🛡️ Kansas AG's office wanted a Colorado reporter's notes. Then this happened.

Your week in the news behind the news in Colorado

Aug 05, 2021

‘It would have revealed anonymous sources’

Before Justin Wingerter moved to Colorado in 2019 to report on politics for the Denver Post he was a journalist in Kansas where he covered a wrongful conviction of a man named Floyd Bledsoe.

The stranger-than-fiction saga gripped him, and he wrote a book about the case called Four Shots In Oskie: Murder and Innocence in Middle America. The book came out this spring.

But this week, the reporter found himself entangled, albeit briefly, in his own legal drama involving the Kansas courts and prosecutors. Last Friday, he learned the state’s attorney general’s office appeared ready to serve him with a broad subpoena commanding Wingerter to turn over information he gathered while reporting his book. (Bledsoe, the subject of his book, is suing law enforcement authorities in federal court, some of whom are represented by the Kansas AG’s office.)

This notable state government request of a journalist’s news gathering material specifically asked for “any and all notes, audio recordings, video recordings, memoranda, reports, correspondence, and any other materials which were prepared and/or maintained by you which relate in any way to the authorship of the book ‘Four Shots in Oskie’ or any news article related to the claims in this lawsuit.”

Such a subpoena would have included “leaked documents and confidential conversations,” Wingerter told me Tuesday. “It would have revealed anonymous sources. As a result, I could not comply with this unconstitutional subpoena.”

But then a strange thing happened.

From the Kansas Reflector, which, like Colorado Newsline, is in the States Newsroom network of nonprofit news sites:

After Kansas Reflector published this story, the attorney general’s office filed a notice with the court to withdraw the subpoena. A spokesman for Attorney General Derek Schmidt blamed an assistant for issuing the subpoena without his knowledge or approval.

Good lord. Blamed an assistant! There must be a “What’s the Matter With Kansas” joke in here somewhere. Anyway, more from the Reflector:

Wingerter, now a reporter for the Denver Post, is represented by attorneys with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Based on interviews, court documents and confidential police reports, his book explains how powerful individuals in the small town of … Oskaloosa carried out an injustice against Bledsoe. Wingerter said he discovered the subpoena because he periodically checks for new filings in the federal lawsuit.
“I was looking at another case, thought I would take a quick look at the Bledsoe case, see if anything’s new, and, ‘Oh, a subpoena’s been filed. That’s interesting. Who’s going to be subpoenaed this time? Oh, that’s my name,’” Wingerter said. Federal courts have determined the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects newsgatherers from being forced to reveal news sources and confidential information. Kansas law also makes it clear that a journalist can’t be compelled to turn over information.

Wingerter said over email Tuesday he was confident that the U.S. Constitution and case law were on his side throughout the brief ordeal, and he’s glad the Kansas attorney general withdrew the summons. “I won,” he said. “More importantly, the First Amendment won. The government lost.”

The journalist credited lawyer Sarah Matthews at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for instrumental support. “She was ready to fight back and win as soon as the subpoena was served,” Wingerter said. “In the end, that wasn’t necessary, but her prep work was crucial.”

The Sunflower State SNAFU has another Colorado link to source protection. This is from a KCUR radio report on the short-lived subpoena threat:

“The Kansas shield law is a state law that governs state privileges,” said Bernie Rhodes, a Kansas City media attorney not involved in the case. “It does not create a federal privilege.”
Rhodes said, however, that the federal circuit that includes Kansas has embraced a so-called common law reporter’s privilege. That grants journalists a qualified privilege under the First Amendment against revealing news sources and confidential information.

That could be the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers multiple states in the West. The embrace he references could be a judge’s 2005 opinion in a case out of Colorado involving a subpoena for news-gathering materials from reporters Marianne Goodland, then at the Silver & Gold Record, and Julie Poppen, then at The Rocky Mountain News.

Read the judge’s opinion in favor of the reporters from that Colorado case here.

Justin Wingerter @JustinWingerter

The press is not free if the government can take a reporter’s notes and reveal his sources. I will not back down to this or any government. I will win. More to come.

kansasreflector.comKansas A.G. subpoenas reporter’s notes from book on wrongful murder conviction | Kansas ReflectorThe Kansas Attorney General’s Office issued a subpoena commanding a journalist to turn over information he gathered while writing a book and news stories about a Jefferson County man who served 16 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. After Kansas Reflector published this story, th…

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APPLY: The #newsCOneeds grant applications are open

This week, the Colorado Media Project opened its grant applications for locally owned newsrooms looking for a chance to earn a $5,000 matching grant through the #newsCOneeds program.

Last year, 24 newsrooms got a much-needed boost to their bottom lines (and morale) from the initiative during the pandemic.

For the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to some of the participants and learn about what worked for them during the unique year-end fundraising drive and how it benefited these outlets in different ways. They included for-profit rural newspapers, an urban city newsletter, public radio stations, and a small newspaper chain, among others. The state-based program is something that could likely be replicated elsewhere.

Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote for the CMP website rounding up the impact of the campaign and some of what I heard from those who participated:

The 2020 #newsCOneeds matching challenge began with a goal of raising $250,000 among the 25 selected Colorado outlets in a single month. Participating news organizations included small, locally-owned rural and urban newspapers, local public radio stations, statewide digital outlets, nonprofit newsrooms, a public benefit corporation, a big city alt-weekly, a one-person startup, and more. In the end, #newsCOneeds 2020 doubled that, helping to raise more than $578,000 from 5,277 individuals for nonprofit and locally-owned newsrooms across Colorado.
Newsroom leaders say the money helped hire freelancers, pay for more news gathering, update websites, purchase necessary equipment, keep journalists reporting on COVID-19 in their communities, and cover operating costs — for months in some cases.

Since 2018, Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, has supported the #newsCOneeds matching challenge “as a statewide campaign to help Colorado newsrooms spotlight the positive impacts they are making in their communities, and to build trust in and support for local public-service journalism.”

This year’s campaign begins Nov. 30, which is #GivingNewsDay. Selected newsrooms will have until Dec. 31 to raise $5,000 from individual contributors in order to claim the match. Find out if your Colorado news organization is eligible for the opportunity to become a 2021 cohort grantee, and apply here. Eligible outlets must be members of the Colorado Press Association or partners in the Colorado News Collaborative. (TIP: The deadline to apply to CPA or COLab is Aug. 20. So get on that.)

Another new Hunter S. Thompson film focuses on Colorado

As the life and times of public figures of bygone eras get a second look through a more critical lens of awareness, the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson is far from canceled.

The complicated character of American letters — and the most famous former resident of Woody Creek, Colorado — is about to get another cinematic send up.

Last year, Thompson was the subject of the documentary Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb co-directed by Daniel Joseph Watkins and Ajax Phillips, about Thompson’s psychedelic-era run for Pitkin County Sheriff. This time, Fear and Loathing in Aspen, produced by Bobby Kennedy III and also tracking the sheriff’s campaign, is an indie film dramatization based on true events. Actor Jay Bulger plays the pioneer of Gonzo journalism.

This latest movie, filmed in Silverton, had been on the shelf since the pandemic put the kibosh on the South by Southwest film festival where it was scheduled to premier, the Aspen Times reported last week, adding, “Kennedy and producers have declined or not responded to interview requests from The Aspen Times since the SXSW cancelation.”

John Wenzel has a write-up about the new treatment in The Denver Post:

The late author of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (among many other books) has been portrayed by Bill Murray, Johnny Depp and Lee Cummings on screen, where the actors have struck compelling but cartoonish figures obsessed with drugs and guns as much as literary pursuits.
Thompson’s life inspired and often encouraged that. But when he died by suicide at the age of 67 on Feb. 20, 2005, his persona seemed reduced to a handful of tropes. Crumpled hat, sunglasses and omnipresent cigarette holder. Unpredictable, violent personality. Woody Creek’s unofficial mayor and gadfly, who babbled in unending streams, often indecipherably.
Those stereotypes can’t possibly provide full pictures of Thompson’s life, said Bobby Kennedy III, who first met Thompson as a child when visiting Thompson’s 42-acre Owl Farm compound outside Aspen with his father, political scion Robert Kennedy Jr. (son of Robert F. Kennedy).

Wenzel interviewed Kennedy for the piece, reporting the producer is “hoping his new film, ‘Fear and Loathing in Aspen,’ adds more real-life depth to Thompson’s persona and politics, which feel prescient in Thompson’s calls to demilitarize police, eradicate America’s racial and class disparities, and clean up the environment.”

Find out what else Kennedy told him here.

Watch: Colorado newspaper editors discuss their new ‘right-to-be-forgotten’ policies

Last week, Denver Post Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo and Aspen Times Editor David Krause appeared for a Zoom panel discussion about new policies their newsrooms have adopted to more thoughtfully cover crime in the digital age.

COLab’s Susan Greene moderated.

Based on an informal survey Greene said she conducted among Colorado newsrooms, she believes that while “many” news outlets in the state have unpublished people’s names and amended online stories, “most don’t have written policies on when they’ll do so and very few have sort of indicated publicly what those policies are.”

Greene probed Colacioppo and Krause about their own policies and dug into broader reforms in criminal justice reporting.

At one point, The Denver Post editor spoke about a longstanding problem of some local news outlets taking the “easy” route of writing up crime stories: “Press releases come out, the police put it on Twitter, you just knock them out.” (Narrator, wagging finger: Don’t do that.) But that’s “not actually the world we live in,” Colacioppo said. “There’s just so much more going on in a community.”

Watch the hourlong discussion here:

More Colorado media odds & ends

🌴 Programming note: This newsletter is on vacation mode, meaning it might hit your inbox with less frequency or with lighter content for a while.

🎉 Congrats to the five emerging Colorado journalists selected for NPR’s NextGenRadio program with Colorado Public Radio.

🔥 I’m excited about the announcement of this $844,000 National Science Foundation grant project to study soil after wildfires that includes a partnership with Colorado College’s Journalism Institute.

💨 Dave Sachs is leaving Denverite, and Denver. “I love my job and the people of this city, but my partner got a unique opportunity in Barcelona,” he says. “We're moving there in mid-September with our portable little baby.”

🚨 Two cases are testing Colorado’s body camera laws, 9News reports.

🌽 Former Denver Post politics reporter Nic Garcia has left the Dallas Morning News to join the Des Moines Register in Iowa as its politics editor. That makes him the second former Colorado politics reporter on the paper’s staff — and the second Nic(k) — as he joins Nick Coltrain.

🤦‍♂️ The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition called out the Secretary of State’s office, saying, “Coloradans shouldn’t have to pay hundreds of dollars to see elected officials’ personal financial disclosures.”

💥 The ‘P’ in CPR stood for Paolo Zialcita one day this week on the site.

☀️ Facebook will give $20,000 to The Colorado Sun. The lists of who get such grants “are always such a huge bummer,” opined one Colorado journalist, noting how “what once were/should be huge influential news orgs” are now “begging for the change between Zuckerberg’s couch cushions.” (Such is the state of the local news business these days.) Others weighed in on the grant size, too — “not even enough to pay one reporter” — and Sun editor Larry Ryckman responded.

📻 Colorado Public Radio’s Ann Marie Awad, a community audio producer who hosts the On Something podcast, said she’s leaving the station for freelance land.

💸 A Boulder Daily Camera newspaper subscriber lamented another price hike, adding, “Somehow I don't think that’s going toward a living wage for the staff.” And there will be “three times the content as compared to a few months ago, right?” a local lawyer asked rhetorically.

📺 Kelly Werthmann, who has “covered every major story in Colorado in the last decade,” is the new weekend anchor at CBS4.

⚰️ Erica Meltzer of Chalkbeat gave respect to The Denver Post and Colorado Public Radio for “grappling with Dick Lamm’s racism in their articles on his passing,” in reference to the former Democratic Colorado governor who died last week. “Most obits left it out,” she added. “It’s uncomfortable but part of who he was.”

🌭 The Denver Press Club is hosting an “outdoor cookout to celebrate a super summer return” this Friday.

🚰 Alex Hager is joining KUNC where he’ll “cover the Colorado River basin and water in the West.”

🗞️ There are eight — yes, eight — job listings for newsroom positions at The Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs and the digital Denver Gazette.

🎒 Government Technology covered Colorado’s new media literacy law. “I don’t think we should shut down any information,” a Democratic lawmaker who sponsored the bill told the magazine. “But too many people are masquerading as real news and credible information and they’re not.”

🎊 Rebecca Boyle, “an award-winning science journalist and author based in Colorado Springs,” has been selected as a Knight Science Journalism Program fellow.

😬 Asked about career highlights by Broadcasting + Cable, Walt DeHaven, the vice president and general manager of CBS4 in Denver who retired this week, “responded that the biggest, most memorable stories are often tragedies, and not exactly highlights. He mentioned seeing the KCNC team coalesce amidst wildfires and mass shootings.”

📺 “Two new broadcasters have joined the Colorado Springs airwaves,” The Gazette in Colorado Springs reports. “Meanwhile, a local sports director has departed.”

🎣 Boulder journalist Sage Marshall has landed a dream job as news editor of Field & Stream magazine. “It’s been a roller-coaster ride as a freelancer and the past couple of months have been especially challenging on a personal level,” he says. “But I’m excited to join a team of talented storytellers.”

I’m Corey Hutchins, interim director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute, the Colorado-based contributor for Columbia Journalism Review’s United States Project, and a journalist for multiple news outlets. The Colorado Media Project, where I write case studies, is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab, both of which I sometimes write about here. (If you would like to join CMP and Grasslands in underwriting this newsletter, hit me up.) Follow me on Twitter, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.

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