “sourced from mainstream outlets and verified against police/official statements, not just aggregated outrage,” he said. (The first one came out Monday.)

Along the way, he wants to provide historical context about antisemitism because he feels a lack of context has enabled too many to embrace “exceedingly binary perspectives that have become egregious at this point.”

Beyond that, he added, “the beat is the beat: campuses, local government, business, media, JCCs, synagogues, wherever it shows up, without checking party registration first.”

‘Longmont City Council Recap’ by volunteers

A small group of Longmont residents are volunteering their time to create a podcast in hopes to offer a neutral news source for the Longmont community.

That’s according to Kaylie Stenhouse, who said the project began when her partner attended a Longmont City Council meeting and told her a dramatic retelling of the events that unfolded.

Now, anyone can listen to a roughly 30-minute podcast summarizing what happens at meetings.

Here’s its origin story:

It started earlier this year when many residents came forward with concerns about a company the city was contracted with, and Council ultimately changed to another company. I was totally surprised to hear of this aspect of government that I knew very little about, especially since big decisions that would affect me were being made there every meeting. Wanting to get more involved, I tried to recruit my sister, Erin, to come to meetings with me … She totally refused. She said that the meetings were too long and too boring. Instead, she had the brilliant idea to create a recap podcast for all the people like her who don’t want to (or can’t) attend meetings but would like to stay informed.

The siblings started the podcast together, and have since expanded their team.

A friend Ana Sundvall joined as a co-host and built their visual brand. She attends City Council meetings with Stenhouse and runs the project’s social media. Another friend, Brett Brodsky, has started working on outreach and fact checking.

Longmont City Council meetings, held every other week, can be long. More than once this year, the team has seen them go past midnight.

The development is an example of citizen journalism trying to make local civic information more accessible. The dialogue among the team is fun, features music, and sounds like friends having a gabfest. They’re into it and it shows.

Podcast episodes are available within a week of each meeting on all the major podcast players. The team adds show notes with links to each episode. A Substack newsletter also works as a distribution tool. Their Instagram page has 127 followers. The first episode came out in April.

”Although, as a team, we have professional backgrounds in education, podcast production, and non-profit work, we are still learning as we go,” Stenhouse said. “We want to allow people to get the information they need about their local government, even if they can't commit to a six-hour meeting on a Tuesday night.”

While the meetings can be dry, the team seeks to highlight some of the more humorous and lighthearted moments in city-level politics.

“We hope to model that you can engage in democracy and local politics without needing it to be perfect,” Stenhouse said. “We can all learn as we go, and it’s better to engage however you can.”

More Colorado media odds & ends

For more information and to register, click the image above

🐱 A school district spokeswoman in Southwest Colorado has an amusing (and probably fairly accurate) slide show presentation that likens reporters to cats. Reporter Jessica Bowman wrote about it for the Durango Herald. "The presentation provides an unusually candid view into how public agency spokespeople approach their role, a role that shapes much of the information the public receives from local governments, public school districts, and state and federal agencies,” she wrote.

💰 LOOKOUT, the LGBTQ+ publication that is expanding into Colorado, just got $350,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, according to LOOKOUT executive director Jake Hylton.

✂️ The E. W. Scripps Company, which owns TV news stations in Colorado, “is readying the issuance of pink slips at several of its local television stations across the country as the broadcaster finalizes some of its transactions and installs new automated systems at a few of its news-producing outlets,” Matthew Keys reported for The Desk. (I hope to localize this national story for Colorado next week.)

👀 “Traditionally at major news operations like the Gazette, the publisher represents the interests of the owner, in this case Anschutz and his family, and runs the business operations — and the top editor stands up for journalism and the public interest.” But not anymore, wrote Jason Salzman for the progressive Colorado Times Recorder. The publisher, Chris Reen, who editors now report to, didn’t engage with Salzman for this piece, though he has in the past.

📰 Writing for the conservative Rocky Mountain Voice digital site, C.J. Garbo opined that Greg Lopez and Taralyn Romero, running for governor as independents, might be the first all-Hispanic gubernatorial ticket. “Yet Colorado’s political press has treated this historical development with striking indifference,” Garbo wrote.

👀 “There’s a lot to cover about Marx’s claims and his history — and not much interest from other Colorado journalists in exploring it in-depth,” 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark wrote on Threads in response to a question from a user who mentioned that ever since Victor Marx won the GOP nomination for governor, Clark “hasn’t clocked out since.”

🏆 The Society of Professional Journalists has named Julia Wildman, a senior at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, “as the recipient of the 2026 Robert D.G. Lewis First Amendment Award,” the SPJ Colorado Pro chapter reported.

🗳 “Colorado’s open meetings law prohibits secret ballots for decision-making,” Jeff Roberts wrote for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. “Some public bodies continue to use them anyway.”

🎥 Earlier this summer, Joe Brown, a professor in Media, Film & Journalism Studies at the University of Denver “co-taught a video storytelling course at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, where he educated incarcerated individuals about production and collaboratively worked on a short documentary about the role of art in incarceration,” Ethan Dvorak wrote for the school.

✝️ “Victor Marx warns that the media is coming for Christians. We’re not.” That was a headline in the Denver Post by Sunday columnist Krista Kafer.

📲 Teens on the Colorado Youth Advisory Council pitched policy ideas to state legislators at the Colorado Capitol last week, “with a large focus on new regulations for social media and artificial intelligence,” Lindsey Toomer reported for Colorado Newsline.

LGBTQ+ outlet LOOKOUT expands to Colorado

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:18:53 GMT

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An Arizona-based digital outlet billed as “the only nonprofit newsroom in the Southwest dedicated to LGBTQ+ communities” is expanding to Colorado.

LOOKOUT began as a monthly protest newsletter by an Arizona reporter frustrated with his newspaper’s coverage of LGBTQ+ issues. But now it’s a four-person news source based in Phoenix that has grown to become a full-time statewide publication.

This Monday, I wrote for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab about LOOKOUT’s expansion into the Southwest — and potentially beyond.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

Last month, LOOKOUT’s founders hosted an invite-only event at a Denver bar for partners, funders, and local publishers. The gathering received support from the Knight Foundation and the digital marketing firm BlueLena.
Danika Worthington attended the party. As the membership manager for the nonprofit statewide Colorado Sun digital outlet, she has had an inside look at the state’s media scene while helping grow a startup through most of its eight years in business.
There is plenty to cover in Colorado’s queer space, both good and bad, she said, but she often feels that queer news is relegated to arts and culture. The Denver journalist, who has donated to LOOKOUT, said she’s excited for an outlet to take a serious approach to hard news in her state.
“I think it might even lead other publications to kind of step up their game,” she said, “or at least to partner with them.”

The founders of the publication were in Colorado looking to get to know those in the Mile High City who care about LGBTQ+ communities and their intersection with local news.

Jake Hylton, LOOKOUT’s executive director, described the reception as profound. “It felt like there was hope around it,” he said over the phone recently. “We walked away with a community.”

The event was the first physical foray into expanding their publication into Colorado after research and listening sessions here and in four other states.

“Colorado is the first step as we regionalize to the rest of the Southwest,” Hylton said about Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada. He added: “There are queer people everywhere, and the type of work we do doesn’t really exist this side of Ohio.”

The idea for LOOKOUT, whose tagline is “Fierce. Independent. Queer.,” began about three and a half years ago.

“There are publications for the Latino community, there are publications for AANHPI communities, there are publications for Black communities,” Hylton said. “But this type of hard-hitting local and hyper-local news never really existed, especially in the form of accountability news.”

Here’s another excerpt from the story:

A grant from the American Journalism Project seeded the publication and the MacArthur Foundation supported its recent feasibility studies. But the founders worry that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from the White House has made it difficult to attract future or sustained funding.
“I do believe this is a pivotal moment, and philanthropy has the ability to step up and support organizations serving communities that are being targeted,” said Jake Hylton, LOOKOUT’s executive director.
The success and ambition of the local news operation is an example of a small, bootstrapped nonprofit newsroom building a community and relying on that community to help fuel its sustainability and reach new places.
“We cannot wait for philanthropy to fund us to do this,” [founding editor Joseph Darius Jaafari] said about the site’s move into Colorado. “We’re going in there bare fucking bones.”

Below are some nuggets from the Nieman Lab story:

“I’ve always been a bit of a rabble-rouser,” said LOOKOUT’s founding editor, Joseph Darius Jaafari, a tattooed 38-year-old Iranian journalist who has written for Rolling Stone, The Marshall Project, and others. “I like to poke, I like to prod, I like to be a bit of a jackass to The Man. That’s kind of, I think, why I went into this career in the first place.”
“Currently based in Phoenix, the newsroom prints a quarterly magazine, produces about three separate newsletters each week to more than 14,000 subscribers, and publishes news, investigations, and accountability journalism on its website each week. The style marries the voice of an alt-weekly — “Join Our Drunken Live Blog of the Republican Governor’s Primary Debate” — with sharp and rigorous reporting.”
Colorado is the first step as they seek to expand throughout the Southwest to include Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada. It’s also part of their own survival strategy as a news organization. Colorado has a robust nonprofit news scene and a strong philanthropic journalism support network. The extent to which a new statewide outlet can break through and compete for funding will be a test for future growth elsewhere.
“Next month, LOOKOUT plans to travel to a pride event in Pueblo, Colorado, a former major steel hub in the West about two hours south of Denver. Some who have been involved in local media there have complained about feeling neglected by the state’s broader local media support networks. Hylton said LOOKOUT is already in talks with the 5-year-old nonprofit Pueblo Star Journal about potential partnerships.”

Find the whole piece here, and keep an eye on the publication as it starts growing some roots in our state’s media scene.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

Denver Post’s list of 150 ‘most notable’ (and almost notable) Coloradans counts plenty of media stars

As part of the state’s 150th anniversary, the Denver Post has published a list of 150 of the most notable people in Colorado history.

Elsewhere, the paper has called the list a compendium of the state’s most “influential.”

The process took weeks in which Posties, by their own admission, “discussed, disagreed, argued, justified, cajoled, begged and whined (a lot)” when deciding who would make the final cut.

In the end, nearly 10% — 14 out of 150 — had strong ties to the journalism business.

These media luminaries include:

Philip Anschutz: “An entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, he has given more than $100 million to the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He is the founder of AEG and owns sports teams and sports venues.” (Editor’s note: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Post did not mention that he also owns the Colorado Springs Gazette, Colorado Politics, and the Denver Gazette, which erected billboards around the city reading “Better. Balanced. Denver.,” and created digital ads that urged readers to “Leave the Post in the past.”)
Alan Berg: “Member of the ‘shock jock’ revolution that took over broadcast media in the 1980s, the outspoken liberal, a Jew, was murdered by the white supremacist group The Order outside his Denver home in 1984 at age 50.”
Frederick Bonfils and Harry Tammen: “The two purchased a failing newspaper in 1895 and renamed it the Denver Evening Post, predecessor of The Denver Post.”
Helen Bonfils: “Bonfils became president of The Denver Post when her father, founder Frederick G. Bonfils, died. Her legacy includes the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the Bonfils Memorial Theater (now Lowenstein Theater) and the Bonfils Blood Center.”
Stan Brakhage: “Experimental filmmaker whose 300-plus works helped define the ‘language of American avant-garde cinema,’ according to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Taught Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado for more than 20 years.”
William Byers: “Byers founded the Rocky Mountain News, Denver’s first newspaper. He helped create the city’s first Chamber of Commerce and joined John Evans and Henry Brown in starting the Denver Tramway Company.”
Patty Calhoun: “Calhoun co-founded Westword magazine in 1977 (from which she is stepping down as editor this summer), a frequent panelist on ‘Colorado Inside Out,’ and past president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.”
John Malone: “The New York Times described Malone as the ‘most influential’ of those who have transformed the modern media industry. The chairman emeritus of Liberty Media is also the second-largest private landowner in the United States.”
Larry Mizel: “Founded M.D.C. Holdings, parent company of Richmond American Homes. His philanthropy is far-reaching. He founded the Mizel Institute, which includes the Mizel Museum and the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab).” (Editor’s note: He also previously owned the Colorado Statesman newspaper, which has now become Colorado Politics.)
Sue O’Brien: “O’Brien was the editorial page editor at The Denver Post for eight years until her death in 2003. Dean Singleton called her the ‘conscience of Colorado.’ She was a press secretary for Gov. Dick Lamm and ran Gov. Roy Romer’s first campaign for governor.”
Don Seawell: “The former publisher of The Denver Post left his greatest legacy as the visionary behind the Denver Performing Arts Complex.”
Dean Singleton: “Denver Post readers can thank Dean Singleton for The Post existing today. The founder of Media News Group is credited with winning the newspaper war with The Rocky Mountain News and securing The Post’s future.”
Hunter S. Thompson: “The creator of Gonzo journalism, where the journalist becomes central to the story, spent decades living in Woody Creek. He wrote ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’”
Dalton Trumbo: “This once cub reporter for The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction published his first book, ‘Eclipse,’ in 1935, which was a thinly veiled critique of his hometown’s socialites. Trumbo was forced to testify before Congress during the Red Scare. He became a fierce defender of the First Amendment.”

Find the whole list here, and a list of those who almost made it here.

The catalogue of also-rans includes Richard Ballantine, owner of the Durango Herald, Charlie Ergen who founded DISH Network, the radio commentator Ross Ford, newspaper owner Horace Greeley, cable news pioneer Glenn Jones, author Jon Krakauer, sports radio personality Dave Logan, cable and telecommunications giant Bob Magness, and former Denver Post editor Greg Moore.

For what it’s worth, Blinky the Clown almost made the list, as did another character — quoting directly from the Post: “Alfred Packer (cannibal).”

More Colorado media odds & ends

For more details about the conference and to register, click the image above

📂 A reader told me they keep a separate email folder to archive this newsletter so they can go back and read older editions and search them. No need! Every edition of “Inside the News in Colorado” is archived here online.

👀 “A St. Louis PBS station says its 70-year archive of programming is stuck in a Denver data center after a cloud storage company cut off the TV station’s access to the 50 terabytes of data this spring,” Shelly Bradbury reported for the Denver Post. “Nine PBS filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Denver District Court seeking the safe return of the data, which the station’s attorneys believe is being stored within Iron Mountain Data Centers DEN-1, a data center at 4300 Brighton Road in north Denver.”

🗞 Niki Turner, editor and publisher of the Rio Blanco Herald Times in northwest Colorado, is turning over the editorial reins to Caitlin Walker.

📺 Readers have asked me about this disclosure at the bottom of some E.W. Scripps-owned Denver7 online stories: “This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.” (This newsletter reported last summer how KOAA NEWS5 in the Springs, also owned by Scripps, was using the same disclosure language and also detailed the process for how it works.)

🖨 “We are keenly aware of the woeful quality of the printed newspaper we have produced in recent weeks,” wrote Grand Junction Daily Sentinel publisher Jay Seaton to readers this week. He listed the problems and called it “unacceptable,” adding that his team is “marshaling all the resources available to us to get it fixed.” The news came with a “stinging irony,” he said, because he recently bought the Delta and Montrose newspapers “in part to get control of the printing press so that we could enhance the quality of the product. I am wiping that egg off my face as I type this. But we will get it fixed.” The development underscores some of the unique problems in the print newspaper industry.

🆕 The Denver Press Club is considering this new mission statement: “The Denver Press Club — the oldest press club in the nation — strengthens journalism and the First Amendment by empowering an ethical Fourth Estate and encouraging the free exchange of ideas. We foster open, respectful dialogue on the issues of the day, and nurture the next generation of journalists through scholarships and professional development. Through the stewardship of our historic clubhouse, we serve as a third place for friends of journalism and a home for where conversations begin.”

🍦 Journalist Spencer Soicher lifted some spirits in the 9NEWS newsroom this summer when he bought a Costco soft-serve ice cream maker and hauled it into the office where he set it up at his desk. He filmed the positive reactions from colleagues and posted them on social media. “The boss let us keep it,” he wrote. “For now.”

🚨 Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that gutted the Denver Post and other newsrooms “is poised to hold a major voting stake in reorganized Cumulus Media,” Mike Blinder wrote in Editor & Publisher. “To many broadcasters, that may sound like another post-bankruptcy ownership story. To those of us in the newspaper business, it sounds like an alarm.”

🆕 Josh Pike joined the Gunnison Country Times. He previously reported for the Pagosa Springs Sun. “I’m looking forward to the perspective and energy Josh brings to our coverage of the people and science that shape policy on water, wildlife, forests, public lands and the environment,” said Times editor John Waters. The paper is also seeking a “full-time reporter/digital journalist.” Email the editor at jwaters[at]orourkemediagroup[dot]com.

🎧 I’ve been listening to an excellent podcast about the news business from Scene on Radio. Episode four features Colorado’s Vanessa Otero and examines and critiques the Media Bias Chart from her company Ad Fontes Media.

📡 Former Colorado Public Radio host Vic Vela has started hosting Morning Edition at Aspen Public Radio.

🌭 Axios Colorado Springs is still without a local reporter since Glenn Wallace started it this spring and left shortly after. Axios Denver’s John Frank has been filling in. Now, as he takes time off, Axios Chicago reporter Carrie Shepherd will be writing the daily newsletter. “What does some Chicagoan know about Colorado? I’ll be honest. Not a ton,” she acknowledged in this Friday’s edition. But she said the team in Colorado will make sure she doesn’t sound “completely out of place.”

🆕 Aspen Daily News has a new downtown office — and a new website. This week, the paper told its readers about it, among other things going on at the ADN including a new reporter, Drew Shaw, supported by Report for America.

💨 After nearly four decades in broadcast journalism, Alan Gionet of CBS Colorado is retiring, the station reported. He “was the first television reporter to cover the dispute over the keeping of bodies in a shed in Nederland. Ultimately, the story went worldwide. Later, the community would use that publicity to create Frozen Dead Guy Days.”

💵 A Colorado newspaper publisher used a personal column to gently ask subscribers to pay their past-due bills by saying it’s “time to feed the horses.”

🆕 Sky-Hi News in Grand County has a new full-time editor, Tim Rasmussen. “From taking photos as a small-town photojournalist in Utah to managing an award-winning photography staff at the Denver Post, Rasmussen is an industry veteran whose career spans more than four decades,” Isabel Del Mastro reported for the paper. (Del Mastro is also new and is working remotely before moving to the area Aug. 10. “Current editor Sean McAlindin’s last day will be July 31,” the paper reported.)

✈️ Writing in Columbia Journalism Review, Susie Banikarim gave props to “an impressive and ambitious new documentary about ICE Air, the sprawling aviation network that ICE uses to move thousands of detainees around the country, from investigative journalists Chris Vanderveen and Chris Hansen of 9News/KUSA-TV in Denver.”

Judge tosses Colorado ‘newspaper of record’ suit: 'Didn't want to continue the fight,' publisher says

Corey Hutchins — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:20:35 GMT

Image created with Google Gemini

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💰 Hey there. Before you read on, if you’re a Colorado-based journalist, you could win $15,000 for your journalism if it strengthened Colorado communities — but you have to enter the contest soon. Like, this weekend.

The A-Mark Prize for Responsive Journalism recognizes work that responds to community needs, holds power accountable, explores systemic challenges and provides actionable information.

Colorado-based journalists and news organizations may enter work produced in 2025. A total of $15,000 in prize money will be awarded. Winners will be honored Aug. 29 at the Colorado Press Association’s annual awards celebration.

Entry fee: $25. Extended entry deadline: 11:59 p.m., Monday, July 27. Learn more and enter here.

Now, onto the news…

A longtime newspaper publisher who sued another paper in hopes it would bring clarity to what defines a “newspaper of record” in Colorado has dropped his suit.

In 2024, Bob Sweeney, who publishes the Weekly Register-Call in Gilpin County, sued the nearby Mountain-Ear newspaper.

A newspaper suing another was dramatic.

Sweeney wanted a judge to decide whether the Mountain-Ear must have a U.S. postal permit in Gilpin County in order for the county’s commissioners to bestow the paper a coveted status within the printing industry.

Being the “newspaper of record” in a city or town is an obscure but important aspect of the local print news business.

The designation allows a paper to sell advertising space to a local government so it can publish required legal and public notices like tax delinquencies, foreclosures, and impending legal action. It’s a dedicated revenue stream on which plenty of small newspapers have come to rely.

The Register-Call and its publisher had argued in court that the Mountain-Ear doesn’t have the proper paperwork to deserve such a distinction. Both papers have offices and circulate in Gilpin, a small mountainous county of about 6,000 just east of the Continental Divide that includes Black Hawk and Central City.

But Sweeney had argued that the Mountain-Ear has a main office in Nederland, which is in Boulder County where it also has a postal permit to operate. And while it leased office space in Gilpin and distributed some papers there, Sweeney’s suit argued it did not have a postal permit in that county.

State law doesn’t explicitly say it has to, but Sweeney’s lawyer argued in the lawsuit that a judge could look to the U.S. Postal Service’s Domestic Mail Manual, which states the “publisher of a Periodicals publication must maintain a known office of publication at the location where the original entry for Periodicals mail privileges is authorized.”

Sweeney said his newspaper had a postal permit in Gilpin and therefore the Register-Call should be the only publication the county can call its “newspaper of record.”

The lawsuit was novel, but wound up going nowhere. It was getting too expensive, among other things, Sweeney said over the phone Thursday. So, he dropped it.

Back when he first filed his suit, Sweeney told this newsletter that while the issue was related to his paper and the county where he publishes it, the legal implications could have a broader impact depending on the outcome.

“You’d have chaos — chaos going on — if counties could run legal ads in other counties, and even in cities,” he said at the time. “You have to run the legal notices in the county where they are. That’s the purpose of public notices — to let the local citizens know what’s going on.”

For its part, the Mountain-Ear had argued the judge should dismiss the case for a variety of reasons — including that “there is no actual controversy.” Elsewhere in its response, the paper’s attorney argued that the Register-Call’s lawsuit was an “attempt to manufacture controversy where none exists.”

This week, Sweeney dropped the suit and a judge dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning he can’t bring another lawsuit like it. The judge said each side had to pay its own attorneys’ fees and court costs. “I didn’t want to continue the fight,” Sweeney said in an interview.

The Register-Call publisher said he might pursue the issue through the U.S. Postal system but he’s not sure. He said he doesn’t have animus toward the Mountain-Ear, which he called a good paper with a terrific editor, he only sued it to “clarify the situation.”

Barbara Hardt, editor of the Mountain-Ear, is glad the saga is over.

“After almost a year of waiting for the trial to prove the Mountain-Ear qualifies as a newspaper of record in Gilpin County, we are elated the Weekly Register Call dropped the frivolous suit against our newspaper,” she said. “It’s back to business, as it’s always been, for our publications. We look forward to continuing our role and business relationship with Gilpin County.”

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas. (See how the Colorado Sun recently did so here.)

A history of the venerable alternative weekly Westword and its founder Patty Calhoun

Dawn DiPrince, the president and CEO of History Colorado, recently wrote about a significant piece of Colorado media history: Westword.

DiPrince, who is also the state historic preservation officer, essentially profiled the Denver alt-weeklie’s founder, Patricia Calhoun.

“The first Westword was printed on September 1, 1977, and only a few weeks later, the Rocky Mountain News declared it ‘debatable’ whether the newspaper novices ‘will be publishing a year from now,’” she wrote. “But, in 2026, Westword persists both online and in print form, is locally owned, still has an office in downtown Denver, and can be picked up at about 2,000 physical distribution points across the metro area.”

Here’s an excerpt:

According to Calhoun, the “old silk stocking Post” wasn’t going to report on the entrepreneurial endeavors of this younger generation. “The Post and News wouldn’t write about gay clubs. It was pretty easy to see your market, let’s just say that,” and Calhoun continues, “It was a fun partying town but it was also an underground economy. It was just that the other news wasn’t paying any attention.”
Westword met the moment and economic opportunity by being the newspaper of this new economy, reporting on the cultural and event news and the bar and club scene. They made sport out of reporting on the local media standards. And, they also became the preferred spot for respective advertising of their generation, including commercial advertising, classifieds, and personal ads. As an alt-weekly they weren’t breaking the news, but over the years, Westword honed two of their specialities: “Holy S---t Stories” and “Magnificent Obsessions.”

You should read the entire piece, but here are some nuggets that jumped out at me:

“Calhoun carved a path sometimes by writing the stories that others wouldn't, breaking longstanding unspoken rules around things you shouldn't print. She broke some taboos around reporting scandals involving sex and powerful men and scandals involving fellow journalists.”
“Joe Rogan, famed podcaster, once applied to be the paper’s weed reviewer.”
Donald Seawell sold the Denver Post for $95 million to the Times Mirror in 1990 and “ensured the legacy funding” of the Denver Center for Performing Arts, “the second-largest performing arts center in the nation.”
“Calhoun notes that when she started there were more than 600 reporters across two newspapers in Denver and now there are less than fifty.” (Editor’s note: I believe there are certainly more than 50 reporters in Denver; there might be fewer than 50 left at the Post.)
“While she will still have a byline, Westword will continue without Calhoun at the helm and hopefully continue to defy the disappointing trends of megacorporate media consolidation, fraying protections of a free press, and misinformation.”

Read the whole story at the link above.

Colorado Public Radio gets $1.5 million tax credit from the State of Colorado

Colorado’s outgoing governor, Jared Polis, was not particularly known to champion public funding for local news.

But under his governorship, the state has used public money to support local news outlets and journalists.

In 2021, for instance, for the first time ever, Colorado’s economic development office offered a $100,000 grant opportunity to a local news publisher when it awarded one to the Local News Network on the Western Slope.

Meanwhile, the state’s tourism office operated a program to pay out-of-state travel journalists to write good things about Colorado.

Now, Colorado Public Radio has announced it is benefiting from $1.5 million in tax credits from the State of Colorado to “help it build a new headquarters near downtown Denver.”

“The arts help grow our thriving economy, contributing nearly $20 billion per year and supporting over 120,000 jobs,” Polis said in a statement. “The investments announced today will improve Colorado’s economy, strengthen communities across the state, and create more hubs of art and culture.”

This money also comes from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the same entity that offered $100,000 to the Local News Network.

“We’re honored that the state of Colorado recognizes the role public media plays in strengthening communities,” said CPR President and CEO Stewart Vanderwilt in a statement. “This tax credit is an investment in a place where trusted journalism, music and community will come together under one roof. It will be a creative hub that serves all Coloradans.”

From the story at CPR:

The tax credit comes with no strings attached on the content or creation of the news Colorado Public Radio News disseminates, and CPR News will continue to operate editorially independent of any outside influence, including from the state of Colorado, CPR leadership said.

Personally, I believe that. I won’t take anything CPR reports about government in Colorado with a grain of salt because they’re getting a state tax credit. I trust the professional journalists there and believe that if there ever was any sort of improper pressure, we’d hear about it.

The United States has a long history of using public resources to support journalism.

In Colorado, there is currently a push at the legislature for more robust public support for local news. During the last legislative session, part of the state budget Polis signed contained language stating that it is the legislature’s intent to direct public marketing dollars to local news outlets.

During the pandemic, plenty of local news organizations accepted public support from the federal Paycheck Protection Program.

Lest some think it’s just Democrats happy to dole out public funds for local news, the conservative Douglas County Commission recently spent $25,000 in taxpayer money to support an event by the conservative Rocky Mountain Voice digital media outlet.

Over the past decade or so, some in the journalism community who might have sniffed at the idea of public support for local journalism have changed their minds.

For a podcast version of this newsletter, I sat down with the state’s likely next governor, Democrat Phil Weiser, to talk about how he feels about public policy to support local news. Listen to it here.

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A one-person nonprofit newsletter is holding police accountable in Colorado

Investigative journalist Andrew Fraieli kept hearing that local newsrooms he was pitching stories to about police misconduct couldn’t afford to pay for needed public records requests.

“So I basically said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll do it myself.’”

That’s what he told Westword’s Brendan Joel Kelley this week for a profile about his one-person nonprofit newsletter Blue Surveillance that is holding law enforcement officers accountable across the state.

From the story:

Fraieli’s frustration predates the nonprofit. About four years ago, Fraieli worked on a multi-newsroom investigative project with the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab) examining the state’s new Peace Officer Standards and Training database, known as POST, which launched in January 2022. POST lists officers who’ve been fired, decertified or otherwise disciplined. What it doesn’t do is explain why. …
Fraieli designed and built the website and logo himself — he’s also art director at the Denver Voice — but he didn’t know how to start or run a nonprofit, so he recruited two board members: Linda [Shapley], his former publisher at Colorado Community Media, and Dave Perry, editor of Sentinel Colorado, whose paper has covered Aurora police misconduct for years. A lawyer handled Blue Surveillance’s incorporation for free.
The project now runs entirely on donations and newsletter subscriptions. Fraieli’s reasoning behind forming a nonprofit is blunt: “There’s no money in journalism right now.”
Rather than chasing clicks via social media, Fraieli built his audience by publishing a weekly newsletter and letting his work speak for itself. He says it took around six weeks before anyone subscribed.

Read about his work process and more about this important niche journalism operation at the link above.

“Colorado is putting a paywall in front of transparency,” Fraieli told Westword. “We’re going to keep gathering the records, keep finding the money, and keep holding departments and officers accountable until things start changing.”

With Gazette’s Bzdek retiring, editors will ‘now report directly’ to the publisher

After 10 years at the helm of one of Colorado’s largest news operations, Vince Bzdek is planning to retire.

The former Washington Post news editor who moved back to his college town of Colorado Springs has been overseeing the editorial direction of the Denver and Colorado Springs Gazette and Colorado Politics.

The news brands operate under Clarity Media Group, which is owned by the conservative Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz.

Chris Reen, Clarity’s president and CEO, said Bzdek will become “editor emeritus” effective Dec. 31.

From the Gazette’s Debbie Kelley:

In the past decade at the Gazette, Bzdek has overseen content strategy and news teams through what Clarity’s Reen calls “some of the most significant accomplishments in our company’s recent history.”
Those include launching Colorado Politics in 2017 and elevating it to be the premier political news media brand in the state; developing and debuting The Denver Gazette in 2020, which in six years has become a statewide influence; and forming an investigative team, Colorado Watch, that won the company’s first-ever national Polk Award in 2024 for exposing flaws in Colorado’s family court system.
Bzdek said he’s extremely proud of the hundreds of local and regional awards the publications have won in the past 10 years — more than any other media company in Colorado.
Several stories generated during his tenure also led to legislative changes, including a series on Colorado’s urgent mental health crisis by more than half a dozen reporters.
In the aftermath of those articles, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis formed a new agency, the Behavioral Health Administration, to coordinate and improve care statewide. More than a dozen reform bills have passed in the state legislature.

“Local news, I believe, is democracy’s immune system and the Clarity Media publications over the last few years have become the local T-cells in that system,” Bzdek said in the story.

Also included in the Gazette write-up was a notable development: “Bzdek will continue to write his column and work on special projects for the remainder of this year, Reen said. Editors in Colorado Springs and Denver offices now will report directly to Reen.”

Some media critics and observers, including this newsletter, have raised some legitimate questions over the years about influence from ownership, the business side, and the Anschutz family in coverage.

So, it will be interesting to see to what extent readers might detect any shift after this shakeup at the top.

More Colorado media odds & ends

For more details about the conference and to register, click the above image

🗳 Phil Weiser, Colorado’s Democratic nominee for governor, chose a former journalist as his running mate for lieutenant governor. Lesley Dahlkemper is a Jefferson County commissioner, but before that she worked in communications. Before that, she was a journalist for Colorado Public Radio where she covered education. She told CPR News this week that her background in journalism “laid the foundation” for her work as a public official.

📺 KDEN Denver, also known as Telemundo Colorado, has named Xitlaly Ruiz anchor and multimedia journalist for Noticias Telemundo Colorado.

📡 The takeover of 9NEWS owner Tegna by FOX31 owner Nexstar has found a fan in Sara Almerri, an attorney who published a column about it in Colorado Politics. But meanwhile, “a group of state attorneys general and DirecTV have accused Nexstar Media Group of violating a preliminary injunction that pauses its $6.2 billion merger with Tegna,” media have reported.

📻 Writing in 5280 magazine, Steve Knopper pondered whether Denver’s radio DJs are doomed. “At least three longtime local DJs have lost their jobs this summer, the casualties of media consolidation and the shift to music streaming services, like Spotify,” he wrote. “The Colorado layoffs are a symptom of larger problems that have plagued iHeart, and the radio business in general, for decades.”

🏆 CBS Colorado’s First Alert Chief Meteorologist Dave Aguilera was inducted into the Silver Circle at the Heartland Emmy Awards.

🪦 John Fryar, “the longtime Colorado reporter whose byline chronicled nearly four decades of city halls, county courthouses and the state Capitol, died Sunday morning at Berkley Manor Care Center in Denver following a years-long battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” London Lyle reported for Prairie Mountain Media. “He was 80.”

🏆 Denver7 has been awarded the 2026 Heartland Emmy Award for Overall Excellence, “earning the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) Heartland Chapter’s highest honor for the second consecutive year,” the station reported.

⚙️ Brett Forrest has left KOAA News5 in Colorado Springs to join the Denver Business Journal where he’ll cover economic development. “When I was hired, I was told they’d like me to bring my video expertise to try and beef up their video reporting presence,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “One step at a time, but more on that to come.”

🆕 Denver7 announced that veteran journalist Jordan Chavez will join the station as its new morning anchor. “Chavez will begin his role with Denver7 on Monday, July 27, and viewers will see him on the anchor desk, joining Anusha Roy beginning Monday, Aug. 3,” the station reported. Chavez spent 9 years across the street at 9NEWS.

👍 Multiple media outlets have now picked up the story about a reassigned media advisor at Grand Junction High School and concern from students about censorship. Sharron Sullivan for Colorado Newsline offered a solid account, quoting former students there. The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported that the national free speech group FIRE got involved after reading this newsletter.

🔗 Rocky Mountain Public Media has “agreed to acquire the stations and other broadcast assets owned by Community Radio for Northern Colorado, according to a June 30 asset purchase agreement,” Current reported. “A limited liability corporation operated by RMPM will acquire CRNC’s six full-power FM licenses, including KUNC in Greeley and KJAC in Timnath, which airs The Colorado Sound, a Triple A format. The deal also includes 11 FM translators.”

Free speech group 'concerned' with Colorado high school

Corey Hutchins — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:46:04 GMT

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The national free speech group FIRE said this week it is concerned and disappointed with Grand Junction High School.

As this newsletter reported in June, current and former journalism students there have complained about the school’s sidelining of a media advisor. They said they are worried about censorship and threats to press freedom.

This week, they found an aggressive national ally that has a history of impactful intervention.

On Tuesday, Marie McMullan, the student press attorney for the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, sent a letter to the superintendent of Mesa County Valley School District 51.

Behold the opening salvo from the letter:

FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative is concerned about reports that Grand Junction High School’s former Orange & Black Newspaper adviser Steve Fox was removed because of the paper’s coverage. We are also disappointed that the school failed to respond to our open records request. As you know, Colorado’s New Voices law prohibits public schools from reassigning an adviser for acting to protect student expression, and the Colorado Open Records Act requires that agencies answer requests within three working days. Accordingly, we echo student journalists’ calls to reverse Fox’s reassignment and ask that the school district fulfill our open records request pursuant to Colorado law.

The letter goes on to detail Fox’s meetings with the principal and assistant principal about his reassignment. It alleges the principal mentioned, among other things, “complaints about the publication from a lot of stakeholders.”

In the letter, McMullan said FIRE submitted an open records request to learn more about Fox’s reassignment. “After receiving no response, FIRE sent a follow-up email on June 30,” she wrote. “As of the date of this letter, the school district has not responded to either request.”

Days later, on July 15, the school responded, sending 20 pages of emails between Fox and others, and declining to provide nearly 100 more that it chose to withhold.

McMullan said FIRE is taking the opportunity to learn more about the situation, “especially once the school district responds to our substantive concerns addressed in our letter.”

Elsewhere in FIRE’s letter to the school district, McMullan explained Colorado’s New Voices law.

Passed in 1990 and updated in 2020, she pointed out that the New Voices law “specifically safeguards public school employees facing retaliatory dismissal, suspension, discipline, transfer, and reassignment for protecting the expressive rights of students.”

The school district “must reverse Fox’s reassignment,” FIRE’s letter to the superintendent reads.

For his part, Fox, the former media advisor at Grand Junction High School, told this newsletter that he is “100 percent convinced” his reassignment is retaliation for student content.

He described the Orange & Black as not antagonistic or overly critical of the school, but he said it doesn’t pull punches in its coverage and has at times published stories that the administration likely did not appreciate.

Callie Berkson, a spokesperson for Mesa County Valley School District 51, said in a statement last month that while the school cannot comment on a personnel matter, the district is committed to student voices and student journalism.

“Personnel decisions are not made to limit or censor student expression,” she said. “The Orange & Black has a long and valued history at Grand Junction High School, and we remain committed to ensuring students continue to have opportunities to report, write, and share stories that are important to their school community.”

The district spokesperson didn’t have anything to add this week following FIRE’s intervention.

While news about the situation at Grand Junction High School has reached the attention of a national free speech group, it has not really made the news agenda for local outlets on the Western Slope.

Robust coverage about allegations of government censorship, opaqueness, and potential First Amendment violations can offer clarity — particularly when governments dispute such claims.

Media attention also can bring broader scrutiny to matters of public interest and ensure public institutions and officials whose salaries are supported with tax dollars are acting in the best interest of the public.

Steve Zansberg, a prominent First Amendment attorney who represents the state’s news organizations, said in an email that he is not aware of any tests of Colorado’s New Voices law since lawmakers updated it six years ago.

Asked if he is considering a lawsuit at Grand Junction High, Fox said that he’s currently going through the labor union grievance process, but that a legal option could be on the table.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Explore the latest findings from our 2026 Pulse Poll, which surveyed 2,240 Coloradans, for potential story ideas.

Colorado Dem AG Phil Weiser sues to block a merger between Warner Bros. & Paramount

Colorado’s liberal attorney general, Phil Weiser, who is also the state’s Democratic nominee for governor, is no stranger to intervening in the actions of Big Business.

He has successfully blocked a merger between two Colorado grocery store chains. He has helped temporarily block two local TV giants that own local news stations in Colorado from consolidating.

Now, the former telecommunications attorney has joined a lawsuit to stop an even bigger media acquisition.

This week, he joined a coalition of a dozen other attorneys general in a legal challenge to a $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. by Paramount Skydance Corporation.

The proposed merger would marry two of the country’s five major basic cable companies and two of the Five Families of Hollywood film distributors.

Such a move would “eliminate competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. and inflict substantial harm on movie theaters, basic cable distributors and, ultimately, audiences nationwide,” the AG’s office said in a statement.

“More concentration in motion picture production and in the cable network sectors threatens harm to consumers and to a robust marketplace of ideas,” Weiser said.

Localizing the national impact, the attorney general noted that Colorado is welcoming the Sundance Film Festival to Boulder next year. That major event previously took place in Park City, Utah.

“We are acutely aware that preserving competition in the motion picture industry will help ensure the distribution of a wide variety of the best films to movie theatres,” Weiser said. “And as reflected by our challenge to the Nexstar/Tegna merger, we are also committed to ensuring that cable and satellite platforms can offer consumers the best possible packages of basic service by preserving competition in the basic cable TV environment.”

To hear more about what motivates Weiser to challenge these kinds of deals, and more about how he feels about Colorado’s news and information environment more broadly, listen to an interview he gave with this newsletter during his recent successful primary run for governor.

More Colorado journalists acknowledge whiffing coverage of the U.S. Senate race

This week, multiple Colorado journalists offered mea culpas to varying degrees about how they covered the recent Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

The race that pitted State Sen. Julie Gonzales against incumbent John Hickenlooper was close. Hickenlooper won by roughly 50,000 votes, or 5.62%.

The tight margin left thoughtful, self-reflective journalists discussing how they should have given it more attention and, in some cases, apologizing for not doing so.

“You deserved better,” Denver’s 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark said on air this week. While he had invited both candidates on his show for in-depth interviews, he said he pretty much left it at that.

“Had I realized that this race was so competitive, I would have tried to organize a debate — there was no debate in that race,” he said. “And I would have spent more time covering their policy differences rather than focusing so much on other races.”

So, how did Clark, a sharp journalist who has covered Colorado politics for many years, get it so wrong?

He said he understood there was anti-incumbent anger surging through the electorate this year, but he “expected” Hickenlooper’s decades of experience and his “relative goodwill among Democrats” to give him more of a cushion. He said he underestimated the ability of Gonzales to put together a strong ground game without a sizable war chest.

“I missed on this one,” he said on his nightly newscast. “Badly.”

On social media, Clark also engaged with users.

“Underdog candidates ask for debates in every cycle,” he responded to one. “Then journalists individually determine what we have the time and resources to pull off, usually focusing first on the races expected to be most competitive. That’s where I messed up.”

Last week, Colorado Newsline reporter Chase Woodruff had been the first journalist to publicly admit that he felt he whiffed on his coverage of the race — one he said in which Hickenlooper had sought to successfully deploy an “oxygen-deprivation strategy.”

One data point about that might be revelatory from coverage by Colorado Public Radio.

Ryan Warner, who hosts the statewide Colorado Matters public affairs show, interviewed Gonzales for a broadcast that aired one month before Election Day. His show made a point to note that “while Hickenlooper granted a short interview to CPR News earlier in the primary campaign, his campaign said he was too busy for an extended interview with Warner.”

Like a televised debate with 9NEWS, an in-depth interview with Warner for his show’s large audience is a kind of must-do for candidates willing to make the case for their candidacy to a broad section of the electorate.

Elsewhere on the post-election self-reflection train was longtime Westword editor Patty Calhoun.

She appeared on City Cast Denver this week, where host Bree Davies brought up Woodruff’s thread. Calhoun echoed that while “we in the media” recognized an anti-incumbent wave, they didn’t “recognize it as much.”

Calhoun agreed with Clark that there should have been more debates among Gonzales and Hickenlooper. As for Westword, she said, “We were looking much more metro than statewide and that was where the big difference was, I think.”

The Westword editor acknowledged that there are fewer reporters covering these races than in times past, which leads to being judicious about coverage. She said she doesn’t think Gonzales would have won had there been more coverage, but it might have been closer.

For her part, Davies said City Cast Denver did interview Gonzales, but around the time she first announced her candidacy last year.

“We’ve never been able to get Hickenlooper on the show,” she said.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

🚩 Heads up: a site called The Badger is saying it “publishes hometown newspapers devoted to local communities—reporting on the meetings, decisions, and stories that shape where you live” including Boulder, Denver and the Eastern Plains. And it’s asking readers for money. Published items do not come with bylines, there is no public-facing transparency about who is behind it or how the items are produced. Multiple Boulder journalists have been using the term “AI slop” when discussing it. Items do cite primary sources.

💵 Democratic Gov. Jared Polis and the Colorado Creative Industries division of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade this week announced 12 recipients of a Community Revitalization Tax Credit. One of them is Colorado Public Radio, which got $1.5 million for a “new statewide downtown headquarters, which will provide the public with access to candidate forums, podcast tapings, live interviews and musical performances. Additional features include a cafe, conference rooms, and space available for use by community organizations and nonprofits, expanding access to professional and creative spaces and amplifying voices across Colorado.”

🆕 Chris Ballantine, 40, has been named CEO and publisher of Ballantine Communications, which owns and operates three Southwest Colorado newspapers including the Durango Herald. He “has played a behind-the-scenes role in the company for many years,” the paper reported.

⛰ The Knight Foundation’s Constructing for Community Connection conference in Boulder this week “brought together about 130 people from across the local media landscape — community newspapers, nonprofit news organizations, digital startups, and online news outlets that have stepped in where local newspapers have disappeared,” Mark Segal wrote for Philadelphia Gay News.

✈️ ≠ 🚁Multiple news organizations across the country and the world reported that a “plane” had crashed into a reservoir while battling a wildfire in Colorado. The Associated Press and others reported it was a helicopter.

📰 The Revolutionist, a socialist West Slope newspaper profiled by this newsletter last year, has been out of print since April as it restructures “to democratize the workload and editorial process,” while publishing online, I’m told.

🎙 While the Red County Blue Nation podcast in small Custer County “has only a few dozen active listeners each week, the podcast has managed to become central to local politics,” Wet Mountain Tribune editor Jordan Hedberg wrote this week in a head-shaking story about some local yappers.

📡 KRCC is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, “marking three-quarters of a century as a public radio voice for Southern Colorado.”

🎸 Milwaukee Magazine has published an eight-page feature package by Colorado State University journalism professor Kris Kodrich about his more than half-century of experiencing and covering Summerfest, the world’s largest music festival. Kodrich “continues to head back to his hometown every summer to listen to great music on the shores of Lake Michigan,” he wrote in a recent email.

🇮🇱 Nicole Zedeck, a Colorado journalist, “arrived in Israel to pursue a dream; months later, she was among the first reporters inside Kfar Aza after October 7,” Howard Blas wrote for the Jerusalem Post.

💼 A longtime southern Colorado “digital/web pro” is on the hunt for his next post (full-time or freelance) after winding down a federal communications consulting contract. Jayson Peters, who describes himself as a veteran of newsroom tech, social and production teams and says he grew up on a copy desk, also teaches online media and web design at the college level. He says he is a WordPress CMS specialist with UX design and project management training. “Filling out job applications is nowhere near as exciting as helping to solve your journo-tech problems,” Peters said. Find him online at jaysonpeters.com. (Editor’s note: Jayson didn’t pay me for this, but I’m considering a journo job board in this space if it makes sense in the future.)

👀 As national media descend on Colorado to report on Victor Marx, whose former GOP rivals in the governor’s race called a con man, one of the state’s most prominent journalists said that while he can’t imagine the stories “change votes in Colorado” they “do make it uncomfy for the local media outlets that are ignoring or sanewashing some of Marx’s wilder claims.”

⚙️ The Denver Post is hiring a legislative reporter it will pay $36 per hour and a breaking news reporter it will pay $28.68. Axios Local is looking for part-time reporters in Colorado and will pay $27-$45 per hour.

It was a Colorado photog who snapped that viral image of white nationalists swarming D.C.

Corey Hutchins — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:54:29 GMT

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This week, hundreds of “masked white nationalists” who make up an extremist group called Patriot Front swarmed into Washington, D.C.

Denver-based photojournalist Cheney Orr was in the District shooting for the Reuters news agency. There, he took some of the most remarkable and widely seen photos of the demonstration.

Orr, who is from New York City, has lived in Colorado for about a year. He was in action in D.C. as dozens of men in blue shirts, full white Invisible Man-type face coverings and sunglasses, and wearing tan baseball caps, flooded the metro subway stations and train cars.

One evocative photo that went viral online shows a 33-year-old Black woman on the Fourth of July sitting in a packed commuter car hemmed in by what looks like more than a dozen members of the group.

The photo drew “millions of views” and provoked “widespread commentary,” according to the Washington Post, including metaphorical analysis about our current political moment. “That’s basically like hounds surrounding her,” the photo subject’s brother told the Post upon seeing the image.

After spending time in Arizona, Indiana, and Georgia, Orr hit the road “full-time in the fall of 2023.” He recently accepted a job at the Colorado Sun where he’ll start this week.

As the nonprofit statewide digital newsroom’s full-time photographer, “he’ll be part of our upcoming hub as we plan to expand into the northeast of Colorado,” the outlet recently stated.

“We’re incredibly lucky to have him on our team, and I can't wait for you to see Colorado through his lens,” Sun Editor Dana Coffield wrote in an email to Sun readers.

Orr was not giving interviews this week, but his personal website offers some background about him.

The photographer spent his 20s “primarily as a construction worker and production assistant,” according to his site. “His first long-term photo essay documenting his dad’s journey with early-onset Alzheimer's was published by the New York Times in 2018.”

The response to it opened Orr’s eyes to photography’s “potential to spread awareness and help people feel less alone,” he wrote. It became his “deepest ambition to continue to create photographs that foster connection.”

His work has taken him to Ukraine and elsewhere, and he wrote that he has been “commissioned to document devastating natural disasters, ramifications of mass violence, flash points on the U.S.-Mexico border, civil unrest, political campaigns, and more.”

The Sun introduced Orr to its audience in a recent newsletter. The item noted he comes to the Sun “by way of the highly competitive Report for America program, one of 78 corps members placed out of a pool of 1,600 applicants.”

He starts at the Sun on July 13.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

The Colorado Health Foundation is excited to share the results of the 2026 Pulse Poll on Thursday, July 16 at 10 a.m. MT.

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about last year’s poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

How Colorado newspapers handled publicity of their new billionaire owner

Move over Philip Anschutz, there’s a new billionaire newspaper owner on the scene in Colorado. And he wants you to know it.

Angelu Fu at the respected Florida-based Poynter Institute reports that the face of David Hoffmann and a positive profile about him were all over the newspapers he owns across the country this week.

That included Aspen and Telluride, where his newspapers handled the coverage differently.

From Fu’s story:

As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, readers picking up a copy of their local paper this weekend might expect photos of fireworks or July Fourth celebrations to dominate the front page.
But if their local paper is owned by Lee Enterprises, they will instead likely see a large portrait of the company’s chairman, billionaire David Hoffmann, under the headline “NEW HOPE FOR LOCAL NEWS,” according to a mockup distributed internally earlier this week and viewed by Poynter.
The company — which owns titles like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Buffalo News and the Omaha World-Herald — has asked its newspapers to run a three-story package about Hoffmann on their front pages over the holiday weekend, starting Friday. The stories, written by senior reporter David McCumber, are highly laudatory of Hoffmann, covering his recent decision to invest tens of millions of dollars into Lee, his history of philanthropic giving and his previous business successes. Several people told Poynter that to their knowledge, the package marks the first time Lee has directed its papers to run a certain news story, raising questions about editorial interference.

The Poynter piece goes on to quote emails from some of the editorial members of Lee Enterprises about how they’d like to see the package play out locally throughout their markets.

“I’m certain the story will be appropriate for A1 centerpiece play in either your Weekend or Sunday print editions, depending on your market. And I’d also like to see this story in front of the digital paywall for all audiences — Mr. Hoffmann’s incredibly thoughtful investment and total commitment to our industry is important for everyone to read about, whether they are a subscriber or not,” chief content officer Jason Adrians is quoted as writing to the company’s top editors.

Here in Colorado, the stories appeared online at the websites of the Telluride News and the Aspen Daily News on July 3.

This line in the Hoffmann profile appears in the online story at ADN: “Hoffmann became the chairman of the board of Lee Enterprises, which owns this newspaper and publications in more than 100 other markets.”

But Lee does not actually own the Aspen Daily News.

Because Lee Enterprises runs a companywide content management system, it is not a stretch to wonder if the mothership might have been able to upload the online content to its individual markets with some of them not even realizing it.

The Aspen Daily News didn’t print the stories.

In Telluride, the lead Hoffmann story led the print edition’s business section this week. Editors at both papers didn’t have anything to say publicly about the coverage.

“It is unclear what role Hoffmann had in the development and publishing of the package, though he is quoted extensively throughout the stories,” Fu reported for Poynter. “Lee spokesperson Tracy Rouch declined to comment.”

If the Aspen Daily News had run the stories on its front page, it likely would have been delicious for its daily rival, the Aspen Times.

Four years ago, the Aspen Times had been engulfed in a scandal involving coverage of a Swedish-born Russian billionaire developer and the way the paper’s new wealthy West Virginia-based owners handled it.

Reporter laments a ‘major collective miss by Colorado's political press corps’

A day before Colorado’s June 30 primary election, Colorado Newsline reporter Chase Woodruff was undergoing a bout of self-reflection.

“Something I’ll be watching and thinking about tomorrow: The closer the margin between John Hickenlooper and Julie Gonzales is, the more poorly it will reflect on Colorado media, myself included,” he posted on the Bluesky social media platform.

The fundamentals of this race, he noted, had always heavily favored Hickenlooper, Denver’s former mayor, the state’s former two-term governor, and a sitting U.S. senator.

“Outside of her supporters, none of the professional politics knowers we reporters spend our days talking to have ever given her a chance,” Woodruff said. “How much that should matter is a question worth asking.”

The journalist pointed out that newsrooms face difficult choices about how to allocate scarce resources, especially in a busy campaign season, “and the reality is that news judgment about the likelihood of various outcomes is always going to factor in to those decisions.”

He linked to a portion of a 2011 manifesto by the famous NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen titled “Why Political Coverage is Broken” that examines something Rosen calls the “cult of savviness.” Woodruff applied that frame to how Hickenlooper had campaigned — he skipped debates and largely ignored Gonzales — and how much of the press covered the race.

“Independent press coverage of the race has been almost nonexistent,” Woodruff wrote, adding: “All of this is just to say that the closer the margin is tomorrow, the more apparent it will be that if Colorado political media had taken it seriously at all this year, the dynamics of the race might have been altered. If you're going to be ‘savvy,’ you at least have to be right.”

And so, on Election Night, when the votes came in showing that State Sen. Julie Gonzales had come within six percentage points of beating Hickenlooper, Woodruff went back to his thread.

“At ~6 points, the answer is very, very poorly, I’m afraid,” he lamented. “A major collective miss by Colorado's political press corps, and a real disservice to voters to have aided (whatever any individual or organizational intentions were) Hickenlooper's oxygen-deprivation strategy.”

To hear that from one of the sharpest political reporters covering Democratic politics in Colorado is something.

Woodruff contrasted the attention of the Gonzales-Hickenlooper race to that of the gubernatorial contest between Attorney General Phil Weiser and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. The coverage the gubernatorial race got, he estimated, could have been 10 to 20 times more.

Bennet lost by nearly twice the margin as Gonzales “despite spending 20x what she did,” Woodruff wrote, calling the development “an astounding failure of prioritization and news judgment on all of our parts.”

So, what does he plan to do differently in the future?

“The main takeaway for me going forward is to put even less stock in what established professional politicos have to say about the likelihood of a given electoral outcome,” he told me this week. “At best they know less than they think they do, and at worst they’re interested parties actually trying to gatekeep and shape public opinion in the guise of trying to measure or predict it.”

Why a journalist at a progressive Colorado news site doesn’t pretend he’s ‘neutral’

When Logan Davis, a journalist for the progressive Colorado Times Recorder digital site, attended an Election Night party, some folks there asked if he was working on a story.

“When I told them no, that I was just there as a friend and supporter of the candidate, one or two of them expressed surprise,” he wrote in a reflective column.

“By sharing information about my personal political beliefs with people who know me as a journalist,” he went on, “I did something that many journalists consider taboo.”

Here’s more from his column, headlined “Why I Don’t Hide My Politics as a Journalist”:

For the last century or so, journalists have been encouraged to obscure their own beliefs and conclusions, and have ordained that act of misdirection with glowing encomiums like “objectivity” and “neutrality.” But the origins of the norms sanctified by those names are less noble than most would guess, and their impact has contributed to a record-low 28% trust in news media.
When I became a journalist, I knew I didn’t want to do it that way. I knew I wanted to bring my audience the facts. Practices like “objectivity” and “neutrality,” as they currently exist, present systemic obstacles to that goal.

Like author Lewis Raven Wallace, who wrote the 2019 book “The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity,” Davis writes about the great journalist Ida B. Wells and her non-neutral reporting on lynchings in the 1800s that had measurable impact.

In The Elements of Journalism, a book that is in some ways the urtext for thoughtful journalists, authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write about the “lost” meaning of objectivity. They lament that too many people seem to conflate it with neutrality.

“Being impartial or neutral is not a core principle of journalism,” they write in the third edition’s chapter on opinion journalism and independence. Journalists aren’t robots. They have opinions. And that’s OK. What matters is the method they use in their work along with a fidelity to accuracy and facts, among other things. “News with a point of view cannot be discounted from journalism,” they write, adding, “many have argued that the American alternative press is closer to the historical roots of journalism than large corporate-owned papers that profess that they provide a neutral news account.”

Some journalists who don’t feel comfortable sharing their opinions do so because they worry it can damage their credibility. That’s what some of them told this newsletter two weeks ago about why they weren’t planning to vote in the party primaries.

One of them, however, told me she believed it lent her more credibility if her readers knew she is a Republican who had marched in GOP parades and been somewhat active in the party.

Davis offered a similar take:

Being a lefty has not limited me to covering lefty stories or having an entirely lefty audience. I have won awards for stories in which almost every source was a conservative Christian, and I built trust with those sources the same way I try to build trust with my audience: by showing up honestly. By telling them who I am and finding out if that’s someone they’re willing to open up to, and taking it from there. I never want to trick a source, and I never want to trick a reader.
That same honesty is why, as a publication, the Colorado Times Recorder has more conservative readers than you might guess. Why? Because they assume that almost all news media is coming from the left, and they appreciate that we are being honest about it. Sometimes they even send us nice emails.

Read his whole piece at the link above.

More Colorado media odds & ends

For more details about the conference and to register, click the above image

📊 According to a poll in last week’s newsletter, 66% of respondents said they didn’t like media using the term “upset” in election coverage.

⛰ Jess Awtry, the vice president of digital strategy and communications at Pew Research Center, posted on LinkedIn that she is “back in Colorado to work with newsrooms from around the country as part of a Knight Foundation convening.” The former editor of the Coloradoan in Fort Collins said she was back in town to “channel audience voices into patterns newsrooms can use. Every day, readers tell us what they need through countless words and actions. Actually, scratch that; they aren’t countless. In fact, not counting them is part of the problem. We need to better open our ears and attune our brains through more sophisticated tools, better questions, savvier methods and old-school listening to separate signal from noise. Specific takeaways to follow after this week’s talk.”

🍻 At 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 11, the Denver Press Club “will host a memorial service to celebrate the life of Lynn Bartels.” *(The emailed version of this had the wrong day of the week.)

🆕 John Waters is the new editor of the Gunnison Country Times newspaper. He previously worked at the Crestone Eagle and the Alamosa Courier.

🔮 “Journalists and commentators can have a tendency to write about what we think is happening or what some hope is happening rather than what is actually happening,” 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark told viewers on air this week. He said we saw that in “some media reports suggesting that the Colorado Republican Party is making a turn back toward competitiveness and more centrist candidates.” He went on to show how that is not the case by citing recent election results showing GOP candidate Victor Marx poised to win the governor’s race coupled with the vote total for another MAGA pastor candidate, Scott Bottoms. Clark said suggestions that Colorado Republican voters were turning away from “the hard right” was “never supported by logic or math.” He indicated that while he believes some would like to write a “different story,” they’re just wrong.

🆕 Brian Calvert, the former editor of High Country News, has become editorial director of Civil Eats, “an award-winning news site dedicated to critical thinking about the American food system.”

❌ CORRECTION: A previous version of this newsletter mistakenly reported that Sherrie Peif, who writes for Complete Colorado, lives and votes in Weld County, Colorado. She has moved to Wyoming and votes there.

🤣 “Me and Littwin and Vaughan had a threesome last night,” the late Rocky Mountain News journalist Lynn Bartels once announced to the newsroom. (Mike Littwin has the anecdote in a column about what really happened in that hotel room in the early 2000s with him, her, and Kevin Vaughan. Read it in the Colorado Sun to find out.)

💨 Jenny Brundin is retiring from Colorado Public Radio. Last week was her final week at the station where she spent the past 15 years as an education reporter. “I am off to engage in madcap adventures around the world — not too old for a backpack,” she wrote on social media. “Lots of volunteering! Not enough room on this — I am humbled by all the teachers, parents, and especially students who let me tell their stories.”

👀 Tamar Sternthal, writing in the Jerusalem Post, criticized certain Colorado coverage about Melat Kiros for being “completely silent” about the Democratic Denver-area congressional candidate’s “refusal to label” the deadly 2025 firebombing of demonstrators in Boulder who were rallying for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza “as antisemitic.”

💪 “Call me crazy, but I think news journalists should concern themselves with factually verifiable accounts of the real world, not with unprovable mystical nonsense,” Ari Armstrong opined in the Colorado Times Recorder. “And I mean that term ‘nonsense’ literally, to mean not based on sensory evidence.” (He took issue with a recent CPR News piece.)

💸 The Douglas County Board of Commissioners spent $25,000 of taxpayer money on what Sean Beedle of the progressive Colorado Times Recorder called a “lackluster conspiracy fest” that was hosted by a conservative media outlet.

📡 “Rocky Mountain Public Media has filed with the FCC to acquire Community Radio For Northern Colorado,” Radio Insight reported.

What is an 'upset' in Colorado media election coverage, really?

Corey Hutchins — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:00:46 GMT

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When scanning headlines and news coverage following Tuesday’s primary elections, one word was nearly unavoidable when it came to the race for Colorado governor.

From the New York Times: “Phil Weiser Upsets Michael Bennet in Colorado Democratic Governor Primary.”

From MS NOW: “Phil Weiser defeats Michael Bennet in Colorado primary upset.”

A story in the Huffington Post called the election a “major upset.” For The Hill, based in DC, it was a “stunning upset.” Politico reported Weiser’s win was a “remarkable upset” and a “shocking primary victory.”

Who might not consider the election between our current attorney general and sitting U.S. senator an upset? The majority of voters who cast ballots in it.

As of Thursday, the results on the Secretary of State’s website showed Weiser had beaten Bennet by 13 percentage points — about 114,000 votes.

It wasn’t just national media framing the race as an upset. Plenty of local outlets in Colorado relied on a term whose dictionary definition is “to force out of the usual upright, level, or proper position” or “to defeat unexpectedly.”

So, here’s a question: upset and unexpected for who?

To say that an election was an upset is in some ways a subjective opinion that reporters don’t seem to mind sharing. And what does this kind of coverage framing say to the nearly half a million voters who cast ballots for Weiser in the election? You weren’t supposed to do that — or — we didn’t think you would?

Similar questions nagged at me in the aftermath of Lauren Boebert’s Colorado primary win in 2020. In that race, she had majorly “upset” incumbent Congressman Scott Tipton, according to press coverage. For Colorado Public Radio, it was a “surprise upset.”

But again, surprising to who?

One answer might be the establishment, institutional insiders, professional commentators, Denver-based pundits — people who assume they know and understand “the proper position.”

In the wake of Boebert’s first “upset” election, at least one Colorado newspaper reporter publicly admitted that he had overlooked what was actually happening on the ground in her race. Then it happened again after her second primary when she nearly lost.

“Part of my job is making sure you’re not surprised,” a prominent TV news anchor who covered the race said after the results came in. “And I failed.”

I worry sometimes that “upset” really might be just another way of a journalist saying “what I didn’t expect to happen” without actually saying so since they don’t want to do that.

Some might argue that by “upset” they mean a candidate beat another who had more money and more name identification, was more established, and who early polls indicated was ahead. Fair. And that might have been the case with Bennet, a three-term sitting U.S. senator and former Denver schools superintendent who once ran for president and had never lost a Colorado election, versus Weiser, a two-term attorney general and former law school dean.

At one time, anyway. But that likely doesn’t change overnight.

Dave Weigel, the excellent national political reporter for Semafor, pointed out on social media that being the attorney general was a “great bio to run on” during this election cycle. “You sued Trump a bunch and beat him on X, Y, Z,” Weigel said, “whereas Bennet’s calling card is a child tax credit expansion that Manchin didn’t want to extend.”

Weiser could have been eating into this “upset” for months before an internal poll widely reported in the final week showed him clearly ahead.

A dearth of public polling in elections doesn’t help matters. News organizations just don’t have the money they once did to commission the kinds of independent surveys that can somewhat inform coverage about a race.

But if journalists are covering a race closely enough, talking to enough voters, and reporting it out accurately along the way, then by the end should they still really call it an upset?

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

Check out our recent post “Emerging Messaging Recommendations: Coming Together Across Differences.”

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

Reporting scanner traffic led to major wildfire correction in Grand Junction newspaper

Like many local news outlets, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel has a scanner in its newsroom that squawks out emergency dispatches from law enforcement and first responders throughout the day.

Reporters rely on what they hear to identify potentially newsworthy events. Fires, car crashes, extreme weather, police standoffs, you name it.

Standard practice for the Sentinel, however, is not to report what its reporters hear directly from the scanner without double-checking it or getting official confirmation about it first.

But this week, the paper deviated from that practice, which led to a major correction and a rebuke from the local fire department.

“On Saturday, The Sentinel reported five Grand Junction firefighters had been rescued and airlifted from the Glade Park area but failed to confirm information that came from the radio scanner,” the paper stated in a June 29 correction.

The development offers a reminder about how important the verification process is during breaking news situations. The Sentinel’s editor, Dale Shrull, said he met with the newsroom staff to provide a reminder of how to not let something like it happen again.

Here’s more from the newspaper:

The Grand Junction Fire Department contacted the Sentinel Sunday that information was inaccurate and based on scanner traffic.
GJFD confirmed that it does not have any personnel assigned to the fire in question.
In the news release, GJFD said that more than 180 members of the Grand Junction Fire Department, along with their families across the country, were impacted by the inaccurate reporting.
“The consequences of this inaccurate reporting were immediate and significant. … In response, Grand Junction Fire Department command staff, with assistance from IAFF Local 2808, proactively contacted the families of all on-duty personnel to reassure them that no Grand Junction firefighters had been involved in the incident,” [the] news release said.
The information was corrected Sunday morning on the Sentinel’s digital platforms.

The City of Grand Junction’s fire department posted an item of its own to its webpage on June 28 attempting to clear the air.

“The Grand Junction Fire Department recognizes the important role the media plays in keeping the public informed during emergencies,” it read in part. “Accurate, verified information is essential during rapidly evolving incidents, not only for maintaining public trust but also for preventing unnecessary distress for firefighters, their families, and the communities they serve.”

The Sentinel had some correcting to do about that as well.

“Although the Grand Junction Fire Department said the information was not corrected in Sunday’s print edition of the newspaper, The Daily Sentinel does not distribute a print edition on Sundays,” the newspaper reported.

The Sentinel said it had corrected its e-Edition page to eliminate all incorrect coverage.

“The Daily Sentinel regrets and apologizes to everyone who was impacted by this inaccurate reporting,” it stated.

National group finds evidence of impact by the Colorado Sun

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, a national group based in Philadelphia, is out with a new report that sought to measure the community impact of select local news outlets in a handful of states.

One of the news organizations researcher Danny Hayes studied was the nonprofit Colorado Sun, the statewide digital news site that has grown exponentially since 2018 when its founders defected from the Denver Post in protest of its cost-cutting hedge-fund owner.

Part of the research included surveying Coloradans “to characterize the reach and familiarity” with the Sun, measure how readers view its journalism, and identify its “contributions to the civic life of their communities,” the report states.

The four other outlets Lenfest studied were Mississippi Today, the Nevada Independent, Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia, and Spotlight PA in Pennsylvania.

Here are some of the findings from the report relevant to Colorado, based on a survey of 1,516 people in late October and early November:

24% of survey respondents said they regularly read the Colorado Sun.
When asked how well the Sun addresses the most important issues facing the state, “Notably, the Colorado Sun’s readers gave it even higher ratings than did consumers of other Colorado outlets.”
“Colorado Sun readers pointed to coverage of school budget cuts, water scarcity, and wildfire risk, with one respondent describing how water policy had led her to start ‘taking shorter showers, fixing leaks promptly, and being careful with outdoor watering.’”
“Colorado Sun readers described feeling hopeful and proud after reading stories about cancer research breakthroughs and community wildfire preparedness efforts.”
“A Colorado Sun reader said the outlet's reporting on medical debt had led her to begin advocating for reform.”

Find the full report here.

This week, the Sun announced it had hit its goal of adding 300 new members. “In fact, we blew it away by adding 430 new members,” the outlet stated in an email to supporters about its election coverage.

‘End of an era’? Nationwide iHeartRadio layoffs cut into Colorado.

A spinning blade of budget cuts has carved into the iHeartRadio talent pool in Colorado.

The company “has begun a new round of layoffs affecting dozens of workers in its local radio broadcasting units,” Matthew Keys reported for his broadcast industry site The Desk. The Hollywood Reporter scooped that iHeartMedia “is undergoing staff cuts as the company embarks on the process of restructuring its radio programming.”

Here in Colorado, where iHeartRadio provides the backbone for conservative talk radio, hosts have been getting the ax.

“Among the Colorado radio personalities let go include Bret Saunders of 97.3 KBCO, Denise Plante of 106.7 The Bull, and Ryan Schuiling of Talk 630 KHOW, according to their social media pages,” Alexander Kirk reported for 9NEWS this week.

Gregg “Uncle Nasty” Stone has also said he is out as an afternoon host at Classic Rock 103.5 The Fox KRFX and the morning host at 92.9 The Bear KPAW in Fort Collins, according to RadioInsight, which is tracking iHeartMedia departures.

Here’s an excerpt from a story by Carol McKinley in the Denver Gazette:

Social media was on fire with reaction from Saunders’ followers upon hearing the news of his upcoming departure from the morning airwaves.
“You are quite literally the only radio personality that matters,” wrote one Threads follower.
Others called Saunders’ exit “the end of an era” and another remarked, “This is a kick in the head that none of us needed.” Some wished him well and encouraged him in his next endeavor.
What lies ahead for Saunders is unknown. There’s no word as to how long Saunders will be hosting the KBCO morning show, and none as to who will replace him.

The “bloodletting” comes at a “precarious time for the medium,” Michael Roberts wrote for Westword about the Denver layoffs and terrestrial radio.

The erosion also comes at a time when Colorado is turning a deeper shade of blue politically. In years past, talk radio had serious impact on the state’s public affairs.

“Between Mike Rosen and Pete Boyles there was a time local talk was on par in influence with the Post and the News in their prime,” one longtime conservative personality told me this week. “If syndicated shows take over morning drive time, it really is the end of [an] era.”

High Country News launches ‘Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative’

The venerable Paonia-based magazine that has long focused on public lands and the environment and is dedicated to “uncovering the complexities of the West,” is launching a new initiative.

The move seeks to help boost the careers of emerging journalists.

“We found that an internship was no longer enough to land a first job in journalism,” editor and publisher Greg Hanscom wrote this week. “We shifted to yearlong fellowships, but as local news organizations downsized or ceased publication altogether, we started to wonder if we were preparing these brilliant young people for jobs that no longer existed.”

So the magazine has created the Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative. High Country News will partner with the national Report for America nonprofit and local news organizations across the region.

“It launches this month with two- to three-year positions for journalists in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, thanks to the support of our great collaborators and the HCN supporters who helped us get this thing started,” Hanscom wrote.

In Colorado, journalist Chart Riggall will work for the Ouray County Plaindealer on the Western Slope.

“Before he got into journalism, he led a variety of other lives, including as a government oversight investigator, brewery hand and public-lands worker in southwest Colorado,” the magazine reported.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

Find more details and registration for the annual Colorado Press Association conference by clicking the image above

🤦‍♂️ Patrick Egan, the 41-year-old taxi driver and Marine who is accused of trying to strangle Ja’Ronn Alex, a young TV reporter in Grand Junction, while allegedly shouting about “Trump’s America” in December 2024, is at it again. After causing a mistrial last year because of his behavior in court, he was scheduled for a plea hearing last week. But it did not go as planned. An attorney for Egan “told the court a new evaluation has been scheduled,” Sam Klomhaus reported for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

🆕 The Rocky Mountain Student Media Corporation has selected Hans Copeland, “most recently a National Public Radio staff member in Washington, D.C.,” as its next president and chief executive officer, Colorado State University announced.

💸 Conservative Douglas County continues to remain an interesting place for experimenting with public support for local news outlets. Last year, the county commission briefly considered the idea of paying upwards of $350,000 to a local newspaper publisher to help the county spread “good news.” Now, the county commissioners have decided to help support an event hosted by the conservative Rocky Mountain Voice digital publication.

🇨🇦 Village Media is making a big play to expand from Canada to the United States with its network of digital local news sites. The company made some of its first forays into the States with two sites in Colorado: The Longmont Leader and Broomfield Leader, but did not find success and closed them both down a couple of years ago.

🗳 Attorney General Phil Weiser beat U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in the Democratic primary for governor. With 99% of the votes in on Wednesday, data showed his largest vote margin — about 70% to 30% — coming from La Plata County. That was where Weiser took on La Plata’s “orphan county” status as attorney general, helping satellite subscribers to finally get Colorado public affairs news and sports on their TVs instead of having it beamed in from New Mexico because of what he called an “arcane” FCC rule. Weiser mentioned in a podcast interview with this newsletter that he learned about the issue as he campaigned for AG and followed through when he won. Seems like voters there took notice.

🆕 Jaylen Lee has joined KOAA News5 in Colorado Springs as a multimedia journalist.

🌌 The New Yorker magazine’s profile this month of Linda Goodman, “The star-crossed recluse who brought astrology to the masses,” has a Colorado angle. She died in Colorado Springs and began writing a book in Cripple Creek where she “settled down among old brothels and saloons.”

📱 “Despite early research on school cellphone bans suggesting stricter, bell-to-bell policies can sharply reduce phone use and may bring small gains in attendance and test scores, many of Colorado’s largest districts have taken a softer approach for high school students, allowing phones during passing periods or lunch,” Jenny Brundin reported for CPR News.

Why Colorado journalists are voting in the primaries — or not

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:17:01 GMT

👋 Welcome. I’m glad you’re here for another edition of Inside the News in Colorado. Before you read on, will you do me a favor and take this 30-second readership survey?

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Now, onto the news…

A ballot box in Colorado Springs during a previous election cycle. Photo by the author.

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Nearly a decade ago, Colorado lawmakers passed a law that allows the state’s unaffiliated voters to participate in the Democratic and Republican primaries.

The law comes with a public disclosure requirement that allows anyone to know which primary a voter chose if someone puts in a request for that public record.

At the time, in 2017, I wrote a story for Columbia Journalism Review about how some of the state’s political reporters were thinking about the new law. Would they participate in party primaries knowing that it could become public?

Obviously their votes would not be known, but the record would show if they chose a Democratic or Republican ballot.

Back then, I found about the half-dozen I’d spoken to split.

“On one side were reporters who said journalists don’t automatically give up their right to vote in exchange for the job,” I wrote. “On the other were those concerned that a partisan source could wield their public voting history as a way to try and discredit their work.”

Back then, I spoke to journalists Marianne Goodland, who was then at the Colorado Independent, Kyle Clark of 9NEWS, former Associated Press reporter Kristen Wyatt, then-Boulder Daily Camera editor Matt Sebastian, ex-Colorado Politics reporter Joey Bunch, Derek Kessinger, then of 5280 Sports, and John Tomasic of the now-defunct Colorado Statesman. At the time, most of them were working out of the state Capitol during that election year.

This week, the issue came up again when Clark, who is now likely the state’s most prominent news anchor, told his audience on Monday that he plans to vote in a primary election for the first time in his life.

The reason? “Simply the reality,” he said, that because he lives in a one-party state, our political contests are almost always decided these days in the Democratic primary, not the general election.

“So, that is where I’ll vote this month,” he said. “It’s the same reason I’d encourage unaffiliated voters in a solidly red state to vote in a Republican primary regardless of their own personal politics.”

Colorado’s primary elections are Tuesday, June 30. Ballots have been out in the mail and people have already been voting for weeks.

But what about some of those other than Clark who are covering the elections? As I found in 2017, they’re still in disagreement.

Alayna Alvarez, a reporter for the daily Axios Denver newsletter, says she does not vote in primary elections that she covers closely — with a narrow exception for measures that have a direct impact on her neighborhood and daily life.

The most recent example was a ballot question tied to Mayor Mike Johnston’s bond package that included investments in the Santa Fe Arts District, where she lives.

“I’m registered as unaffiliated because I want to maintain my independence and avoid creating questions about my political affiliations while covering campaigns and government,” she said. “My goal is to report fairly and be judged on my work, not on assumptions about my politics.”

Alvarez does vote in presidential elections. She doesn’t cover those, at least not yet.

“For me, it’s a balance between participating as a citizen and maintaining the credibility that’s important to my role as a journalist,” she told me. “Different reporters make different decisions about this — and I respect their choices — but that’s the approach I’ve settled on.”

Over at the Colorado Sun, Jesse Paul, a politics reporter and editor for the digital statewide nonprofit, is not planning to depart from his past history of not voting in party primaries.

For him, it’s a similar credibility issue.

“I think it may signal bias if I were to choose to vote the Democratic or Republican primary ballot, even though I live in Denver and the Democratic primary ballot this year is definitely full of more contested races,” he said. “I do vote in general elections, but I try to wait until the last moment and I try not to make a decision on a race until I’ve sat down to fill my ballot out. I find that helps me be objective in my coverage.”

Paul added that he believes it is a personal choice.

“I certainly understand why my colleagues choose to cast a ballot in the primaries as unaffiliated voters,” he said. “It’s their right. This is just what I find works best for me.”

Reporting on Colorado politics for Complete Colorado, the news and commentary arm of the libertarian-minded Independence Institute, Sherrie Peif said she will be voting in the primary — but where she lives just over the border in Wyoming. (She recently moved from Weld County and said if she still lived in Colorado she would vote in the primary here.)*

She can’t vote in the Democratic contest because she’s a registered Republican and doesn’t care who knows it.

“I have never not voted in a primary,” she said and recalled debates about whether to do so from her days in the Greeley Tribune newsroom all the way back to college at Metro State in Denver.

Every journalist has an opinion, whether they admit it or realize it or not, she said, but they can still be fair and balanced. “That’s why we have editors and publishers,” she said.

Over the radio waves, Bente Birkeland, an unaffiliated voter who closely covers politics and government for Colorado Public Radio, said while she has never felt comfortable casting a ballot in a primary, she wouldn’t criticize a fellow journalist for doing so.

“I would urge whoever would be looking into it to not rush to judgment,” she said. “Just because a reporter votes in a Democratic primary or a Republican primary — or even a regular citizen — I don’t think it’s accurate to draw a conclusion, a clear line to ‘that’s their party affiliation.’”

For what it’s worth, I’ve personally voted in Democratic and Republican primaries in Colorado. Sometimes I haven’t voted in races I closely covered because it just felt off; other times I might have because I felt like I had a unique perspective about those on a ballot given my access to the candidates and what I knew about them.

When I interviewed Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is running for governor, I asked him how he would feel if he found out I voted in in the Democratic primary after interviewing him as a journalist.

“That’s your right; you have to decide how to handle it,” he said. “I don’t have a view on how journalists should vote or not vote. I know that’s a conversation journalists have.”

Marianne Goodland, who now reports for Colorado Politics and is the longest-serving journalist at the state Capitol, told me this week that her mind had changed since the last time we spoke about the topic in 2017.

Like her broadcast counterpart Clark, she will also be voting in a primary for the first time in two decades because the political reality of Colorado has changed, particularly since 2018. While she’s not crazy about feeling like she might be showing some allegiance to a particular political party by choosing its ballot, she’s ready to do so if she is going to have an impact.

“If I want to have input, the time to vote is now,” she said.

Henry David Thoreau once said, “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

Sounds like some Colorado journalists will be doing that more than others this year.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

Check out our recent post “Emerging Messaging Recommendations: Coming Together Across Differences.”

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

Phil Weiser on public policy and local news

Colorado Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is running for governor, spent about an hour with me for a podcast conversation about public policy and local news.

You should have gotten the special edition of this newsletter in your inbox on Wednesday.

🎧 If you missed it, CLICK HERE to listen to the interview.

In our conversation, we discussed his appetite for more state support for local news in Colorado, why he’s suing to stop a commercial TV merger in Denver, what he did to mitigate Colorado’s “orphan counties,” and more.

We talked about how he would act as governor on some First Amendment and transparency issues when I and others might have disagreed with the way he handled them as attorney general, and what he thinks about taxing Big Tech and AI companies.

“We have two problems right now that I believe are closely related,” he said at one point. “We’re not teaching civics. We’re not developing what you might call information management skills among the population. Young people are growing up without taking civics, without learning how to ask How do I know this is true? And that’s an important skill that we need young people to learn.”

A question he indicated he would like to help answer is: “How do we engage and support media in a way that will be adding to the robust nature of our marketplace of ideas and advancing this other need?”

The campaign for Weiser’s Democratic opponent in the race, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, said he would do an interview multiple times but wasn’t able to make him available over the course of roughly four months.

Lynn Bartels, former Colorado journalist, outrageous ‘gossip hound,’ has died

Last week’s newsletter should have primed readers for the inevitable: former longtime Colorado journalist Lynn Bartels died this week following a bout with brain cancer. She was 69.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued a statement, calling her “an institution in Colorado politics.”

Bartels will be remembered as a “dogged reporter who often scooped her peers, built strong relationships with sources and held people in power from both parties to account with humor,” wrote Denverite’s Kyle Harris. “She knew more about what was going on in Colorado politics than most and earned access to tidbits of gossip that made her political stories come to life.”

A reporter for the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post for nearly a quarter of a century, Bartels later wrote a column for Colorado Politics. This week was not the first time her former journalism colleagues offered tributes about her and her work.

In 2015, she took a buyout at the Post and crossed over into the world of public relations. At the time, I wrote for Columbia Journalism Review that the news had led to congratulations from fellow journalists in Colorado “sadly marching down my Twitter feed like a funeral procession.”

As a spokesperson for former Republican Secretary of State Wayne Williams, Bartels was on the helpful side of the communications personnel spectrum.

Later, Bartels parlayed her journalism career into work for the Colorado County Clerks Association, where she was able to get publicity content about her clients into the news sections of rural papers under her byline. Most recently, she worked for Republican Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer who is running for governor.

The reporter took an everyone’s friend approach to her job, which led to this lede in a 9NEWS story about her passing: “In today’s polarizing political climate, there are few people who are spoken about kindly by everyone regardless of political affiliation.”

Her “idea of a good time was going on a bus tour of rural Colorado with a candidate. And because of that, she knew every county, town and wide spot in the road,” said a source for the Denver Post’s obituary, which was the most comprehensive one I read.

When it came to politicians, said another, “She might grill them on the latest turn of the news wheel, or even openly point out their hypocrisy — citing a month, year and issue when they took the position they were now opposing. But in the very same conversation, she would ask about their kids.”

A headline in Colorado Politics called her “outrageous.”

Some years back, Bartels connected conservative Denver Gazette columnist Jimmy Sengenberger with a Democrat who had information on a left-wing figure he was covering.

“The figure was someone others in the media were largely unwilling to touch,” he wrote in a tribute to Bartels. “This source was wary of speaking out publicly — as Democrats often are about their own these days — yet certain that light had to be shed.”

The Denver Press Club, in a remembrance of this week by Kevin Vaughan, called Bartels a “relationship and community builder,” a teacher, and a “gossip hound.” He recalled she “gave interns — and out-of-town reporters spending time in Denver — a spare room at her home in north Denver.”

Notably, her former Rocky editor John Temple told the Post that while she eventually made her name covering state politics, Bartels didn’t want anything to do with it at first.

“One funny thing, given how much Lynn became part of Colorado political life, was that when we first asked her to go to the Capitol to cover the legislature, she cried,” he said. “She didn’t want to go.”

As for how Coloradans can honor Bartels, Denver Post opinion page editor Megan Schrader wrote that they can do so by “supporting her deepest passions in two ways: by casting a ballot in the June 30 primary and by subscribing to a local news source.”

‘No journalists from White-led news organizations’ present at political event?

Summer Nettles, a Colorado-based independent journalist, activist, and coach, says she noticed something about a recent candidate event she attended.

“There were no journalists from White-led news organizations present,” she wrote in a dispatch from the forum.

“Despite the significance of the conversation, the room was as devoid of journalists from White-led news organizations as sex in comedian Chris Rock’s famous anthem about strip club champagne rooms—none,” she added. “Unfortunately, that absence has become routine. We’ve become so conditioned to segregation in journalism we aren’t even aware that it’s happening.”

Hosted by the Economic Development Association for Black Communities in Denver’s Five Points area, the event featured CU Regent and Congressional District 1 candidate Wanda James and candidate Melat Kiros.

Here’s an excerpt from Nettles’ writeup about it:

Unlike forums assembled by traditionally White-led organizations, I suspected conversations about identity would emerge in ways that rarely happen in mainstream political spaces. There are uniquely internal conversations taking place within both Denver’s Black and Ethiopian communities that often exist outside the narrow gaze of White progressivism and White-led media. One of the enduring powers of whiteness is its ability to define Blackness while simultaneously creating hierarchies within it, often based on proximity to white cultural norms and institutions. It is a reality many communities of color understand all too well.
As a multiracial woman who most closely identifies with her Black family, I found myself reflecting on those dynamics throughout the evening.

Read the entire piece at the link above.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

🆕 LOOKOUT, the Arizona-based publication that calls itself “the only nonprofit newsroom in the Southwest dedicated to LGBTQ+ communities,” plans to expand to Colorado and will be hosting a launch party in the near future. This week, the outlet is meeting with partners and funders in Denver. “This is our first step in a longer series of connecting with stakeholders and the broader community to ensure we’re not parachuting in, but that we can learn how to strengthen local news, bring people together, inform, enrich, and celebrate queer life across the Southwest,” Executive Director Jake Hylton said in an email. Watch this space for more soon.

🏗 Photographer Seth McConnell was on hand for the Denver Business Journal as a crew from Light of the World Signs removed the “Denver Post” sign from its former downtown building’s facade on June 23. The outlet posted a photo gallery. Denver Post photojournalist RJ Sangosti shared photos he took of the removal on Instagram.

💨 CBS Colorado has “bid farewell to Chief Photographer and Editor Kevin Hartfield, who retired after more than 40 years behind the lens,” Christa Swanson reported for the station. “Many at CBS Colorado will remember him most for his steadfast and kind nature, which has been a bedrock of the newsroom.”

✂️ Bret Saunders and other on-air personalities “got a nasty surprise this week when iHeartMedia, owner of KBCO 97.3 FM and hundreds of other U.S. radio stations, informed them they were being laid off as part of nationwide cost-cutting at the corporation,” John Wenzel reported for the Denver Post. “Saunders declined to comment when reached by the Denver Post. KBCO’s website made no mention of the layoffs. (Saunders has long written the Denver Post’s Sunday jazz column.) Denise Plante, another metro area on-air personality for iHeartMedia, and the first woman Inducted into the Colorado Broadcasters Hall of Fame, also said she was laid off from 106.7 FM KWBL, also known as The Bull.” Meanwhile, “after seven and a half years at iHeartRadio in Denver, the longest chapter in my career has come to a close,” wrote Ryan Schuiling on Facebook.

☀️ The Lenfest Institute published a new report titled “The Community Impact of Independent Journalism: New Evidence from Five States.” The nonprofit statewide Colorado Sun digital outlet is one of them.

📲 “New media: Colorado politicians turn to local influencers to reach constituents,” read the headline of a Westword story this week by Hannah Metzger. About 100 “mayors, city council members and other government officials” gathered to hear some influencers speak, “seeking insight on how to better engage with their constituents.”

❌ CORRECTION: *The emailed version of this newsletter mistakenly reported that Sherrie Peif, who writes for Complete Colorado, lives and votes in Weld County. She has moved to Wyoming and is voting there.

📺 Colorado’s MAGA congresswoman, Lauren Boebert, was subbing in this week as a guest host for Matt Gaetz on the right-wing OAN TV channel. Is it a test trial for a potential professional pivot?

✂️ “Today, I learned that my position as Managing Editor of the La Junta Tribune-Democrat and Bent County Democrat has been officially eliminated by CherryRoad Media, bringing to a close a chapter that has defined much of the last 15 years of my life,” Joe Zemba wrote on social media on June 25. “What saddens me most is knowing that this decision removes the last local editorial connection to these newspapers. Community journalism is strongest when it is rooted in the community itself.”

🪧 The progressive Colorado Times Recorder nonprofit digital news site didn’t hear from any betrayed Trump voters after erecting a billboard in Weld County seeking to speak with some. But they did get comments online, which editor Jason Salzman rounded up this week for a post.

👀 Justin Wingerter of BusinessDen has a story about a lawsuit involving the Aspen Daily News that reveals some intimate details about the sale of a stake in the paper, which allowed former owners David Cook and Spencer McKnight to sell ADN to Hoffmann Media in December. A lawyer for them called the suit frivolous, but the story shows how legal action can get potentially uncomfortable private details about businesses, including news organizations, “out there,” even if some of those details might be in dispute.

🦊 The Fox News Channel has “hired investigative journalist Natalie Chuck as a correspondent based in Los Angeles, expanding the network’s reporting team on the West Coast,” Matthew Keys reported for The Desk. “Chuck joins Fox News from E. W. Scripps-owned KMGH (Channel 7, ABC) in Denver, where she served as an investigative reporter covering issues affecting communities across Colorado.”

🗣 Republican Victor Marx, who is running for governor, said that he is going to deny certain media outlets access to his campaign on primary night because of their coverage of him. “For too long, Colorado politics has operated the same way,” he wrote. “Candidates rely on legacy media to tell their story. We don’t.”

🎙 “In an era of far-right extremism, rising antisemitism, political violence and outrage media, the story of Alan Berg’s murder bears many tragically familiar qualities,” wrote Quentin Young, editor of the nonprofit Colorado Newsline.

🎧 INTERVIEW: Phil Weiser, Democrat for Colorado governor, about public policy and local news

Corey Hutchins — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:45:21 GMT

👋 Welcome. I’m Corey Hutchins, a journalist and educator, and this is a special podcast edition of “Inside the News in Colorado,” my weekly inbox newsletter.

Colorado Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser (left), who is running for governor. Photo by Evan Semón Photography)

Happy Wednesday, and thanks for sticking with this special mid-week edition of your typical Friday read. This time, I’ve tried something different.

It’s an hourlong podcast edition of a conversation I had with Colorado’s Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, who is running for governor.

The election is June 30 and ballots are already in the mail.

Across the country, lawmakers are passing and governors are signing a spate of public policy initiatives to support local news. “Tens of millions flow into local news as public policy becomes journalism’s fourth leg,” read a recent headline in Editor & Publisher.

In Colorado, there is currently a coalition-building effort underway for more robust public support for local media. (Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter and which I advise, is supporting that effort; I haven’t been closely involved.)

So, it makes sense that I’d want to talk to someone running for governor about what they might do regarding the local media industry if they win.

In this hour, Weiser and I discussed:

His media diet and how he determines what’s real and true online and what isn’t.
Why he is suing to stop a merger between the owner of FOX31 and 9NEWS in Denver.
His comfort level for more robust state support for local journalism in Colorado.
What he did to mitigate Colorado’s “orphan counties” — places in southwest Colorado where local news came in from New Mexico instead of Colorado on satellite TVs.
How he would act as governor on some First Amendment and transparency issues when I and others might have disagreed with the way he handled them as attorney general.
Why he can’t watch videos about dogs online anymore.
His thoughts on hypothetical legislation that could support local news and taxing Big Tech or AI companies.
His relationship with the press.

Last August, Weiser spoke at the Colorado Press Association’s annual convention where he urged journalists in Colorado to let him know about any incidents involving threats or harassment. (His advice was to consult law enforcement as early as possible if it happens — and to let his office know if local police don’t appear to take it seriously.)

🙏 Thanks to Ground Floor Media for advertising in this podcast. And thanks to Seth Jahraus for producing it, narrating the ads, and composing the music.

What about Weiser’s opponent, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet?

Seems like you’ll have to find that elsewhere.

His campaign canceled multiple times after agreeing to do an interview. They just couldn’t make it happen over the course of about four months.

That’s a shame because Bennet has had a lot to say in the past about his support for local news. His dad ran NPR, his daughter is a journalist, and his brother once oversaw the editorial page pages of the New York Times.

In 2020, Bennet co-sponsored a federal bill in Congress called the “Future of Local News Commission Act” and spoke on Zoom to Colorado publishers and journalists about it. (I moderated the discussion.)

Bennet also got his first job in Colorado working for the investment company of Phil Anschutz, the conservative billionaire who owns Colorado Politics and the Denver and Colorado Springs Gazette, which makes up one of the largest news operations in the state.

I think it would have made for a fascinating, meaningful, and impactful conversation for the “Inside the News in Colorado” audience and beyond, and I’m bummed it didn’t happen.

As for the Republicans running, I’m skeptical of their chances of becoming governor in deep blue Colorado unless something earth-shattering happens between now and November. But we’ll see who wins that primary and whether they might want to talk about public policy for local media down the line.

My personal view on what Weiser said in the interview

I left our conversation encouraged about Weiser’s open mind surrounding some of the issues we talked about.

It’s not often you hear a candidate for governor name-dropping book titles like “The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications” by Paul Starr.

Because he indicated some caution about being first on public policy, I hope the conversation inspired him to keep track of what’s going on across the country on the local news legislation front from organizations like Rebuild Local News, newsletters like Community Newswire, or Inside the News in Colorado. (He said he reads newsletters!)

Weiser certainly sounded more curious about the potential for public policy around local news than our outgoing governor, Jared Polis, has. In one major contrast, he said he is skeptical about getting rid of a state requirement to place public notices in local newspapers. Polis has said if lawmakers put a bill on his desk to scrap them he would sign it.

Weiser’s campaign was also easy to work with to get this interview on the books.

“I am super strong in terms of my openness and interest in being accessible,” the candidate said, adding that he respects the role of the press, as do those who work for him.

I hope he sticks to that if he wins.

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City to strip 'Denver Post' logo from a journalism ghost ship downtown

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:14:31 GMT

On a Sunday in March of 2009, a crane company pulled up to 101 W. Colfax Ave. in downtown Denver. There, a crew worked to remove the large letters reading “Rocky Mountain News” from the building’s facade.

A small crowd gathered as a machine lowered the words in three pieces one by one onto a flatbed truck, and that was that.

The Rocky had closed, leaving the Denver Post with the remaining nameplate on the 11-floor building that the two rival newspapers had shared as part of a joint operating agreement in one of the nation’s last great newspaper wars.

Now, 17 years later, history will repeat itself — this time with the letters of “The Denver Post” coming down.

The undertaking will offer a clear visual of the dismantling of a civic institution at the hands of a hedge fund that has financially controlled the newspaper over the course of several years.

The downtown building with its curvaceous white structure and green glass that resembles a cruise vessel has sported a Denver Post logo in large letters near the roof since 2005. But it has been a journalism ghost ship for nearly a decade and has been flying something of a false flag.

In 2017, shortly before laying off a third of the Denver Post newsroom, the Alden Global Capital cost-cutting hedge fund marched the paper’s remaining journalists out of the downtown Denver building and into a printing plant in a polluted industrial zone in (checks notes) Adams County.

In a sardonic twist, in recent years, city office employees have been roaming the same space where reporters used to make calls to sniff out what those government worker bees were up to.

Last August, media reported that the newspaper’s owner, DP Media Network LLC, had kissed off its city landlord when it simply quit paying the monthly rent of $650,000.

Reporter Brian Maass of CBS Colorado broke the news last year; the Post was able to get a hold of a lawyer working for its parent company to explain why.

“We stopped occupying this space while the building was under private ownership long before the city purchased it,” the attorney said. “So there was never any impression we would be using the space when the city made the decision to purchase the building.”

Unsurprisingly, the city didn’t like feeling stiffed. Its leaders had harsh words for the newspaper’s owner.

“We don’t care how big of a corporation they are,” a city spokesperson told a TV station last fall. “The City and County of Denver will not be bullied.”

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston weighed in with some swagger.

“Denver pays its debts on time and DP Media Network should do the same,” he said last October. “We are working with the tenant to restart payments and intend to recover every penny we are owed.”

The ugly situation — City vs. Newspaper — had put the Denver Post’s journalists in an awkward position. As they were diligently reporting on Denver’s budget problems and how its leaders were having to slash services and lay off workers, they were also having to report that their own company was $2 million behind in back rent to its landlord, the city.

The development underscored the problems that ownership of local newspapers can sometimes cause for the on-the-ground journalists who work there. The excellent people at the Post still produce some of the best journalism in Colorado each year, just not as much as they used to. And they are likely long sick of being compared to what they have lost.

For months, Denver leaders and the newspaper’s owner negotiated the best way to save face in another public drama that brought that backstory into relief.

This week, the two sides announced they’d reached a settlement resolution of $13.5 million that the paper will pay to the city. Did Denver get every penny it was owed?

From reporter Elliot Wenzler of the Post:

That settlement is less than 40% of what the company would have paid the city under its original lease, which was set to end in 2029.
If the company had continued paying that rent through the remainder of the lease, it would have paid the city $34.5 million, including the missed rent since 2025. That count doesn’t include any late fees incurred during the missed rent payments.
But the city says it will still be made whole by the arrangement because of the transfer of control over building parking revenue and existing leases.
Under the agreement, the newspaper’s name will also be removed from the building.
Mayor Mike Johnston called the agreement “a great deal for Denver” in a news release.

This latest move comes amid a recent shakeup.

Last month, newsroom leadership of the Post’s labor union told this newsletter they were “deeply disappointed by the decision of our corporate owners to further shrink our hardworking, award-winning newsroom,” after learning of a round of proposed buyouts — the first in about a decade.

It’s not hard to wonder if another shoe might drop following the newspaper’s owner having to fork out $13.5 million to the city. The newspaper company’s lease will end at the end of this month.

Whether any news photographers will be on hand when the letters start to come down remains to be seen.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

Check out our recent post “Emerging Messaging Recommendations: Coming Together Across Differences.”

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

Colorado cops get into the true-crime podcast game to try and solve a decade-old crime

The latest entity to get into the booming true-crime podcast genre is an unlikely one.

It’s not an independent journalist, a true crime Redditor with a sound studio, or a local newspaper looking to broaden its audience.

The Aurora Police Department has created “The White Whale: The Chelsea Yasser Story” in hopes that it will help solve a decade-old cold case for its homicide unit involving the 2016 killing of a 21-year-old.

The first episode is scheduled to drop on June 29.

While some local media have reported on this development with little skepticism, the Denver Post’s Shelly Bradbury took a more comprehensive look.

“Aurora’s foray into the true-crime genre is an unusual approach for Colorado police departments — while a handful of agencies have produced podcasts, the shows typically include straightforward question-and-answer sessions designed to educate residents on the basics of policing or offer insight into the profession,” she reported.

An ‘influencer’ on Colorado’s campaign trail

A few months ago, this newsletter reported on how some organizations are looking to better understand Colorado’s influencer landscape.

Some influencers have lately been getting involved in Colorado elections — there’s plenty of money there — and this campaign season is no exception.

We have already seen one influencer (based in California no less) giving Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet a boost in his race for governor while trying to get $2,000 from his rival, Attorney General Phil Weiser, for the same attention.

This week, reporter John Frank of Axios Denver had an item headlined “Colorado influencer uses social media to cover elections” in the lead-up to our June 30 primary contest.

“Unlike traditional journalists,” Frank wrote, Haley Metzger “doesn’t present herself as neutral. She openly identifies as a Democrat and frequently shares her own views alongside interviews with candidates.”

The 31-year-old Denver-based influencer, who counts roughly 50,000 followers on Instagram, has a sales job and has volunteered on campaigns.

“She tells us her interviews take inspiration from her younger sister, Hannah Metzger, a journalist at Westword,” Frank reported.

Notably, “she concedes that the videos with politicians don’t draw huge traffic to her account. Her most popular posts involve her talking straight to the camera about politics.”

Media report ex-journalist Lynn Bartels is battling brain cancer

Friends of Lynn Bartels, the former veteran political reporter for the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post, continue to offer remembrances of her as she fights a serious illness.

Her family “has shared she is fighting brain cancer,” reported Denver 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark this week.

Following a tribute to her journalism career last month by Colorado Sun columnist Mario Nicolais, came one this week by Jon Caldara, who leads the libertarian-minded Independence Institute think tank.

From the column:

Bartels reported on me off and on for decades, and she could be rough. It wasn’t personal. It was her job to go after anyone involved in politics. We became friends. How could we not? She never took herself too seriously, always took her reporting seriously, and laughed at my adolescent jokes.

On that last note, the column includes a sex joke about Bartels this newsletter won’t repeat.

Elsewhere in it, though, Caldara wrote about his longtime friendship and professional relationship with the reporter, and also about how the journalistic landscape of Colorado has changed.

“We used to have an army of local political reporters,” he wrote. “The kind who knew where the bodies were buried because they helped dig them up. They had experience, dogged determination, and a professional hatred of getting scooped by the competition.”

He called Bartels their field “general.”

Rural Colorado billboard: ‘Newspaper seeks betrayed Trump voters’

Motorists on a highway in rural Weld County have been passing by a bright yellow billboard with these words on it: “Newspaper seeks betrayed Trump voters.”

The organization behind the advertisement isn’t a newspaper, per se, but rather the nonprofit Colorado Times Recorder, a digital media site that doesn’t disclose its progressive donors.

Founder and editor Jason Salzman spent $1,800 to erect the billboard near the JBS meat processing plant in Greeley in hopes that readers will contact his reporters.

“We’re looking for people to interview to find out: why did they vote for Trump? Why do they feel betrayed by him now?” he said in a video clip posted to Facebook. “We think that there’s lots of people out there who are willing to tell their stories now.”

Some people, Salzman said in a subsequent clip, have told him that his billboard is “pathetic” and a waste of time.

“But we think we have to find people like that and interview them,” he said.

The billboard has been up since the first week in June.

So far, Salzman told me, “zero” people have reached out to the Colorado Times Recorder since it’s been up. He said the campaign will run until the end of the month.

“I’m still hoping that we actually get people to reach out,” he chuckled over the phone. “I still have hope.”

Regardless, if people see it — particularly Trump voters — and believe that more people who voted for Trump are feeling betrayed, for a progressive organization, perhaps that’s enough of a success on its own.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

👀 Last week’s newsletter edition about students warning of threats to press freedom at Grand Junction High School made the top of the Student Press Law Center’s weekly roundup. The national free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, is also monitoring the situation. Watch this space for updates.

📰 In her last week before retirement from the Denver Post, features editor Barbara Ellis offered what she called a “tribute to some journalists who left their marks over my more than 40 years in the profession.” The “names of these journalists may not matter to you,” read the headline. “But their stories might.” She also had this fond memory: “I will never forget one mistake: I got to scream ‘HOLD THE PRESSES’ when I let a Page 1 headline go with the ‘L’ dropped out of the word ‘public.’ In 84-point Helvetica.” Now that would have been a howler for the ages.

💻 Glenn Wallace, who served as the author of the new daily Axios Colorado Springs newsletter for three months before leaving, told me this week that adapting to the workload and writing style — Axios uses a trademarked “Smart Brevity” style — was a factor in his decision to step down. “I loved launching the Springs newsletter, and working with the rest of the Axios CO team,” he said.

🆕 Nicole Vap, a longtime former investigative journalist for 9NEWS who also worked for CBS Colorado, has joined Colorado Public Radio. “Public media feels like the right choice at the right time,” she wrote. “The one thing I never considered in the past year was leaving journalism, even though much has been said and written about how consolidations and mergers have influenced editorial decision-making across the business (some by me).”

🔮 The executive editor of the Colorado Politics and the Colorado Springs and Denver Gazette has predicted that Barbara Kirkmeyer will win the Republican primary for governor. Vince Bzdek said he believed she would “emerge as sort of the level-headed person with the most experience, and when people actually start voting that she’ll kind of win them over,” he said on the Ryan Schuiling Live conservative talk radio program. “But who knows,” he said, calling the race a “campaign like I have never seen.” The Gazette’s editorial page, which is separate from its news section, has endorsed Kirkmeyer.

🐎 Does the Denver Post’s reporter who covers sports betting bet on sports? “Noelle Phillips answers the question she asked everyone she interviewed about Colorado sports gambling,” the paper reported for its series on sports betting in Colorado. (Spoiler: she doesn’t sound like a degenerate.)

😡 9NEWS reporter Marshall Zelinger had a rant about media relations for WestJet for only confirming that an “incident” happened, and a city agency that responded to a plane at DIA with two blown tires for punting to a third party for comment. “No. Full stop,” the journalist said. “I’m going to go direct to the source. Never send me to a third party to try to report something that I need to hear direct from the source.”

⚽️ Telemundo Colorado, also known as KDEN, “debuted a refreshed Noticias Telemundo Colorado studio as the 2026 World Cup got underway,” NCS reported. “The Denver station, part of NBCUniversal Local’s Telemundo Station Group, said the upgraded space includes a new news desk from the Telemundo Scenic Fabrication Shop, new lighting design and two large LED monitor walls.”

📡 Vic Vela, a former Colorado Public Radio host who created the “Back from Broken” podcast about drugs and alcohol recovery — and sued the station in 2024 for discrimination after his firing, which he ultimately settled — is scheduled to take on a new role as the Morning Edition host at Aspen Public Radio next month. “I’ve missed talking to you on the radio and telling creative and engaging stories about Colorado characters,” he said on social media. “I’m super excited and I sure hope you’ll join me live from the Colorado high country.”

🏆 “Buoyed by a half dozen awards for reporter Seth Boster, the Gazette earned top honors this month in Division I of the Society for Features Journalism’s 2026 Excellence-in-Features Contest,” Nathan Vandyne reported for the paper.

🎬 Summit Daily News columnist Tony Jones wrote a piece this week about a recent “Truth be Told” event the paper hosted in Silverthorne. “The approximately hour-long movie is a deep dive into the challenges and considerations that Colorado journalists address everyday as they produce content for their audiences,” he wrote. “At a time when the objectivity of national newscasts and reporting is suspect due to corporate influences, it’s crucial to have news resources that are accountable to the public in the regions they report on.”

Press freedom threatened at Colorado high school newspaper, West Slope students warn

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:42:19 GMT

Current and former students at the school newspaper serving Grand Junction High are concerned about the sidelining of a media advisor and are worried about censorship and threats to press freedom.

About three weeks ago, the Orange & Black Newspaper reported that its advisor, Steve Fox, was “facing reassignment by administration.”

The move, wrote student reporter Mason Strippel, raised questions about “adviser independence, student press freedom, and the balance between administration and student media at Grand Junction High School.”

Here’s more from the May 26 piece in the O&B:

This transition, which moves Fox into an English and yearbook role, is more than a routine staffing decision. It comes after a period where O&B has published content that challenged expectations and addressed issues that were not always comfortable for the school. Fox has been the adviser of the O&B for 5 years which started in the beginning of 2021-2026. Fox also has a past of working as a news reporter for 15 years. He is also the current advisor of Colorado Mesa University (CMU) newspaper named The Criterion.

Under Fox’s leadership, the O&B “expanded beyond typical school coverage and took on more serious topics,” the paper reported. One example included an opinion piece about Gaza and Palestine that led to backlash.

Other content had also created tension, the school newspaper reported.

A front-page cover story that featured a large group of students apparently rankled the administration and “a visible detail in the image led to increased expectations for oversight.”

In another case, coverage of a lawsuit “brought attention to legal issues that are not typically covered in school media,” the paper reported. “These examples reflect a pattern of O&B publishing content that goes beyond surface-level reporting.”

This week, tensions escalated.

The Orange & Black’s former editor, Marie Calkins, who is now at Colorado Mesa University, published a column in the much larger Sentinel newspaper that serves Grand Junction, the largest municipality between Denver and Salt Lake City.

“Student press freedom under threat at GJHS,” read the headline.

The column echoed what the student paper had previously reported about the reassignment of its media advisor following uncomfortable reporting and offered more details.

Here’s an excerpt:

In the past two years, GJHS administration has attempted to censor, review, and repress several articles and elements within the publication. Their first attempt, in fall of 2024, was quickly shut down by the staff when administration was upset about a cover photo because it contained a photo of a student wearing a shirt that said “I Hate Milfs,” at a football game.

The piece reads that the administration “found fault in it due to their opinion that it didn’t promote the school appropriately.”

School administration, Calkins wrote, “asked to engage in prior review and restraint, which is when a school official tells a publication not to publish something and takes action against them doing so.”

The journalist alleged that such a thing would be in violation of the First Amendment “and when the legal language was presented to administration, they decided against it.”

Calkins also reported that school officials took issue with a pending story about a discrimination lawsuit involving the termination of a teacher and had “attempted to persuade Fox and Eli Schultz, the editor in chief at the time, not to publish the article.”

“This violates D51 school board policy, Colorado’s state law protecting student journalism and the First Amendment,” Calkins wrote. “Administration attempted prior restraint, again, creating a ‘chilling effect,’ likely leading to a decrease in free expression.”

A note at the bottom of the column reads: “This opinion piece also represents the viewpoints of other past members of the Orange and Black who read it prior to publication: Miah Hines and Lila Mottram.”

Earlier this month, Megan Fromm and Mark Newton, former editors and advisors to the Orange and Black, said they wrote a letter to the school board, superintendent, and principal expressing concern about the issue. They urged the administration to reconsider Fox’s reassignment and reaffirm its commitment to the free, robust, and uncensored voice of its student journalists.

“We live in a world where educators and leaders openly struggle to convince young people to think critically, verify sources, and care about civic engagement,” they wrote. “Fighting this fight means allowing our young people the freedom to think and express in real-time, with relevant and authentic tools that speak to their lived experiences.”

Here’s more from the letter:

Scholastic journalism makes this learning process fully public, and the discomfort this can create for adults is not the students’ burden to bear. The community at large will never see the mistakes a student makes on a science test or their growth on an English essay, nor will they be able to pass judgment on how a teenager constructed their history project. We would encourage the district to remember the value of learning experiences like scholastic journalism that have real-world implications and not to try to sanitize those experiences; rather, students who choose to engage in scholastic journalism should be respected and supported for their willingness to grow and learn in very public ways. This support requires recognizing that the role of scholastic journalism advisers is not to ensure a perfect publication.

For his part, Fox, the former media advisor at Grand Junction High School, told me he is “100 percent convinced” his reassignment is retaliation for student content.

“I was informed I would continue in my role shortly before the reassignment was announced,” he said. “When I informed students, they were all surprised.”

He added that students had immediately shared their concerns about the future of the school paper, a lack of qualified advising they might receive in the future, and how the decision might lead to erosion of student journalism at Grand Junction High as it has elsewhere.

Callie Berkson, a spokesperson for Mesa County Valley School District 51, said in a statement that while the school cannot comment on a personnel matter, the district is committed to student voices and student journalism.

Since 1990, Colorado has had a state law that clarifies the rights of student journalists in public schools. The state was one of the first to enact such laws, known as New Voices laws. In 2020, lawmakers amended it — specifically to protect student media advisers.

Lawmakers did so in large part because of testimony from multiple Colorado journalism teachers who described being punished for supporting the press rights of their students, said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center.

“The legislature heard those stories and responded by adding the explicit anti-retaliation protections for school employees,” he said in an email this week.

Schools, he added, routinely tell students that they should be engaged citizens, ask hard questions and participate in democracy and student journalism is one of the few places where students actually get to practice those skills.

“If students conclude that vigorous reporting leads to pressure on their publication or its adviser, the lesson they’re learning is the opposite of what public education should be teaching,” Hiestand said.

The national student press attorney said what seems to be happening at Grand Junction High School — “an experienced journalism adviser being reassigned after the paper pushed back against prior review and restraint” — is a “textbook example” of what Colorado's student free expression law was specifically designed to prevent.

New Voices Laws have been spreading across the country.

The legislation seeks to strengthen protections for student journalists in the wake of a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Hazelwood, which established that schools can suppress student journalism if they have “legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

Earlier this year, a court ordered San Francisco’s Lowell High School to reinstate a media advisor to his former role after finding the school had violated California’s New Voices law.

Steve Zansberg, a prominent First Amendment attorney who represents the state’s news organizations, said in an email that he is not aware of any tests of Colorado’s law since lawmakers updated it six years ago.

Asked if he is considering a lawsuit at Grand Junction High, Fox told me it would likely be determined by students at this point.

The Orange & Black newspaper first started publishing in the Grand Junction school system in 1918, according to its website. (Hollywood legend Dalton Trumbo was an early staff member.) Last year, the paper won 19 awards from the Colorado Student Media Association.

Recent stories and columns explored the impacts of a new school cell phone policy, a mobile school meal program, a new AP class, and new air monitors at the school.

In recent weeks, Fox has been posting links to student journalism in the Orange and Black on his public Facebook page along with his own praise for it.

“No matter what they write about, no matter if there are spelling or grammar mistakes, no matter if the journalism could be stronger, I am always proud of students for being willing to take the risk to share their writing publicly,” he wrote in one post. “For being accountable for what they publish. For being thoughtful and responsible. For being willing to engage in their community. It would be easier - safer - to go to class and keep out of the spotlight. These students are not taking the easy path. I am … immensely proud of them for that.”

He also seems pretty up to speed on the work of the Student Press Law Center.

Fox posted a link to the national advocacy group’s publicity of the court win in San Francisco. In another post, he linked to an item from the Society of Professional Journalists that called on Indiana University to protect student media independence after a major SNAFU and lawsuit there that involved the firing of a student media advisor.

In a personal note above the SPJ post, he added: “Watch for it all over.”

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

Check out our recent post “Changing the Story Changes What’s Possible.”

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

🛣 This newsletter is in travel mode, meaning content might be lighter than usual, and I might not be as quick to respond to emails, messages, or DMs.

📺 Last week’s newsletter focused on an interview Kyle Clark of 9NEWS conducted with a gubernatorial candidate and a recent debate he moderated. National media have also taken note. This week, HBO satirist John Oliver dedicated a segment of his “Last Week Tonight” show to the same topic. “Perhaps the craziest race this year is for governor of Colorado,” he told his audience. The national shine is once again earning Clark accolades from viewers across the country while at home in Denver his job hangs in the balance as litigation surrounds the recent purchase of 9NEWS by Nexstar, which owns Denver’s FOX31. Watch the clip below:

💸 A new policy paper by Matthew Baker and Dermot Murphy for the national group Rebuild Local News has found a diminishing local news environment has led to $1.1 billion in extra borrowing costs for local government and taxpayers. “As an illustrative example, Colorado has a population of 6.01 million people, and approximately 31.5% of the population lives in a news desert,” the authors wrote. “Colorado issued $13.89 billion of municipal bonds in 2025, and thus we estimate that $13.89 billion x 31.5% = $4.4 billion was issued in a news desert in 2025.” (For what it’s worth, I told one of the authors that I’m skeptical that nearly a third of Coloradans live in a news desert, which the report describes as a place that has “zero newspaper outlets.” He said they had consulted 2015 Editor and Publisher data for the info.)

🔗 “Public media’s next chapter may be consolidation,” wrote Alex Curley in a story this week for Editor & Publisher magazine. In it, he argues “three possible mergers” have made consolidation “the new dominant conversation among public media workers.” One of them is between KUNC and Rocky Mountain Public Media in Colorado. “So, based on these three mergers, what does the future of consolidation in public media look like? It’s clear that there’s vulnerability in being a small, independent public media broadcaster, financial or otherwise, which makes merging with a larger organization appealing.”

👏 “We love it when good journalism and a healthy primary goad an incumbent politician into doing the right thing,” the Denver Post editorial board wrote this week when assessing the U.S. Senate Democratic primary race between Julia Gonzales and John Hickenlooper. The “good journalism” was a reference to a March story by Laura Toomer for the nonprofit Colorado Newsline site that reported how Hickenlooper’s investments raised questions amid a push to ban congressional stock trading. “Hickenlooper, who has been in the Senate for six years now,” the Post editorial read, “told us that he and his wife have decided to move their money into a qualified blind trust.”

🍺 The conservative former Gazette editorial page editor Wayne Laugesen emerged in national media this week as a source in a tsunami of bad press for Graham Platner, the embattled Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Maine. Laugesen, who is described in a story in the New York Post as an “independent journalist and strategic communications and policy consultant,” told the paper that he had a negative experience as an ex-patron of a Washington, D.C. establishment where Platner was the bartender several years ago. “Laugesen, who at the time lived three blocks from the Tune Inn, said Platner was so disagreeable that he and his wife eventually took their business to the Hawk N Dove next door whenever they saw Platner behind the bar,” according to the story.

🗣 A man cited for projecting “stop ICE murders” on the Colorado Supreme Court “is suing members of the city police department and Colorado State Patrol claiming violations of his right to free speech and petition,” Amanda Pampuro reported for Courthouse News. “On Jan. 31, officers seized Trevor Ycas’ projector and cited him for violating a city advertising ordinance after he flashed political slogans on the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center in Denver during a demonstration. The messages included ‘stop ICE murders,’ ‘de-ICE Colorado,’ and ‘abolish ICE.’”

🚫 The Florence Reporter community newspaper in southern Colorado had this announcement to readers this week: “To maintain the highest standards of journalistic integrity and the trust of our readers, The Florence Reporter does not accept payment for ‘sponsored content,’ or any articles written on behalf of an advertiser. We believe in a clear line between news coverage and commercial interests. While we offer various traditional advertising opportunities to help businesses reach our community, our editorial content remains independent, unbiased, and unpurchasable.” (Some other small Colorado newspapers have made sponsored content part of their business model.)

🎯 Want to sponsor this newsletter? | Here’s Denver agency SE2 founder Eric Anderson about why he did it

“It’s been great to work with Corey on this sponsorship,” Anderson wrote in a post at SE2. “I’d encourage others who want to reach his uniquely influential audience to consider [this newsletter] as a cost-effective way to connect.”

You should feel good about this, too, reader. He called you uniquely influential. If you or your organization would like to sponsor this newsletter, get in touch. 🎯

🍻 Patty Calhoun, the outgoing founder and editor of Denver’s alternative weekly newspaper Westword, took two conservative talk-radio hosts on a tour of downtown Denver last Friday night. Jeff Hunt and Bill Thorpe said it was a night they’ll never forget. Downtown is just “not what it used to be,” Hunt said on the show, echoing an apparently common lament of his audience of “conservative folks.” They cited the visibility of people experiencing homelessness, and drugs. So, he wanted a downtown defender to show him around. “It was a pleasant experience,” Hunt said, sounding like an American backpacker recounting a foray into the Exarcheia area of Athens in the 2010s. “We were never accosted. We were never threatened. Nobody even asked us for money while we were down there. I felt pretty safe.”

📺 9NEWS broadcast a short clip that showed viewers how a day in the life of a reporter on assignment in Estes Park looks.

☀️ The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition has updated its “free online guide to Colorado's sunshine laws to reflect 2026 legislative changes, including adjustments to the statute governing the release of police bodycam and dashcam footage.”

🆕 Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, is “thrilled to welcome two new team members” with the addition of Charlene Emory-Proctor as associate director of operations and Libbie Randolph as grantee relations manager.

🇺🇸 The Rocky Mountain Voice, a conservative media outlet in Colorado founded by former Colorado Republican candidate for governor Heidi Ganahl, is hosting a “Freedom Festival” at the Douglas County Fairgrounds later this month. The event includes a roster of conservative speakers like Greg Gutfeld of the Fox cable TV channel and Nick Shirley who is described as an “investigative journalist & fraud whistleblower,” as well as a rodeo, rally, and drone show. When introducing the outlet in 2024, Ganahl described the Rocky Mountain Voice as part of a “Road to Red” project to help Republicans win elections in Colorado.

📚 “Officials within Colorado’s Elizabeth School District removed eighteen books from school library shelves and marked another as ‘temporarily suspended,’ claiming to protect children from inappropriate content and to guard parental authority,” wrote Ari Armstrong for the progressive Colorado Times Recorder site. “But if you look at the facts surrounding the case and at the books themselves, it becomes obvious that the district targeted these particular books at the behest of ideologues largely to ‘protect’ children from content ideologically at odds with the views of those making the complaints.”

➡️ As a board member of the Society of Professional Journalists Colorado Pro chapter, I’d like to invite you to join the nation’s foremost organization for journalists. SPJ is a fierce national advocate for First Amendment rights, journalistic ethics, and other values important to a free and vital press. The Colorado Pro chapter offers professional training programs and events, including the four-state Top of the Rockies competition, the region’s broadest platform for honoring journalism excellence. Each year, the chapter provides thousands of dollars in scholarships to the young journalists of tomorrow. At a time when journalists are under fire from all sides, joining SPJ is your chance to make a stand for journalism. Learn more about the chapter here, and find out how to join here. ⬅️

🖕 Colorado’s controversial congresswoman, Lauren Boebert, got into it this week with a Fox reporter who seemed to want to prod her about an aspect of her private life. “Fuck you, first of all,” she said after the reporter began to ask about one of the exes of another member of Congress who had suggested that Boebert and Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie might have had a liaison. “If you’re going to bring me into this, like, this sexist stuff is like out of control,” Boebert said. “So, there’s your clickbait that you were looking for.”

🎙 From her “experiences as an investigative reporter to political pundit on the set of PBS 12’s ‘Colorado Inside Out,’” Chris Rourke shared “details of her storied career in journalism and commentary” on the Humanity Against Tyranny podcast. On the show, the former Colorado journalist said she believes being a former journalist is “permanent now.”

⚙️ Nicole Fierro, who worked as a journalist for KDVR FOX31 in Denver, is now “serving the community in a new way,” she said on social media. “I am beyond honored to share that I am now the senior communications manager for Douglas County Sheriff's Office,” she said.

🆕 Julia Wildman, a senior at Colorado Mesa University, has joined Grand Junction Daily Sentinel “as a summertime intern for the newsroom.” The paper did a Q-and-A with her.

📺 Colorado communications consultant Rachel Mains teased an upcoming video for her Pinpoint Colorado series in which she interviews Greg Nieto for a “fascinating conversation about Channel 2, Colorado’s first television station.” She says the discussion will explore how the channel “helped shape the local news” and will offer a look into Colorado broadcasting history, among other things.

Colorado media odds & ends - debate season and KUSA kudos edition

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:03:30 GMT

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Journalists at Denver’s KUSA 9NEWS have had an anxious year.

A rival broadcaster, which owns FOX31, acquired their owner, Tegna. The deal is currently embroiled in litigation as Denver newsroom jobs hang in the balance.

Despite that, a small team at the nightly newscast “Next with Kyle Clark” is showing just how important KUSA is as a public good during another major statewide Colorado election.

The local NBC affiliate this week hosted the first televised debate among the top Republican candidates for governor — and one for the two Democrats who are running as well.

When it came to the moderated GOP forum, Colorado Public Radio reporters Rae Solomon and Bente Birkeland called it “unlike any political debate in recent Colorado memory.” The “false claims and attacks became so unhinged at times that moments could have been mistaken for a Saturday Night Live cold open, or a spoof reality show like Jury Duty.”

Indeed, the performance was likely eye-popping for normies who don’t follow politics as closely as professional ideologues and others who must do so for a living. At one point, Republican State Rep. Scott Bottoms, a candidate for governor, said he would “probably” offer a role in his administration to a podcaster who has accused some of the state’s leadership of being “Satan Jews” — just “assuming” that role is “not around Jewish people.”

Debate moderators Kyle Clark and Marshall Zelinger offered a master class in how to engage the kinds of state-level characters who have emerged as contenders for high office in the era of Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, Clark’s election-defining interview with Victor Marx, whom he described as the “unconventional frontrunner in the GOP race” for governor, continued to reverberate through the week.

Among other things during the interview, the candidate declined to say how many people he had killed as an adult or how he managed to allegedly call in an airstrike on ISIS as a civilian. He talked about how he performs exorcisms by phone. Clark came with deeply researched questions about the candidate’s past, along with receipts, and sought to get clarity on some particularly remarkable claims Marx has made about himself. “Do you understand why so many of your critics think you’re a con man?” Clark asked at one point.

“I thought that that was one of the first things that potentially really shook up this race, which has felt kind of stuck,” said conservative talk-radio host Ross Kaminsky on his show. Clark spoke with Kaminsky on iHeart Radio this week about his 30-minute interview with Marx.

Asked why he believed Marx, who is leading the GOP pack in fundraising and had been ducking public debates until this week, agreed to speak with Clark for an in-depth grilling, Clark said he thought it was because he’s “unfailingly polite.” Candidates also know he’ll be prepared and won’t say things that are factually inaccurate, he said.

Marx himself said after the interview that “as a reporter, Kyle is professional and he’s researched. And that you don’t see a lot of in social media, so I appreciate it. And he asked the hard questions, which I wanted.”

At one point, Clark told Kaminsky that Marx, who is a ministry leader, had offered to perform an exorcism on him while at his training center around the time of the interview.

“I was taken aback by the offer,” Clark said.

Elsewhere in conservative talk-radio land, host Mandy Connell said on her podcast that despite having a “longstanding ridiculous beef with Kyle,” she applauded the interview. “Every Coloradan needs to watch this,” she told her audience.

As much as Connell said she appreciates the rise of what she called citizen journalism, the interview Clark conducted was an example of what a trained journalist can provide, she said.

In his regular column for the Colorado Sun, liberal columnist Mike Littwin opined that the much-talked-about interview, in which he said Marx showed himself “to be even weirder than one of his two opponents,” is “likely to win him MAGA votes.”

Despite Clark and his “Next” show doing what people across the board have recognized as a consequential piece of public service journalism during this year’s statewide election — if not the most consequential to date — there is a chance that Nexstar might at some point seek to eliminate the “Next” unit if the company is successful in court with its acquisition of Tegna. Why on earth would any local news organization even consider it?

Ballots for the election start going out to voters on Monday.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

⛰ The Colorado Health Symposium in Keystone is open for registration. You don’t want to miss one of the best events of the year in Colorado.

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

🌊 This newsletter is in travel mode, meaning content might be lighter than usual, and I might not be as quick to respond to emails, messages, or DMs.

🤖 A new law signed this week by Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis “will restrict artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, regulating the technology amid concern about its role in several suicides by young people,” Jon Murray reported for the Denver Post. Polis also vetoed four bills, “including one that would have imposed new safety regulations on social media platforms and another that would have charged fees on some video game purchases to fund youth mental health programs,” Brian Eason reported for the Colorado Sun.

⛰ Aspen Journalism and the Center for Investigative Reporting are inviting the public on Friday, Sept. 11 “to an event celebrating the vital role of nonprofit, investigative journalism and in-depth story telling. This gathering will feature special guest Al Letson, Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal, the nationally acclaimed investigative radio show and podcast from The Center for Investigative Reporting, in conversation with Aspen Journalism Editor and Executive Director Curtis Wackerle.”

⬛️ Colorado Springs residents who rely on DirecTV to watch NBC affiliate KOAA “may be out of luck for the foreseeable future,” Alex Edwards reported for the Gazette June 1. “The station, owned by the E.W. Scripps Company, is the latest victim in a string of contract fights between media conglomerates and cable and satellite TV providers.”

🗞 “Over the years, I’ve watched local journalism change dramatically,” wrote North Forty News publisher Blaine Howerton. “Many newspapers and media companies now rely on aggressive subscription funnels, ultra-cheap introductory offers, hard paywalls, automated upsells, and endless systems designed to keep readers moving through a marketing pipeline.” But the northern Colorado newspaper is “intentionally trying to build a different kind of relationship with readers — one that feels less like a corporate funnel and more like a trusted local habit.”

💨 Longtime sportswriter Patrick Saunders is one of the Denver Post journalists deciding to take a company buyout, and is calling it “bittersweet news.” This newsletter reported last month that the paper’s hedge-fund owner wants four buyouts. “Saunders has worked for the Post since October 1998 when he began writing about the Denver Broncos,” the site Purple Row reported.

👏 The national Rebuild Local News group applauded Colorado for “prioritizing local media in state advertising,” noting that state agencies now “must develop strategies that give priority to Colorado-based news media in public marketing campaigns.”

💨 Reporter Glenn Wallace is leaving Axios Colorado Springs after just about three months working for the new daily newsletter. “The opportunity to launch a new and innovative form of local media for my hometown has been the honor of my career,” he wrote, adding that he has “personal matters to attend to.” Axios Local is looking to fill the job and will pay between $65,000 and $100,000 for the position. (The salary range for the Springs position when Axios first posted it pre-Wallace was between $60,000 and $90,000. The new salary range matches what the company listed for a reporter in Boulder when it hired one there in 2024.) Editor Gigi Sukin has been authoring the Springs newsletter the past few days this week.

🔗 Michael Rosenblatt, a technology product developer who is on the KUNC board of directors, authored a column in the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper about the upcoming merger between that northern Colorado-based radio station and Rocky Mountain PBS. “This merger positions KUNC and The Colorado Sound to continue growing as trusted, innovative and community-focused public media brands for Northern Colorado audiences for years to come,” he wrote. “It represents the best of both worlds: preserving a strong regional identity while building the scale and sustainability necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing media environment.”

🆕 The Colorado Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists “has named the chapter’s president for 2026-27 and its president-elect, announced new and continuing members of its board of directors, and said thanks and farewell to two departing board members,” the organization, of which I’m a board member, announced. “The changes follow the chapter’s first contested membership board election in several years.” Read who got the nods here.

✍️ Both Democratic candidates for governor, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Attorney General Phil Weiser, said if they had the job they would sign a bill that Gov. Polis vetoed that would “require social media companies to comply with search warrants within 24 hours of receiving one,” and also a bill to “ban rent-setting algorithms,” Chase Woodruff reported for Colorado Newsline.

🎯 Want to sponsor this newsletter? | Here’s Denver agency SE2 founder Eric Anderson about why he did it

“It’s been great to work with Corey on this sponsorship,” Anderson wrote in a recent post at SE2. “I’d encourage others who want to reach his uniquely influential audience to consider [this newsletter] as a cost-effective way to connect.”

You should feel good about this, too, reader. He called you uniquely influential. If you or your organization would like to sponsor this newsletter, get in touch. 🎯

✍️ Behold our Substack governor: Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis has created a Substack newsletter. “One of the things I’ve missed in recent public life is conversations,” he said on Facebook about why. “Too much of our politics now happens through headlines, sound bites, and brief posts. I wanted a place to explain not just what I think, but why I think it.” The governor’s first Substack post was about his decision to commute the nine-year sentence of Tina Peters, the former county clerk who a jury convicted of participating in a scheme to, according to the Associated Press, “chase election conspiracy theories promulgated by President Donald Trump.” Two weeks ago, “Inside the News in Colorado” wondered why Polis didn’t wait for the ongoing court process to play out. In his first post, Polis answered it. “Some have asked why I did not simply allow the courts to continue the process. The answer is simple,” he wrote. “Any path through the courts would likely have taken years of appeals.” For his next post, he said he planned to “reflect on the reaction I have seen from this decision and what I have learned.”

🤖 The Denver Post’s business team wants to hear from Coloradans about their perspective on “how AI is impacting the workforce in Colorado.” If you or someone you know might be “interested in sharing your experience for an article,” you can fill out a form here.

💨 The Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction this week offered a tribute to its retiring reporter Dennis Webb. “He was famously even-handed and respected by the people he covered. Even if a story was unflattering to the subject, Webb was never accused of being unfair. That’s a rare achievement in this business, even if it’s the goal.”

🎂 The hyperlocal digital news site Denverite, which is now owned by Colorado Public Radio, is (checks notes) 10 years old. Former editor Dave Burdick posted on LinkedIn about how he felt. “Even though we set out to represent and serve people as well as we could, and even though we felt confident we were going to do something new and different, we were surprised at how quickly and how urgently people told us the city needed something like Denverite,” he wrote. “Readers, then sources, then industry colleagues adjusted their expectations and their behaviors in small but significant ways. (So did we.)”

🏆 A photo by Enrique Quintero published in the Colorado Mesa University student newspaper The Criterion “won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Award late last month, in the general news photography category,” the Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction reported. The photo “showed a firefighting airplane dropping flame retardant over the Turner Gulch Wildfire in an effort to slow the blaze’s spread.”

🆕 Following last week’s newsletter that reported on a new nonprofit Western Colorado Journalism Foundation launching on the Western Slope, the group is “now accepting applications for assistance” and “also ready to welcome donations.” Kalen McCain wrote about it in the Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction. “Those interviewed by the outlet stressed that the nonprofit wasn’t affiliated with Grand Junction Media,” McCain wrote. “Nor will its aid be restricted to newsrooms close to Grand Junction, or of a certain size, or with any particular revenue model.”

📺 The University of Northern Colorado’s Journalism and Media Studies program “opened their studio to give local students hands-on television news production experience,” Sydney Kern wrote. “As a class assignment during the spring semester, sixth-grade students at University Middle School in Greeley were digging deep to uncover answers to four important topics.”

🧐 Alan Franklin, the deputy director of Progress Now Colorado, said on social media this week that he believes “Republicans have been losing in Colorado for so long that the local press considers it their mission to save Republicans from themselves” in part because “competitive races are more interesting to report on and generate more traffic. If you don’t have a competitive race, pretending you do is better than nothing.”

📸 University of Colorado journalism professor Angelica Kalika has a piece out this week in The Conversation headlined “TMZ descends on Washington in a test of whether tabloid tactics can serve the public interest.”

⚖️ “Judicial records belong to the American people; they are public, not private, documents.” So reads the opening of a legal brief the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition submitted this week to the Court of Appeals, “challenging a judge’s suppression order that has made an entire divorce case file and the order itself available only to the parties,” the CFOIC’s Jeff Roberts reported.

New journalism foundation launches on Colorado's Western Slope to bolster local news

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:31:50 GMT

A group of veteran journalists and their advocates on Colorado’s Western Slope has banded together to launch a nonprofit foundation they hope will lead to more robust journalism in the region.

“We believe that unbiased news should be the standard — not the exception,” reads a blurb on the home page for the Western Colorado Journalism Foundation.

The new 501(c)(3) organization, which launched this week, states: “We directly fund reporting that serves the public interest: delivering facts, context, and accountability that strengthen communities, and democracy, from the ground up.”

One of the founders of the WCJF is Jay Seaton, publisher of the Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction, which serves the largest city between Denver and Salt Lake City.

Like many newspaper publishers in Colorado and the nation, he has seen advertising and subscription revenues plummet. In response, newspapers have had to cut positions and print days. The Sentinel’s newsroom is half the size of what it was when he bought the paper in 2009.

“The Sentinel has been non-profit for many years, just not tax exempt,” Seaton said wryly about the state of newspaper economics. “If current trends continue, it will be even smaller over the years. I don’t like that for a community I love.”

So, he and others have done what they have seen work elsewhere: formed a tax-exempt nonprofit to raise money from those who want to financially support local journalism beyond paying for a newspaper subscription or buying an ad.

“The idea is, if the traditional revenue model can’t support newsrooms at the level that they should be supported, then let’s find another way,” Seaton said.

The development is another example of the need for private philanthropy to help sustain local public service journalism and fill the gaps where it can — with money coming from national efforts like Press Forward, individuals, local community foundations, and more.

Also involved in this new local effort is Colorado Mesa University journalism professor Laurena Mayne Davis, who is on the board of the Western Colorado Journalism Foundation.

“It’s important to cultivate relationships between higher education and professional media for a traditional reason — providing a pipeline of talent — and for a new economic reality — augmenting lower staffing levels,” she said.

New problems, she wrote in an email about her involvement in the WCJF, require new solutions. “And that’s where the Western Colorado Journalism Foundation comes in.”

The new foundation, she said, aims to increase the number of journalists working in newsrooms in western Colorado.

“Particularly in rural locations where they may be only one source of local news, the loss of reporters due to budget cuts can lead to news deserts,” she said. “Communities suffer in the absence of watchdog journalism and the stories that bind us.”

Colorado in the past decade has seen an explosion of nonprofits in the local news space.

The statewide Colorado Sun became a nonprofit in 2023. The nonprofit Boulder Reporting Lab serves that city. Other nonprofit news organizations on the digital-only side include the Ark Valley Voice, Colorado Newsline, and Colorado Times Recorder. Print newspapers like the Aurora Sentinel and Crestone Eagle have converted into nonprofits. The Revolutionist, a socialist Western Slope newspaper, is a nonprofit.

Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, is a nonprofit funder table that aims to help local journalism thrive across the state. Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab, is a nonprofit journalism support organization.

The Rural Journalism Institute of the San Luis Valley is another example of a regional nonprofit organization to support local news that has ties to a for-profit news outlet, in that case, the Alamosa Citizen.

Charles Ashby, a longtime Western Slope reporter who covered the Capitol and state government and retired last year after nearly 50 years as a journalist, is a board member of the WCJF. He said the new initiative took inspiration from the success of what he called a “growing number” of nonprofits that are funding various journalistic endeavors.

“We felt like the Western Slope isn’t taking advantage of what’s out there,” he told me.

He said while the group is in the beginning stages of establishing itself, he hopes it can help newspapers on that side of the state “get the financial assistance they need to improve their coverage of a wide range of topics.”

How they hope to do that, he said, is to fund reporter or editor positions on a topic-by-topic basis.

“Our goal is to solicit gifts, grants and donations and use that money to fund grants either for specific news outlets or to fund an editor to coordinate projects between existing reporters,” he said. “Much of that coverage would be dictated by the newspapers themselves.”

Beat funding for local news has been around for more than a decade. Local newspapers have raised outside money for more arts coverage or for more coverage of housing and homelessness, including from entities that would benefit from such coverage. The Water Desk in Colorado raises money from people who want to see more coverage of water issues.

Best practices are to ensure editorial independence and guardrails that protect those who produce such news from the influence of those who fund it. Entities can help fund more coverage of a topic, but shouldn’t have a say in how it’s done.

Seaton said the organization plans to do that and its board of directors would be in charge of the solicitations and also determine where the money goes and how.

“We’re going to seek from anyone who receives these funds total transparency so donors and anyone can have a full line of sight as to where that money is going,” he said.

As for the foundation showing the public where its money is coming from, Seaton said he thinks it will be up to the donors. He’d like to be able to publish a page in the Sentinel thanking those who give.

Also on the board is Colorado Mesa University Foundation CEO Robin Brown, former Colorado House Majority Leader and ex-CMU President Tim Foster, and former Sentinel editorial page editor Bob Silbernagel.

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

⛰ The Colorado Health Symposium in Keystone is open for registration. You don’t want to miss one of the best events of the year in Colorado.

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

⌨️ Reporter Julia King has a fascinating story in the Boulder Daily Camera about a Reddit enthusiast who moved to Colorado two years ago, ousted a new moderator of the r/LouisvilleCO subreddit, and is now being hailed as a hero by many of the 2,500 users. “One Reddit user ousted, and a ‘reign’ over a Louisville online community ends,” is the headline. “Online spaces such as Reddit have become a critical pipeline for information, according to Casey Fiesler, an associate professor at CU Boulder who researches and teaches technology ethics and internet law, and policy within online communities,” the story reads. “When we have fires here, how do you find out about what’s happening? Often the answer is social media, like a local Facebook group or a subreddit, or a hashtag on Twitter, or that kind of thing, and that can actually be really important,” Fiesler told the Camera.

📻 The Christian Community Foundation, Inc., which is doing business as WaterStone, a religious organization based in Colorado Springs, is buying the conservative talk-radio company Salem Media. “Under the terms of the agreement, WaterStone will acquire all outstanding shares of Salem Media common stock for $1.00 per share, representing approximately a 250% premium over Salem’s recent trading price,” according to a Salem news release. “Today, Salem remains one of the largest Christian and conservative multimedia companies in America, reaching millions of listeners, readers, viewers, and podcast consumers each month through its national radio network, streaming platforms, digital media brands, and publishing platforms.”

⚖️ The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition is asking the Court of Appeals to reverse a January ruling by Larimer County District Court Judge Gregory Lammons in a case that involves the Estes Valley Voice digital news outlet. The case “presents a simple but monumental question for the future of government transparency in Colorado,” the CFOIC said in an amicus brief it filed in the case. “If a portion of a public record contains confidential information, may the custodian of that record withhold the entire document rather than producing a redacted version upon request?” At issue is a public hospital district in Estes Park, and a judge who decided that the district doesn’t have to redact privileged material from attorney billing invoices and simply release non-confidential portions of the documents to the Estes Valley Voice after the Voice filed a public records request.

📡 Last week, Boulder’s KGNU community radio station “held a grand opening for its new Community Media & Cultural Center downtown on the 48th anniversary of its first broadcast,” Brooke Stephenson reported for Boulder Reporting Lab. “The new building, behind the Dushanbe Teahouse on 14th Street, features multiple recording studios, meeting and event spaces, a cafe and a rooftop deck. The station invested about $9 million to purchase and renovate the building. Station leaders said they hoped moving to a more central location, within walking distance of CU Boulder and Boulder High, would encourage greater community engagement.”

🤔 Jason Salzman of the progressive Colorado Times Recorder nonprofit digital news site, which doesn’t disclose its donors, wondered about potential ties between the owner of the Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics news outlets and the conservative Common Sense Institute that partnered on last night’s gubernatorial debate. “Vince Bzdek, executive editor of the Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, didn’t return an email seeking an answer to that query,” along with other questions, Salzman wrote. He also wondered why a “centrist or left-leaning think tank” wasn’t involved to balance out the Common Sense Institute.

🎙 Denver Post reporter Tiney Ricciardi appeared on the WKRP Montrose podcast this week to talk about her journalism career and “how the pandemic ultimately gave her the opportunity to work remotely and relocate to Western Colorado.”

💨 “I have retired from The Daily Sentinel, mostly wrapping up my journalism career — although I still hope to dabble in freelance reporting on occasion,” Dennis Webb wrote this week for the Western Slope paper. “To speak candidly, I am retiring from this field at a time when I think journalism is as important as ever, hopefully as a tool to help point a way forward for a nation all too divided. But I have confidence that the profession is up to that task.”

⛰ Parker Yamasaki wrote for the Colorado Sun about “a literary festival in the mountains” that includes “a weekend of words at the Crested Butte Center for the Arts, featuring four packed days of workshops, readings, movie screenings, panels, parties and kid-friendly activities.”

🏆 Among those whose work the Pulitzer Prize board this month bestowed the nation’s highest journalism honors was Kevin Mohatt, a freelance photojournalist in Denver. “I would be proud of this work regardless,” he said about the honor.

🎯 Want to sponsor this newsletter? | Here’s Denver agency SE2 founder Eric Anderson about why he did it

You should feel good about this, too, reader. He called you uniquely influential. If you or your organization would like to sponsor this newsletter, get in touch. 🎯

🤐 Aurora’s city council members voted this week 6-4 to impose “emergency rules that essentially require police to clear future social media posts and press releases with the city manager’s office,” Sentinel Colorado reported. “In Aurora,” an editorial opined, “the public is already at a disadvantage in getting a clear and accurate picture of what the crime situation is because of the strategic lack of transparency built into the Aurora police department.”

💸 The Colorado State Patrol recently agreed to settle a civil complaint “filed on behalf of a man who criticized the agency on one of its social media platforms,” Logan Smith reported for CBS Colorado. “That man, 45-year-old Jerod Zaczkowski of Aurora, received $50,000 as part of the settlement. Zaczkowski, as described in the complaint that was filed in January, had several comments deleted from CSP’s Facebook page and was eventually banned in January 2025 from posting further comments.” Zaczkowski “criticized CSP troopers in one comment by calling them ‘Oath breaking tyrant Nazi cucks,’ as stated in the complaint.” What happened to Zaczkowski “is intolerable in a democratic society,” lawyer Andy McNulty said in a statement. “The State Patrol censored a critic online because it didn't like what he was saying. In a time where the slow creep of authoritarianism is happening at every level of government, we must push back and say we will not accept censorship.”

🆕 Terri Glassman has joined the Colorado Press Association and Colorado Press Network as its new director of strategic partnerships and revenue. “As we continue evolving Colorado Press Network’s statewide advertising and partnership efforts, Terri will help us build new revenue opportunities for member news organizations through strategic partnerships, sponsorships and cross-platform marketing initiatives,” Press Association President and CEO Tim Regan-Porter told members in an email. “She brings deep Colorado market knowledge, strong relationships across industries and agencies, and a clear understanding of the importance of trusted local journalism to communities across the state.”

🪦 Colorado sportswriter Adam Munsterteiger died peacefully at 47, his family said. KUSA 9NEWS had a remembrance of him. Jimmie Searfoss spoke about how great a mentor he was. “He had such an influential role of spreading the news about all of CU Boulder,” anchor Kim Christiansen said.

💰 As Boulder County and the North Metro’s “only independent, locally owned news platform,” Yellow Scene magazine said it has “asked difficult questions, fact-checked powerful institutions, and covered the stories shaping our communities.” Now, it is hoping to sign up 1,000 Sustaining Supporters by the end of summer.

📺 As a merger between KDVR FOX31 owner Nexstar and 9NEWS owner Tegna “continues to face legal battles amid antitrust concerns, Tegna’s C-Suite has seen the departure of several key executives,” Loree Seitz reported for The Wrap. “We’re grateful to the departing Tegna leaders, who have chosen to resign from their roles,” a company spokesperson said.

👀 Colorado lawmakers want local news outlets to get priority in state advertising spending.

📺 9NEWS journalist Kyle Clark, known for conducting some of the best and most election-defining interviews of candidates during campaign season, has done it again. This week, he sat down with Victor Marx, whom he described as the “unconventional frontrunner in the GOP race” for governor. “A condition of our interview was that we travel to Marx’s ‘training center’ in El Paso County and tour the facility prior to our interview there,” Clark said. “At that point, no questions or topics were off limits in our allotted 30 minutes.” Watch it in full here.

⚖️ Patrick Egan, a Grand Junction Marine who is accused of following a young, nonwhite local TV reporter for miles in a taxi while questioning his citizenship in “Trump’s America” before tackling and choking him outside of a news station, “is poised to plead guilty to at least some of his charges, according to court records,” Sam Komhaus reported for the Sentinel in Grand Junction. “A plea hearing has been scheduled for June 22. Egan had been scheduled for a trial in early June.” In January, a judge declared a mistrial after the in-court litigation went off the rails.

⚙️ Prairie Mountain Media, a subsidiary of MediaNews Group, which is financially controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund, is willing to pay a Special Sections Coordinator … $18.75 - $21.63 for the job.

🤝 The Colorado Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists is launching a mentorship program designed to connect working journalists with Colorado college students. Doug Bell, SPJ Colorado Pro’s education chair, “says the program will pair mentors and mentees for one year, and the pairs will meet twice a month virtually or in person for feedback and career advice. Mentors and mentees will be matched based on interests and expertise.”

🏆 Colorado collegiate journalists from the University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado Mesa University have been honored “in the Society of Professional Journalists‘ national Mark of Excellence Awards.”

🔎 The Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab, offers free access to LexisNexis “that normally costs thousands.” Fill out this form for help.

✂ A Coloradan “talked to a reporter about getting fired, then got punished for it,” Marshall Zelinger reported for 9NEWS. Now he’s on administrative leave from his state IT job. “His violation: talking to me without getting permission first,” Zelinger said.

❓ Summer Nettles, a Colorado-based independent journalist, activist, and coach, asked in a LinkedIn post if “new journalism” can thrive under “old philanthropy.”

👻 John Hickenlooper, the incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator (and the state’s former governor) who is running for reelection “declined an interview with Colorado Matters,” a high-profile statewide radio interview show, “citing his schedule,” host Ryan Warner reported. Hickenlooper’s Democratic primary opponent, Julie Gonzales, sat for an interview, which aired this week. “Will we continue to engage in six more years of ‘go along to get along politics,’ or will we make history by electing the first woman in Colorado’s history to serve in the U.S. Senate, only the second Latina ever (in the U.S.) in our entire 250-year history?” she asked.

⛰ Colorado Mountain College is hosting its inaugural Roaring Fork Valley Civics and Media Summit today, according to the Aspen Daily News.

Jared Polis, free speech, Tina Peters, and 'self-inflicted political pain'

Corey Hutchins — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:53:25 GMT

Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, became the center of the media universe this week when he unilaterally cut in half a nine-year prison sentence for the famous former Mesa County elections clerk, Tina Peters.

Peters had become a folk hero for a faction of the political right who say they believe Joe Biden stole the presidential election from Donald Trump in 2020.

A Western Slope judge and jury had sent Peters, a white-haired septuagenarian election denier, to the slammer in 2024 after she orchestrated a security breach of her county’s own election system in 2021. She did so as part of a “failed attempt to uncover voter fraud,” according to the Colorado Sun.

Republican President Donald Trump had been demanding that Colorado leaders release Peters. He even offered her a “pardon,” though it was merely symbolic.

Some of Colorado’s Democratic politicians have accused Trump of punishing Colorado over the imprisonment of Peters by dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research and by withholding funds for Colorado’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, among other things.

For months, Trump’s allies in Colorado, some of whom are known to use particularly violent rhetoric, seethed into podcast mics about how “Hero Tina” must go free.

As pressure mounted, Polis indicated in media interviews that he might offer Peters clemency, citing her age, health, the severity of the sentence, and whether she showed contrition.

He finally did it last Friday.

Peters was among more than three dozen other commutations and pardons. The governor said in a series of statements and media interviews that he chose to commute her sentence because he believed her “free speech” had led in part to a “disparate” and “unusual” sentence that was too harsh for a first-time nonviolent offender.

Because of this clemency, Peters could walk free on parole June 1.

“This is not a pardon. It’s really making sure that her free speech was not a criteria for her overly harsh sentencing,” Polis said, according to Colorado Public Radio. He added: “In this case, there is absolutely both the appearance and, frankly, I believe the likelihood, that her speech was considered in her sentencing.”

In another interview, Polis said while Peters has “crazy” and “conspiratorial” viewpoints that aren’t true, “that is not a crime in our country or in our state.” People, he said, are “allowed to believe whatever you want to believe and say what you want to say.” He said it is a “core tenet that people should not be penalized for free speech.”

The governor said he agreed with an April decision by the Colorado Court of Appeals that found the judge in Mesa County, Matthew D. Barrett, had “obviously erred” by imposing a sentence “at least partially based on Peters’s protected speech.”

From that unanimous 78-page opinion:

Peters contends that the trial court violated her First Amendment right under the United States Constitution and her right under article II, section 10 of the Colorado Constitution because it punished her based on her protected speech regarding allegations of election fraud. We agree.

Much of the decision, which was rendered by a panel of three judges who former Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper had appointed, centered on what trial court Judge Barrett said from the bench when he took Peters to task during a blistering sentencing hearing.

“There are many things in my mind that are crystal clear about this case. You are no hero,” Barrett told Peters in court. “You abused your position and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to [peddle] a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again. In your world, it’s all about you.”

The “damage” Peters caused, Barrett said, “is just as bad, if not worse, than the physical violence that this court sees on an all too regular basis.” He called it “particularly damaging when those words come from someone who holds a position of influence like you.”

“Every effort to undermine the integrity of our elections and public’s trust in our institutions has been made by you. You’ve done it from that lectern,” Judge Barrett continued. “The voting public provided you with everything you’ve done has been done to retain control influence [sic]. The damage is immeasurable. And every time it gets refuted, every time it’s shown to be false, just another [tale] is weaved.”

The appeals court cited Judge Barrett’s soliloquy and ruled that his “comments about Peters’s belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing.”

The appeals court remanded Peters to a lower court for resentencing. That’s when Polis stepped in — and, to hear his critics loudly proclaim, stepped in it.

In the days after he commuted Peters’ sentence, nearly 90% of the Colorado Democratic Party’s central committee voted to censure Polis. “As part of the censure, the party will bar Polis from being a featured speaker or honored guest at official Democratic functions,” the Colorado Sun reported.

Both the state’s Democratic attorney general and secretary of state ripped into their fellow statewide officeholder and harshly condemned his decision.

Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, who is running for governor, said on CNN that he would not consider Polis as his replacement in the Senate, calling what Polis had done “disqualifying.”

When the governor showed up on Tuesday at an event hosted by the nonprofit Colorado Sun news site, he said he believed he would be remembered “fondly” for his decision. Protestors later interrupted the gathering with a large banner reading “EAT SHIT POLIS.”

Colorado’s most prominent nightly news anchor, Kyle Clark of 9NEWS, reported that Polis had done something disparate of his own when he commuted Peters. He said on air that the governor “knows he gave Tina Peters special treatment.”

Clark was referring to a paragraph that has appeared in “every other one of his commutation letters” that did not appear in the one for Clerk Peters. That paragraph was about the subject taking “full accountability” for their actions, being “remorseful,” and how Polis believes the incarcerated individual will “be successful” upon their release.

Polis, Clark said, better hope that Peters is not successful.

“Because if Tina Peters is successful upon her release in helping President Trump overthrow American elections,” he said, “that commutation letter is the only thing Jared Polis will ever be remembered for.”

In Peters’ backyard, the editorial board of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel opined that their former elections clerk was ready to “fit Gov. Polis” with a clown nose.

Taking up for the embattled governor, though, was the Denver Post editorial board, which includes opinion page editor Megan Schrader, the paper’s top editor, Lee Ann Colacioppo, the paper’s vice president of technology, Bob Kinney, editorial administrator Monica Brewer, and systems editor TJ Hutchinson.

“We cannot look at the 9-year sentence and not consider the importance of the First Amendment and our deeply held commitment to free speech,” the board wrote in its May 16 editorial.

As Denver Post workers get a union contract, the paper offers a round of buyouts

Following months of contract negotiations, workers for the Denver Post won raises for staff.

The new contract gives workers a 3% pay increase this year, and another 3% next year. The Post is financially controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund.

The 37-page contract, posted to the website of the Denver Newspaper Guild, states it is effective April 19 and was signed April 24.

One notable provision in it involves artificial intelligence. The upshot is that the newspaper company agreed that within the next year it would not lay off a unionized worker as a result of replacing that worker’s job “in its entirety with AI technology.”

Another provision states that the company can modify its use of AI as it sees fit as long as it makes the policy more restrictive. But, if the company intends to modify its AI policy in a way that is less restrictive, or requires “bargaining unit employees to utilize AI,” then the newspaper “will provide the employees and the Guild with notice of such proposed changes.”

This newsletter previously reported on the Post’s AI policy last April.

Elsewhere in the contract, it states that a Denver Post employee’s byline “shall not be used over their protest.” Another provision states that workers are “free to engage in any activities outside of working hours, provided such activities do not consist of services performed for media in direct competition with the Employer and provided further that without permission no employee shall exploit their connection with the Employer in the course of such activities. The employee must consult with a senior editor prior to performing any work for other media.”

Weeks after the new contract was signed, however, the overlords asked for buyouts. That would be the first time in about a decade I can recall that happening. I’m told the company is looking for four of them, and the newsroom labor union’s unit is currently 40 people.

“We’re deeply disappointed by the decision of our corporate owners to further shrink our hardworking, award-winning newsroom,” the Denver Post newsroom unit leadership said in a statement to this newsletter. “The buyouts were offered to the most senior journalists at the paper. Those eligible, combined, have worked for the Denver Post for more than 300 years. Those who choose to take the offer will be deeply missed by their coworkers and our readers.”

The newspaper is currently running a special promotion: $2 for two years.

Brian ‘Scoop’ Nemeth launches podcast to uplift neurodivergency & physically disabled

Denver media personality Brian “Scoop” Nemeth, who once aspired to be the Black Bill O’Reilly, has started a podcast about disability and the media.

Called the Fierce and Fearless Podcast, the show is built like “old-school talk radio,” the host said in a launch announcement. “This isn’t inspiration porn,” he said, “this is real-mother-fucking talk.”

Nemeth was a known fixture in downtown Colorado Springs throughout the early 2000s when he would sell his writings to passersby up and down Tejon Street. In 2015, the great former KRCC podcast “Wish We Were Here” profiled what the hosts called the “man with high-functioning autism” and his ambitions to become a news anchor. In 2011, after graduating from Pikes Peak State College, he moved to Denver to pursue journalism at Metro State.

For his new show, Nemeth promises a diverse roundup of guests and panelists. If you’ve ever felt “underestimated or being straight-up given the cold middle finger by the world, this podcast is for you,” he promised.

On his April 10 debut episode, Nemeth said when it comes to disability and the media, he wanted to talk about an elephant in the room.

“Let’s be honest for a second,” he said. “Neurodivergency and physically disabled hosts don’t exactly have an easy path into commercial talk radio.”

He then ran down a list of several Denver talk-radio hosts and said he wasn’t trying to criticize them.

“It’s about the system around them,” he said. “Radio runs on strict clocks, rigid formats, and very specific expectations about how a host is supposed to sound, react, and perform in real time. If you communicate differently … or have physical needs, those differences are often treated as problems instead of just differences.”

Nemeth said he believes that often, the problem is not with the audience, but the people involved in media companies.

“Even if a disabled or neurodivergent host is smart, engaging, and talented, it isn’t usually the audience” that has issues with it, he said. “It’s the behind-the-scenes producers, program directors, engineers, and sales teams. If the people running the booth don’t understand your disability, then pauses become dead air, processing time becomes awkward, and differences become risk.”

That’s why, he said, you often don’t see neurodivergent or disabled people on talk radio with the stars of the show. “Not because we lack ability,” he said, “but because commercial radio isn’t comfortable with how we communicate.”

That’s in part why Nemeth started the Fierce and Fearless Podcast.

Find out more about it here.

KUNC merger with Rocky Mountain Public Media moving forward

Last month, this newsletter reported that KUNC and Rocky Mountain Public Media were exploring a merger.

“Recent federal funding cuts have created a unique challenge and uncertainty for public media,” KUNC wrote in a statement at the time, “and this partnership presents an opportunity to strengthen the ecosystem while remaining deeply rooted in the communities they serve.”

This week, the heads of both outlets said the link-up is moving forward.

“Our Boards of Directors are expected to approve the merger this summer, and FCC approval is anticipated by the end of 2026,” they wrote in a joint column published in the Colorado Sun.

More Colorado media odds & ends

👀 The City of Denver and the parent company of the Denver Post “have reached a tentative agreement to resolve a months-long, multimillion-dollar lease dispute over the iconic downtown building that bears the newspaper’s name, CBS News Colorado has learned,” according to reporting from Brian Maass.

📚 🚫 Colorado libraries “recorded a 25% decrease in challenges to their books, materials, events and exhibits in 2025 compared to the previous year,” Elizabeth Hernandez reported for the Denver Post. “Last year, public libraries across the state reported 43 challenges to their books, materials, events and exhibits and two challenges to Internet policies, according to data from the Colorado Department of Education’s Library Research Service.”

🏷 A “leading LGBTQ+ publication” in Colorado is apparently for sale for $250,000. “As one of the nation's longest-running LGBTQ+ publications, it plays a vital role in connecting businesses with the community through dynamic event activations, targeted print and digital advertising, and strategic long-term partnerships,” the listing reads. The publication has a stated yearly revenue of $300,000.

⚕️ Colorado Sun columnist Mario Nicolais wrote a tribute to the ailing longtime former Colorado politics reporter Lynn Bartels. “Other reporters have tried to fill the spaces left behind by her to varying degrees of success,” he wrote. “Those with more longevity and institutional knowledge, like the Colorado Sun’s Jesse Paul, have picked up the most slack. Other, younger journalists have worked hard to establish their own voices. The news still gets reported.”

🏆 The Denver Press Club inducted five more people into its Hall of Fame. They include Denver Post Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo; Alan Kania, the Club’s historian and author of “The Denver Press Club: 150 Years of Printer’s Devils, Bohemians, and Ghosts”; Sharon Linhart, who founded Linhart Public Relations; Jim Trotter, associate editor of the Gazette in Denver and Colorado Springs, and Linda Carpio Shapley, the interim CEO of Rocky Mountain Student Media at Colorado State University.

✍️ Joshua Kendall wrote this week about how Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau “pissed off Hunter S. Thompson.”

☀️ The nonprofit Colorado Sun statewide news outlet, founded in 2018, has hired its 30th employee. One of the recent hires is Justin George, who comes from the Washington Post and is returning to Colorado, where he grew up. He will edit the Sun’s public policy team and help lead its political coverage.

🔎 Colorado’s Thy Vo is one of 11 journalists ProPublica selected for its 2026 cohort who “will receive intensive training and mentorship from ProPublica editors and staff.”

📡 A new full-time reporter, Hannah Weaver, “has been hired for the Aspen Public Radio Women’s Desk, which was created in 2025 to better understand the status of women through economic, sociocultural, regulatory, technological, and news-making contexts,” the outlet reported.

🪦 “Over the weekend the news community in Colorado lost a fierce journalist: Raetta Holdman from CBS Colorado died on Sunday,” Michelle Griego reported for CBS Colorado. “Raetta wasn’t someone you saw on air, but she was a force behind the scenes.”

📺 Hope Vanderburg is joining KRDO TV in the Springs in June after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin.

📲 Colorado Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is running for governor, urged a federal appeals court “to lift a block on a law mandating cigarette-style warning labels for social media.”

Colorado lawmakers want local news outlets to get priority in state advertising spending

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:22:04 GMT

The Colorado Capitol around 2016. Photo by the author.

Colorado lawmakers have done what they are constitutionally obligated to do: they passed a balanced state budget.

The roughly $47 billion spending plan came after “months of painful cuts to programs and key services across the government to make up a massive budget shortfall,” Sara Wilson reported for Colorado Newsline.

Notably, part of this budget signed by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis contains language that could help bolster the local news industry.

A footnote in the now-signed budget reads:

It is the General Assembly’s intent that any agency or department that receives an appropriation for marketing, advertising, or public outreach implement a plan to prioritize expending the appropriated money with Colorado-based members of the media and to ensure that the plan includes specific strategies for prioritizing print, broadcast, and digital news organizations primarily serving Colorado’s local communities.

Colorado Press Association President and CEO Tim Regan-Porter lauded the development.

The language in the footnote matters because “trusted local news outlets remain one of the best ways to reach and inform communities across our state,” he wrote in a statement on LinkedIn. “Strong local journalism helps communities stay connected, engaged and informed.”

He also said it happened because people showed up.

“Thank you,” Regan-Porter said, “to everyone in the broad-based coalition who helped make this possible through planning meetings, coalition discussions, conversations with legislators, outreach, advocacy and showing up for Local News Day at the Capitol.”

Local News Day took place in Colorado in March.

This year, public policy to support local news took root in multiple state legislatures. Channeling state advertising dollars toward local news outlets was one way.

Last month, Maryland became the first state to pass a law requiring state agencies to “direct 50 percent of their advertising budgets to eligible local news outlets and mandate public reporting of their ad spending,” according to the national group Rebuild Local News.

Did Denver police ‘knowingly’ target journalists during 2020 George Floyd protests?

Denver police have admitted that they “did something wrong” during the George Floyd protests of 2020.

That’s according to local news coverage this week in response to an appeals court’s decision in a lawsuit. The ruling upheld a $14.75 million verdict in favor of George Floyd protesters who sued over claims of police excessive force.

Denver “has admitted its police department violated protesters’ civil rights,” Kyle Harris reported for Denverite.

From his story this week:

The complaint, filed in 2022, names 13 plaintiffs and makes sweeping accusations about police conduct during the protests:
Denver police knowingly targeted journalists and others recording the Denver Police Department’s violent behavior.
The department also used an “overwhelming use of force without any reasonable basis” against thousands of people.
Officers intentionally shot people in the head.
The 13 plaintiffs were “brutalized for their political expression.”

In its own reporting, FOX31 hedged more than Denverite when the TV station broke the news on May 7.

“Denver appears to admit liability in court filing as trial over police actions during George Floyd protests starts Monday,” read the headline of a story by Vicente Arenas.

A note: Both outlets reported a trial was set to take place this week, beginning Monday, but there has been no local coverage of a trial. The last court filing on the docket available for review through the paid PACER court document service, posted May 8, reads: “Please be advised that the parties, through counsel, have agreed upon terms to settle this matter for all Plaintiffs. Undersigned counsel certifies that he has conferred with counsel for Defendants and that counsel for Defendants has no objection to this Notice. The parties request that the trial set for May 11, 2026 be vacated.”

At issue in the reporting last week was a May 5 pre-trial federal court filing from the City and County of Denver that stated in part that “Denver has conferred with Plaintiffs extensively, and the parties have reached an agreement on Denver’s admission of liability.”

Denver’s “stipulation of liability will save significant time and resources,” the filing stated. “No longer will the jury need to clear their schedules for a three-week trial. The jury will consider evidence of Plaintiffs’ injuries and damages, not of Denver’s liability, which will expedite trial.”

The spring of 2020, in the midst of a destabilizing global pandemic, was already tense when video emerged of a police officer kneeling on the neck of an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis and killing him. Protests exploded.

In cities across the country, police fired projectiles at journalists covering the demonstrations. In plenty of documented cases, cops attacked, gassed, harassed, and arrested members of the press who were reporting. Making for a particularly sick metaphor, one photographer was blinded in the eye from a shot she says came from the direction of a police line.

Journalists in Denver took heavy fire as they covered protests downtown. At the time, this newsletter documented the various ways in which local law enforcement gassed, sprayed, and shot members of the press corps with pepper balls.

This section of the 2022 legal complaint from those who sued the Denver police outlines reports of police attacks on the press in Denver, though none of the ones named are plaintiffs in the case:

Throughout the Denver George Floyd protests, Denver police officers targeted accredited members of the press along with a multitude of individuals seeking to record police conduct. Time after time, they shot at individuals recording, seeking to limit the opportunity for those outside the protests to see their actions. And as we have seen over the past decade, the filming of police officer’s using excessive force has played a critical role in building a movement to stem the worst abuses.
On May 28, 2020, while he was covering the protests at the State Capitol, Hyoung Chang, a credentialed press photographer for The Denver Post, was struck two times by pepper-ball rounds fired by law enforcement personnel. One round cut Chang’s arm. The other shattered his press badge that was hanging around his neck. Mr. Chang was quoted after the event as saying, “If it was one shot, I can say it was an accident. I’m very sure it was the same guy twice. I’m very sure he pointed at me.”
On May 29, 2020, John Cameron attended the George Floyd protests in Denver in order to record footage as a member of the press. When DPD officers noticed him recording, and without warning, officers started firing pepper balls and rubber bullets. He turned and ran and they continued firing at him, hitting him in the back.
On May 29, 2020, at approximately 8:15 p.m., a credentialed cameraman for KMGHTV/Channel 7, was struck four times in the chest by rubber bullets fired by DPD officers. Officers also fired paintballs, hitting the front lens of his conspicuous professional-grade video camera, which was at head level when DPD officers fired on him. 37. On May 30, 2020.
On May 30, 2020, Jeremy Jojola, an on-air correspondent for KUSA-TV/9News was shot with a less-lethal projectile round while standing beside a professional cameraman from that station. The round struck Mr. Jojola’s backpack.
On May 31, 2020, Alex Burness of The Denver Post, was fired upon, without warning, by law enforcement and shot in the head and abdomen with rubber bullets. DPD officers fired at Mr. Burness just after he yelled out “PRESS.” He sustained a contusion on his head and right abdomen.
On May 31, 2020, DPD officers shot at Trevor Hughes face with rubber bullets without warning. Mr. Hughes was photographing and recording the protests near Colfax and Emerson at approximately 8:30 p.m. While recording, with the camera near his face, DPD officers shot Mr. Hughes in the hand with a rubber bullet. The shot broke and severed Mr. Hughes’s right ring finger, leaving it dangling. Mr. Hughes immediately left the protest and went to urgent care. Mr. Hughes had to have his finger surgically repaired.

Colleen Slevin of the Associated Press reported in 2022 that the trial was “believed to be the first for a lawsuit challenging the tactics of police during the protests that erupted across the United States nearly two years ago.” (The report didn’t say who believed it.)

This newsletter reached out to a Denver police spokesperson this week with a request to talk about local media reporting that authorities might have knowingly targeted journalists.

The Denver Police Department “does not comment on open litigation,” spokesman Doug Schepman said in an email. He also passed along a link to a document that laid out changes to policy and practice the department made following the 2020 protests.

One of them is that the department “discontinued” its use of “rubber-ball grenades” during crowd-control operations. Policy also now dictates the “direct-fired applications of pepperball during crowd control situations only in response to circumstances in which a person is displaying active aggression or aggravated active aggression.”

Colorado College students spotlighted in ‘Student Press Report’

If you’ve followed this newsletter long enough, you know the financial realities of local journalism can be a challenge, and the industry is in a constant state of flux.

This week, Colorado College journalism student Sydney McGarr, a student I advise, authored a piece in the Student Press Report about why some higher-ed students are still choosing journalism as a future career.

From the story:

Layoffs ripple through major U.S. newsrooms, local papers shutter at an alarming rate, politicians sharpen their attacks on the press and AI technology threatens to make journalists obsolete.
Yet, 10,073 students graduated with journalism degrees in the U.S. in 2023, according to a report by Data USA. What keeps these graduates motivated?
In this season of graduations, here’s what college journalists from around the country had to say about their career plans and their ideas about the future of the field.

“Democracy needs reporters,” Colorado College student Veronica Bianco, another advisee of mine, told McGarr for the piece. “If we turn away from the profession, the federal government wins and democracy erodes.”

Read what other college journalism students from around the country told McGarr for her story in the Student Press Report at the link above.

🌿 This week’s newsletter is proudly supported by PR firm Grasslands: A Journalism-Minded Agency™, founded by Ricardo Baca (ex-Denver Post, ex-Rocky Mountain News, and current Colorado Public Radio board of directors). We understand journalists because we were journalists — and we’re here to help. Need expert sources or compelling stories? Our diverse client roster includes beloved Colorado institutions (Naropa University and Illegal Pete’s), innovative wellness brands (Boulder County Farmers Markets, Naturally Colorado, Eden Health Club), bold natural products businesses (Wild Zora, Flatiron Food Factory, Flower Union Brands), and other purpose-driven organizations. As creators of the Colorado Journalist Meet-Up and longtime champions of quality journalism, Grasslands recognizes the essential role reporters play in our communities. Our team is ready to connect you with sources, data, and unique perspectives that elevate your reporting.

Have a story you’re working on? Email Ricardo directly: ricardo@mygrasslands.com. Together, we’re crafting better narratives — one story at a time. 🌿

More Colorado media odds & ends

💰 The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley is launching a “new media fellowship supporting high-quality reporting on bridging and belonging in Colorado.” The center “will award up to 15 one-year grants ranging from $5,000 to $25,000, for a total of up to $150,000, to Colorado-based content producers working across a range of media, including radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, websites, podcasts, and social media. Fellows will join a community of practice which begins with an in-person convening.”

🎒 A journalist at Colorado State University was inspired by a Steve On Your Side investigation into prices at Denver International Airport by Steve Staeger at 9NEWS. So, Lauren Jones did price compaisons for food on campus and off. “Her story, published last month in the Ramspondents newsletter, found restaurants inside the Lory Student Center on CSU’s campus charged the same or less than their comparable locations off campus. The biggest surprise – the Subway on campus was priced about 20% less than at least two off campus locations.”

⚖️ A Denver activist who was sentenced to jail time for violating Colorado’s anti-doxing policy “raises questions about First Amendment rights,” Ava Kian reported for Colorado Public Radio.

💸 There’s a broad movement among policymakers and media advocates across the country “to shine a light on where public ad dollars actually go,” Rebuild Local News reported, adding that “early data from Minnesota and Colorado show that much of that spending flows to Big Tech and out-of-state platforms rather than local news organizations.”

🤞 The MATCH Lab at Colorado News Collaborative has been named a national finalist in the 2026 Next Challenge for Media & Journalism. “This is a big deal,” COLab director Laura Frank said. “The Next Challenge, from American Public Media, is the largest competition open to nonprofit and for-profit media startups in the entire country — and we’re in it! Five finalists. One winner. And we have a shot at $50,000!”

🆕 Kate Kampner is “headed to Vail, Colorado to be a general assignment reporter with Vail Daily,” she said on social media.

🏆 SPJ Colorado Pro’s friends at the Denver Press Club are honoring five media legends “with induction into its Hall of Fame. Tickets are available for two extraordinary evenings this week recognizing five luminaries who have shaped Colorado’s stories.”

🏔 Andrew Maciejewski, the regional team editor of the Colorado mountain newspaper group that includes Summit Daily News and its sister papers, wrote a personal column this week about trust and the media.

🏔 The nonprofit Ark Valley Voice newsroom has struck a unique partnership with the nonprofit Colorado Firecamp for affordable housing in Salida and is looking for an intern to live and report there this summer. Get in touch with founder Jan Wondra if you’re interested or might know of someone who is.

⚙️ Analisa Romano, a senior reporter at the Denver Business Journal since 2022, has left, “and is now freelancing,” Talking Biz News reported. “Romano covered the airport and airlines, economic development, money, health care and other professional services.”

🏆 The Colorado Springs Gazette chose Pine Creek High School valedictorian Emma Luu, a journalist, for its “Best & Brightest.” Luu “has always been fascinated by stories about overlooked moments and lives. In childhood, she lovingly chronicled the lives of the bugs and insects in her family’s garden, beginning a lifelong passion for journalism,” Rachel Wright wrote.

🆕 The Alamosa Citizen is welcoming its fourth cohort of interns to its online newsroom. “We are grateful to the funders of this year’s cohort, including the Robert Hoag Rawlings Foundation,” the outlet stated. “The Rural Journalism Institute of the San Luis Valley is the nonprofit partner of Alamosa Citizen and helps us raise critical dollars to grow a new generation of journalists working in small communities.”

🥊 They’re still trading jabs, folks: A Denver Post headline from January: “Attorney General Phil Weiser, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet trade jabs.” Four months later from the same publication: “Michael Bennet, Phil Weiser trade jabs.”

🆕 Jessica Sachs is joining the Summit Daily News after graduating from the University of Colorado in Boulder. “Since moving to Colorado as a teenager, I’ve made it a point to grab a copy of the Summit Daily’s newspaper every time I found myself in the area,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “I’ve always been so inspired and impressed by the amazing work they put out. It’s so surreal and exciting to know that now I’ll be seeing my byline on those very same pages.”

Denver photojournalist on Pulitzer finalist nod: 'I would be proud of this work regardless'

Corey Hutchins — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:38:03 GMT

Photo of Kevin Mohatt provided

Among those whose work the Pulitzer Prize board this week bestowed the nation’s highest journalism honors was Kevin Mohatt, a freelance photojournalist in Denver.

His photojournalism was part of a portfolio submitted on behalf of the Reuters news organization that took home a finalist nod on Monday in the Breaking News Photography category.

Judges said photos from the Reuters team were deserving for their “coverage of wide-ranging immigration enforcement actions across the United States, a portfolio distinguished by its breadth, power and immediacy.”

Shortly after last year’s inauguration, Republican President Donald Trump ordered widespread immigration crackdowns — and he specifically name-checked Aurora, Colorado, as a target.

Mohatt moved into gear.

“I wanted to show what the impact was on people,” he said over the phone this week. “On families, and on children.”

To do so, he spent several nights inside an apartment complex sleeping on couches in the homes of families who were anticipating federal ICE agents roaming the hallways and knocking on doors.

“It was exhausting work,” he said. Being able to be there took time. He cultivated the trust of a source who introduced him to others.

The point was to show through news photography how rhetoric from the nation’s top officials was at odds with the reality on the ground in communities.

“The message at the time was, ‘We’re just going after the criminals,’ which is what they said throughout the campaign,” Mohatt said. “And I wanted to show that that’s not what was really happening — that they were going after families, children, and specifically people that had documentation that are here legally that have work permits.”

From the homes of those who let him in, he documented panic and uncertainty: families loading up cars or hunkered down, waiting anxiously for roving patrols. He sometimes had to find creative ways to not show someone’s face or easily recognizable characteristics, like tattoos.

“People were terrified,” he said. Others told him they had done nothing wrong, so had nothing to hide.

The cutline of his Pulitzer-honored photo reads: “With his bag packed, a Venezuelan man peeks out the window of his apartment looking for any signs of federal agents after hearing reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be coming to detain immigrants for deportation in Aurora, Colorado, January 30, 2025.”

One evening, sure enough, it happened.

While Mohatt was inside one apartment, the tell-tale signs came in quick succession: crowded footsteps in the hallway, fists pounding on doors, and loud voices in English: “Police, please open the door.”

In early February, photos he took and audio he recorded from inside an apartment at a raid in Aurora made it into a Reuters special report, not included in the Pulitzer package, titled “Inside Trump’s immigration crackdown as net widens.”

Mohatt also photographed police in ICE vests walking a man in handcuffs from Cedar Run apartments in Denver, an image that earned plenty of play across the news wires that day.

Mohatt has lived in Colorado for two decades and has been freelancing for Reuters since around 2019. He also shoots for outlets ranging from Colorado Public Radio, Colorado Newsline, 5280 magazine and the Denver Post to the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

This comes from a portion of his personal website: “I became a journalist because I want to help tell the whole story.”

This week, Mohatt is on assignment in Alabama, where he’s covering the impacts of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

In recent days, plenty of accolades have come his way since his name and the word Pulitzer appeared in the same sentence.

He’s grateful for it, he said, adding, “I would be proud of this work regardless.”

This year, The Colorado Health Foundation is working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

🗣 Read our latest post: “How Public Comment Shapes the Policies That Shape Our Health.”

The Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️

Colorado lawmakers are scrambling to pass a softer AI law

Once poised as a pioneer for regulation in the new frontier of artificial intelligence, Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers might have bent for the tech industry in the final days of their legislative session.

That’s according to reporting by Chase Woodruff for the nonprofit Colorado Newsline digital site.

From the piece:

Colorado’s landmark 2024 legislation to protect consumers from discrimination by artificial intelligence systems couldn’t withstand the “massive amounts of money” being spent by technology companies to influence AI policymaking, the law’s architect told fellow lawmakers Tuesday.
“We could have probably built a wing here at the Capitol — built us our own ballroom — with the amount of money that’s been spent on this topic,” Sen. Robert Rodriguez, a Denver Democrat and the state Senate majority leader, told members of the Senate Business, Labor and Technology Committee.
Two years ago, Rodriguez was a sponsor of Senate Bill 24-205, a first-in-the-nation legal framework that aims to protect consumers from bias in AI-powered decisions relating to employment, housing, healthcare, insurance and more. Under a new bill sponsored by Rodriguez and other top Democrats at the Capitol, however, much of that framework would be scrapped in favor of a scaled-down compromise, negotiated behind closed doors by a governor-appointed task force.

“It’s not as comprehensive, and I am not happy with that,” said Rodriguez, who Woodruff reported characterized the new bill as responding to the reality that President Donald Trump’s administration has “decided to go a different direction on regulating AI.”

Here’s what the bill does, according to Ed Sealover of the Sum & Substance, a news arm of the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, which supports the bill:

SB 189 scraps the risk-assessment requirements in favor of transparency, mandating that AI deployers inform affected parties when the systems help to make a consequential decision and then report what information it used to reach that decision. Consequential decisions include those involving employment, housing, financial or lending services, insurance, healthcare services, education and essential government services, and those unhappy with the outcomes can ask to review and change the factual data on them.

Axios Denver’s John Frank reported that the American Civil Liberties Union and Colorado Chamber of Commerce “expressed support for the AI measure, despite often being on opposite sides of major issues.”

The new regulations “are largely the product of a task force convened by Gov. Jared Polis to make the AI rules he signed in 2024 more workable for businesses using the technology,” Frank added.

The legislation still has to clear both legislative chambers before the end of the session next week.

Comcast/Xfinity blackout resolved for Colorado TV news customers

Comcast and a company that owns Colorado local TV news stations reached an agreement this week that brought local broadcasts back for Xfinity customers.

Last month, on April Fool’s Day, nobody in Colorado could watch a local TV news channel if it was owned by the E.W. Scripps Company and they subscribed to Xfinity as their provider.

In Colorado, those stations include Denver7 in the state’s capital city and KOAA in Colorado Springs.

“We’ve reached a new agreement with E.W. Scripps Company, and their content is once again available on Xfinity,” Xfinity wrote to customers on Tuesday, May 5. “We appreciate your patience as we worked on a resolution with Scripps that allows us to continue offering their content at a fair price.”

The blackout had stemmed from a contract dispute.

“We’re pleased to have reached a new agreement with the E.W. Scripps Company and thank our customers for their understanding during the negotiations,” a Comcast spokesperson told Matthew Keys of The Desk news site. “We will continue providing credits to eligible customers for the period when the channels were temporarily unavailable.”

The dustup had marked the second Colorado TV news distribution SNAFU in a month.

In March, residents in Colorado Springs and Grand Junction who use a Dish Network satellite and streaming service lost access to TV stations owned by Gray Media after the two companies failed to come to a renewal agreement.

‘That is new’: How Colorado’s meteorologists are using AI to help report the weather

Last month, a handful of meteorologists from 9NEWS convened for a public panel hosted by the state SPJ chapter where they talked about “T-Storms, Trends & Trolls.”

This week, a group of different weathercasters presented about their craft at the annual SunFest hosted by the Colorado Sun. During the discussion, they spoke about how artificial intelligence tools are helping them with their work.

From Olivia Prentzel in the Colorado Sun:

The real advantage of AI isn’t necessarily more accurate forecasts, but speed — allowing meteorologists to run far more model simulations than was previously possible, said Joel Gratz, founding meteorologist of OpenSnow.
“Instead of running that forecast one time, five times, 10 times, you run it 50 times, 100 times, eventually you run it 1,000 times and see what those probabilities are,” Gratz said during a panel discussion with local forecasters.
9News meteorologist Chris Bianchi said as he forecast one of Colorado’s driest winters on record, marked by historically low snowpack and a late-March heat wave, he watched AI models improve in real time, delivering sharper guidance than traditional forecasts.
“I now look at the AI model over the numerical models, the old models — and that is new as of probably two months ago,” Bianchi said.
Within five years, Bianchi expects AI to significantly improve short- and medium-range forecasts, increasing the reliability of five-day outlooks and beyond.

Read the full story at the link above.

State deep-sixes a potential ‘Right to Know’ ballot measure

After state officials slapped away the proposition of a ballot measure that would ask voters to add a “Right to know” transparency proposal into the Colorado Constitution, a broad group of advocates appealed.

The Independence Institute and the League of Women Voters of Colorado requested a rehearing at the title board. That’s the state body that decides if a measure can make it on the ballot and voters will get a chance to give it a thumbs up or down.

But that board on April 24 voted 2-1 to deep-six the idea.

“The board’s decision centered on the initiative’s potential to disrupt current laws. [Board Chair Theresa] Conley said the measure’s impact on the status quo is too vague to summarize clearly for voters,” Sherrie Peif reported for the Complete Colorado digital site, which is the news and commentary arm of the Independence Institute.

From her story:

For now, the measure is dead, as proponents have decided not to appeal the decision to the Colorado Supreme Court. According to Shayne Madsen, legal counsel for Independence Institute, the group is confident they can rework the language of the amendment and get it past the Title Board for a future election.

Read the full piece at the link above.

Have a story you’re working on? Email Ricardo directly: ricardo@mygrasslands.com. Together, we’re crafting better narratives — one story at a time. 🌿

More Colorado media odds & ends

🙏 The Colorado Senate on Thursday honored longtime Denver Post bureau chief Fred Brown with a “ceremony as distinctive as the journalist himself, donning masks bearing his likeness and celebrating his five decades of shaping political reporting and ethical standards in the state,” Marianne Goodland reported for Colorado Politics.

📰 Arlene Solis “found her passion for journalism between art class and room 3352, home of the school newspaper at Boulder High School — and now she's helping bring the school's student paper, The Owl, to life,” Mike Castellucci reported for Denver7. “In the Owl’s April edition, Solis earned a front-page byline for her story on Boulder High School’s 150th anniversary, a milestone the school shares with the state of Colorado.”

💰 Gov. Jared Polis this week signed a law “requiring parents to set up trusts for children who appear on social media,” Marissa Ventrelli reported for the Denver Gazette. “Under House Bill 1058, parents must create a trust for their child if the family earns at least $40,000 a year from online content, the child appears in 30% or more of that content each month, and the content generates at least 10 cents per view.”

⚖️ On Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced DISH Wireless LLC, located in Englewood, Colorado, “would pay $17,280,240 for violations related to the Federal Communications Commission’s affordable internet program,” Bryce Patterson reported for KKTV.

💥 “A former Denver Post editor and veteran journalist was among the guests inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when gunfire erupted, triggering chaos and a lockdown at one of the most high‑profile events in Washington, D.C.,” reported Kelly Werthmann for CBS Colorado. “Ricardo Baca attended the annual dinner Saturday night at the Washington Hilton with his wife, representing Colorado Public Radio. Not 48 hours later and back home in Denver, Baca spoke with CBS News Colorado about the moment when shots were fired outside the ballroom, just feet from where they were seated.”

📺 Brett Forrest is wrapping up his role as a senior reporter and anchor for KOAA News5 in the Springs in July and said he is “beginning the search for what’s next in Denver or beyond.” Over the past few years, he built his career “covering high-stakes stories in real time—from wildfires and elections to breaking news situations where accuracy and clarity matter most,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “If you’re hiring—or know someone who is—I’d welcome a conversation.”

❌ An item in last week’s newsletter transposed which station would absorb another in Colorado Springs. The E.W. Scripps-owned KOAA would absorb the Gray-owned KKTV.

🆕 The Denver Post this week took advantage of a new Google feature that allows users to “deepen your understanding of current events and news by selecting your preferred source.” The Post emailed subscribers with instructions about steps they can take “to see the Denver Post content more frequently in your searches.” The email subject line read “Make sure trusted sources appear first in your search results!”

🎬 A free event featuring a screening of the documentary “Truth Be Told” by filmmaker Brian Malone “and a discussion that includes Colorado journalists will give readers a peek behind the curtain of local news,” the Summit Daily News reported. “The event will be held from 5-8 p.m. Thursday, May 14, at Silverthorne Pavilion.”

🏆 The digital nonprofit progressive news site Colorado Times Recorder won an honor in the “Top of the Rockies” contest for a story headlined “Five CO Springs News Outlets Scrub Their Websites of an Article About the Arrest of Former GOP Council Member.”

📧 Alice Brooker of the Press Gazette reported on the expansion of the Axios Local daily email newsletter empire and noted it had expanded into Colorado Springs and “its 36th and 37th newsletters will launch in Arapahoe County and Douglas County, both in Colorado, this month.”