Longmont Leader news site closes: 'A day I hoped would never come'
The news behind the news in Colorado
Colorado seems like a bust for the Canadian-owned local news publisher that tried to replicate its success in the United States and chose the towns of Longmont and Broomfield for its first locations.
Last year, Village Media told this newsletter that the Broomfield Leader was the first market the company ever had to shut down when it closed the site in September after two years.
Now, this week, its Longmont Leader site has gone dark.
“This is a day I hoped would never come,” wrote editor Macie May in a goodbye column. She added:
It is a sad day to post one last piece to a site where I have spent so much time sharing the stories of this community. It was a joy for me to wake up each day to see what new things were happening in our community, a feeling I will miss.
Asked what led to the closure, Village Media’s CEO, Jeff Elgie, was candid.
The company, which has a stated mission to “save local news” and operates more than two-dozen outlets while partnering with more than 100 more, has been growing since it first took over the Longmont site from a Google-backed McClatchy project in 2021, he said. But it has been focusing its corporate resources and investment on new markets in Ontario.
“Longmont has always been ‘forgotten’ in that sense,” Elgie said over email, “and from my perspective, the largest part of the failure was due to … us!”
The CEO added that other issues Village encountered were high turnover early on and difficulty finding a capable local commercial sales representative at a pay scale the company felt was reasonable.
The site was generating 400,000 pageviews a month, he said, and had an email subscriber list of more than 14,000. (Longmont’s population is around 100,000.) And he lauded May’s work as editor.
“So — really, I think it’s more our failure from a commercial model/investment standpoint — and we just weren’t paying it the attention it deserved,” Elgie said. He added that in Canada the company doesn’t typically go into a place that already has a local daily newspaper. (While the Longmont Times-Call has retrenched over the years, Elgie called the newspaper “somewhat healthy” competition and said it publishes frequently online.)
There were some hints last year that things were getting rocky at the Leader.
Last summer, Amy Lovatt, who worked for the Longmont Leader for about a year and a half, said she was the last reporter of four journalists between the Longmont and Broomfield outlets when she was laid off in July.
When the Broomfield Leader shut down a few months later, Village Media’s Elgie put on a brave face.
While the Canadian company’s foray into Broomfield didn’t work out, the Longmont site was doing fine, he said, and they intended to keep it. The site was close to breaking even financially, he added, and had roughly quadrupled its traffic since Village took it over from the McClatchy experiment a few years prior.
But since then, with May as the only full-timer its output reflected its newsroom size. The news section was heavily outsourced to “community submission” posts that were verbatim news releases copied and pasted from government agencies.
Colorado Community Media, the string of two-dozen nonprofit-owned suburban Denver-area newspapers, had discussed a potential collaboration, but it didn’t pan out. Village’s expectations for the amount of sales staff CCM would need to support the operation were more than it could reasonably provide, said CCM Publisher Linda Shapley.
Now, the Longmont Leader is gone.
Visitors to the site see a farewell message saying in part that the decision was “not made lightly and we understand the impact it may have on our loyal readers and community partners.” Elgie said the company would happily facilitate transfer of the site’s archives to another operator if and when the time comes.
In her goodbye column, editor May called it “an honor to write for this publication.” The community, she said, had “provided me with a home. It has been a place where I have been proud to raise my children and a place where I have found what Longmont is best at providing; a community.”
As for Village Media, while Colorado might be kaputt for the Ontario-based company, it still has one U.S. site left, the Soo Leader in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.
📢 Attention Colorado-Based Journalists: A Networking Event Just For You. Grasslands is bringing back its popular COLORADO JOURNALIST MEET-UP on July 11, creating a fun space for all active Colorado members of the media to eat, drink, learn, network, and reconnect with their media communities. This COLORADO JOURNALIST MEET-UP is free and open to all active members of the media, from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., Thursday, July 11, 2024 at Grasslands, 100 Santa Fe Drive (in Denver's Baker neighborhood).
This Meet-Up will include sushi bites, beer and wine — and a high-level panel conversation titled “State of the Local Media: Colorado Journalism in an Important Election Year.” Confirmed panelists are Denver Post Editor-in-Chief Lee Ann Colacioppo, Colorado Public Radio Executive Editor Kevin Dale, Colorado Sun Senior Editor Dana Coffield, CBS Colorado-KCNC President and General Manager Tim Wieland, and Corey Hutchins from this newsletter Inside the News in Colorado, all moderated by Grasslands CEO Ricardo Baca (ex-Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, and Daily Beast).
All full-time and freelance Colorado journalists are welcome at this Meet-Up, so please forward this to your colleagues. (Note: In keeping with the spirit of this Meet-Up, our non-media friends are not invited and will not be granted entry.) RSVP for the COLORADO JOURNALIST MEET-UP via a quick email to caseyechols@mygrasslands.com.
We look forward to the conversations, connections and community-building on July 11. The COLORADO JOURNALIST MEET-UP is proudly hosted by journalism-minded public relations and marketing agency Grasslands. More about us: mygrasslands.com and @grasslandsagency on LinkedIn and IG. 🌿
Sol de Valle expands as a standalone publication
Starting at the end of this month, the nonprofit Sopris Sun newspaper in Carbondale will create a standalone Spanish-language publication.
Since 2021, Sol del Valle has lived “primarily as an insert within the Sopris Sun and Aspen Daily News,” said the Sun’s executive director, Todd Chamberlin. “But after working with Public Media Corporation and getting community feedback, it made sense that a stand alone is a critical next step.”
The development comes as a coalition of news organizations has banded together in recent years to serve Spanish-language audiences in the area for a project called the Roaring Fork Spanish News Collaborative.
Denver’s Kyle Clark urged to moderate the Biden-Trump debate
“The internet has spoken and it wants Colorado’s 9NEWS journalist Kyle Clark to moderate the upcoming debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.”
That was the lede of a Monday story by Matt Arco for New Jersey Advance Media with the Associated Press contributing. And if that’s truly the case, well, count me in as part of “the internet.”
Praise for Clark rolled in this week following his expert handling of a televised debate among six Republican candidates running for Congress to replace outgoing U.S. Rep. Ken Buck. (One of them is Lauren Boebert.)
Watch clips from the debate here to see what “the internet” — and late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel — is talking about. (“The big takeaway is the moderator,” Kimmel said on his show. “That’s how you run a debate … give that man a raise.”)
Clark is probably one of the best local TV journalists in the country, and whenever he gets national attention, which is multiple times a year, someone inevitably asks if he has his eyes on a larger market.
“Colorado is a great place to live and to raise a family,” he responded to someone this week. “And I love how local journalism is engrained in, and accountable to, the community.”
La Ciudad explains CCM’s news reporting process
This week, Jackie Ramirez published an explainer for readers of the relatively new bilingual newsletter La Ciudad about how journalists at the nonprofit-run string of local newspapers in the Denver area do their work.
Included in it, importantly, is what those who interact with the press should understand and expect when dealing with a reporter.
The piece gets into the nitty-gritty about how journalists decide who to interview and how, whether they record their interviews and how, and it offers advice for those not experienced with talking to reporters. The story also explains what happens after someone has interacted with a journalist.
Here’s an example I chose to flag since I see this come up frequently with students doing journalism for classes at the college level:
You have now reached the end of your media interview, so what’s next? In our experience at La Ciudad, interviewees often ask, “Can I take a look at the article before it’s published?” The answer to that question is no. That’s because of a primary principle in journalism.
“Allowing a source to have a view of (and presumably have influence into) the final product can significantly disrupt the integrity of the process,” content strategist Craig Guillot wrote for a LinkedIn article.
While it may seem like a harmless request, if a reporter decides to share an article before being published, it can harm their credibility and violate the trust of their editors. If a source is worried about misinformation or misquotes, a reporter can ease the source’s anxiety by immediately sharing the published article online with the source so that they can point out any discrepancies or errors and request to have them fixed.
The piece also explains semantics like “on the record” and “off the record” — something about which Colorado Community Media knows well given what once happened with a public official and one of the newspaper’s reporters. (Spoiler: the reporter was in the right.)
I’d add this post from the late journalism educator Steve Buttry on the topic. Sign up for the La Ciudad newsletter here.
#CrescentWatch: June 2024: The ‘last’ of the linotype press
It’s somewhat sad to realize we don’t know how much longer this will go on, but writers and reporters will continue to trek to the town of Saguache in southern Colorado to profile Dean Coombs because, well, he is 72.
Each dispatch will come with some version of this line:
They are the hands conducting a family tradition going back to 1917. The hands putting together another Saguache Crescent — believed to be the last linotype-made newspaper in the country, possibly the world.
That’s from journalist Seth Boster in the Colorado Springs Gazette, and the latest profile of Coombs and the machine he uses to put out his Saguache Crescent weekly newspaper.
This “man in the window” in downtown Saguache “cranking levers and pulling knobs like a steampunk Willy Wonka” made the Smithsonian magazine in 2022, and CBS Sunday Morning and High Country News before that. Other outlets have dropped in and come away with headlines like “A Colorado newspaper that’s also a time machine.”
More from Boster in this week’s Gazette:
At 72, Coombs knows his time is limited. He knows the paper will die with him. He has no kids, no successor — nor would he wish the work on anyone, he has said. “It’s got to be your life.”
So, what might become of it then? A local museum?
More Colorado media odds & ends
🗺 This newsletter is in out-of-the-country mode, meaning content might be lighter than usual and I might not be as quick to respond to emails, voicemails, or DMs.
😬 In announcing news that Ford Motor Company has purchased the naming rights for the Sunset Amphitheater in Colorado Springs, the revamped Indy newspaper’s Facebook account called the project “a beloved concert venue in our city.” That’s notable since the venue isn’t yet built, hasn’t had its first show, and neighbors who worried about noise sued over it. But the venue is a major development project of one of the Indy’s new owners. On social media, former Gazette reporter Warren Epstein noted that a line in a news story read “get ready to witness history in the making at the all-new Ford Amphitheater,” and called such boosterism an “insult” to the “legacy of the Indy.” Following an inquiry to outgoing publisher Fran Zankoswki, the Indy cut that line from the news item and updated its Facebook teaser with a statement noting the “post has been changed to better reflect the standards of the Independent editorial department.” UPDATE: Indy editor Ben Trollinger said the Facebook item was posted by the paper’s digital marketing manager who is not a member of the editorial department and who also added the “Get ready to witness history in the making at the all-new Ford Amphitheater” line to the reporter’s piece. “That should have never happened,” Trollinger said, adding that it wasn’t written or approved by anyone in the newsroom and “we are taking steps to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.”
💨 After more than half a century in journalism, BizWest Managing Editor Ken Amundson is retiring, the outlet announced this week. In his own personal column, Amundson rounded up some of his notable community journalism.
💰 Two-year grants of $100,000 are open for “small newsrooms or coalitions that provide original reporting in underserved communities” in Colorado (and elsewhere) with a deadline of June 12 to apply. The money is coming from the national Press Forward campaign dedicated to help sustain local news in communities across the country. “The funding will be unrestricted, general operating support, allowing news organizations to spend it as needed to sustain and grow their operations,” reports Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter and is helping lead the local Press Forward chapter.
🐘 The Colorado Republican Party is mailing physical copies and emailing digital copies of The Colorado Trumpet, a 12-page newspaper. The front page carries photos of party chair Dave Williams with Donald Trump, and Jeff Crank with Nikki Haley, under the headline “MAGA vs. Globalists.” Williams is running against Crank for Congress in a district that encompasses Colorado Springs. A mission statement from editor Eric Grossman states the “information monopoly in Colorado ends here.”
🌎 Colorado’s Nancy Watzman has joined the staff of the Associated Press where she’ll manage the democracy portfolio for its philanthropy team. “I’m excited for this opportunity to help the AP develop partnerships and support for the AP’s crucial work covering elections, keeping government accountable and combatting disinformation around the globe,” she said this week on social media. “And I’m looking forward to reconnecting with friends and colleagues working in news sustainability.”
💨 “I’ve quit my job at Colorado Public Radio,” said digital managing editor Dave Burdick this week in a post on LinkedIn. “I’ve been in a flat-out sprint since starting Denverite in 2016 and it’s time to catch my breath and start dreaming up what’s next.”
🗣 Last week’s newsletter about diminishing arts coverage generated some robust feedback. If you read it, you might want to check the comments on the published version. After it went out, I added this: Jezy Gray is a full-time culture editor and reporter covering the arts at Boulder Weekly, Gray told me via email after this newsletter went out. The Intermountain Jewish News also does ‘a lot of arts coverage, mostly reporting,’ assistant publisher Shana Goldberg said.
🎙 Multiple local Colorado reporters made cameos in last week’s installment of City Cast Denver’s long-form podcast “Lauren Boebert Can’t Lose.” Reporter Charles Ashby of the Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction said on the show that people in the area “don’t like journalism any more than they like their government.”
👀 Writing for the newswire Reuters, James Pearson reported how NewsBreak, “with roots in China that is the most downloaded news app in the United States,” is publishing false material and items under fictitious bylines. The report found “the app’s use of AI tools affected the communities it strives to serve.” For instance, “on three occasions in January, February and March, Food to Power, a Colorado-based food bank said it had to turn people away because NewsBreak stated incorrect times of food distributions. The charity complained to NewsBreak in a January 30 email to NewsBreak's general customer support email address, which Reuters has reviewed. The charity said it received no response.” Denver was a test market for NewsBreak, which later shut down its pilot program.
👍 Steve Staeger, the consumer investigative reporter at Denver’s 9NEWS, admonished rival station KDVR for publishing a “study” by a lawn care company. “When will we ever get over these national clickbaity lists that generate anger in the comments and clicks?” he asked. (Steve, for profit, ad-driven corporate media called; it has your answer.)
⚙️ Mackenzie Maltby Tamayo announced she is the new publisher of Pikes Peak Media Company, which oversees the revived Indy bi-weekly newspaper and Colorado Springs Business Journal. “Excited to announce and thankful to J.W. Roth and Kevin O’Neil for appointing me,” she said on social media about the local owners. Maltby Tamayo works for O’Neil and was involved in the campaign of Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade.
🆕 Piper Vaughn said she is “thrilled” to begin her career “as a multimedia journalist at KOAA5 in Colorado Springs.” For her master’s thesis at the University of Southern California, Vaughn made a documentary about “how the media covers mass shootings” that focused on Columbine and the Aurora theater murders.
📚 Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis has signed into law a bill “designed to protect Colorado libraries and their employees from partisan book-banning battles,” reported Elizabeth Hernandez in the Denver Post. Last Friday, he signed SB24-216, “a new law that requires the state’s public libraries to establish written policies for acquiring, retaining, displaying and using library resources — and governing how to handle any requests to remove books or other resources.”
📺 Annabelle Childers is leaving KRDO, and so is Sean Rice. Both of them are choosing to move on from the Colorado Springs TV station after their contracts went up. They were two of the reporters on a recent series called “Olympic City Identity Crisis” (chronicled in this newsletter) about the extent to which the Springs is living up to its slogan as Olympic City USA.
⚙️ Fresh off his private settlement over his firing from Colorado Public Radio, former host Vic Vela, who created the “Back from Broken” podcast, has said he has some career news he’ll share in the near future. He said to “note the big yellow feathered clue behind me” in a photo of him with Big Bird.
🚫 “The conservative gadfly Dinesh D’Souza’s film and book ‘2000 Mules,’ which pushes false conspiracies about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, has been removed from distribution by its executive producer and publisher,” Christina Wilkie reported for CNBC. The film “got huge promotion from the talk radio hosts at Salem’s KNUS in Denver,” noted Kyle Clark of 9NEWS.
📺 Greg Maffei, the CEO of Colorado-based Liberty Media, told investors at a recent conference that author Mark Robichaux has been working on a new biography about John Malone, wrote Etan Vlessing in the Hollywood Reporter. Known as the “cable cowboy,” Malone is one of the richest people in Colorado. This would be Robichaux’s second Malone tome. He previously authored “Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business.” Malone, who chairs Liberty Media Corp., which invests in broadcasting stations and tech, recently sold $24 million in the company’s stock, according to reports.
🗳 “Thousands of Coloradans responding to a survey by their local newsrooms say candidates competing for their votes this year need to be focused primarily on several broad issues: democracy and good government, the economy and cost of living, the environment, climate and natural resources, immigration and abortion,” wrote Tina Griego and Megan Verlee for Colorado Public Radio about the Voter Voices initiative that seeks to help Colorado newsrooms better cover the 2024 elections.
I’m Corey Hutchins, co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute. For nearly a decade I’ve reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Colorado Media Project is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab, both of which I sometimes write about here. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter hit me up.) Follow me on Threads, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.