Behind the scenes of Kyle Clark's 9NEWS show 'Next'
The news behind the news in Colorado
Following an expert performance moderating a televised debate among six congressional candidates earlier this month, 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark earned plenty of attention.
This newsletter previously reported how some were even calling for him to moderate this week’s Biden-Trump debate, and how late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel dedicated serious time to praising him on a recent show.
Indeed, Clark is “having a moment,” Axios Denver reported on June 7.
This week, though, Coloradans got an inside look behind the scenes of a day in the life of Colorado’s it TV anchor and the innovative show he created in 2016 called “Next” where he delivers the news along with a point of view.
For Denver’s alt-weekly Westword, Michael Roberts spent June 12 tracking Clark from 7:30 a.m. to past midnight and brought readers inside the team that produces what has been the Mile High City’s most-watched nightly newscast. Making appearances in the piece are producer Mallory Harris, digital producer Marilyn Moore, former digital producer Marissa Solomon, reporters Marshall Zelinger and Kelly Reinke, meteorologist Kathy Sabine, and “behind-the-scenes collaborators, including director Cyrus Allen and senior executive producer Nathan Higgins.”
The story offers a history of the show and Clark’s broadcast career, which began in his hometown of Lyons, New York. (As someone who grew up in Upstate New York and went to college in Central New York, I will not be taking a stand on whether Clark is from CNY or the Finger Lakes Region in this newsletter. That might really bring out the trolls.)
Here’s an excerpt from the Westword profile that aptly describes what makes the show different from much of what you tend to see on local TV news:
Next With Kyle Clark, which airs weeknights at 6 p.m., consistently generates both insults and adulation, and that’s one of the best things about it. From its August 2016 bow, Next aspired to break out of what Clark refers to as “the litany of tragedy model: ‘Let me tell you the ten worst things that happened in Colorado,’ then weather and sports and goodnight.” The idea was to take an original angle on big stories, tackle others whose complexities tended to scare off the average reporter, and present them in a manner that was pointed and personal.
Included in the rest of the in-depth piece are details about the origins of the program’s “Word of Thanks” microgiving initiative that Clark began during the pandemic lockdowns. For it, Clark asks viewers to donate to a different Colorado nonprofit each week and kicks in the first $250 donation from his own pocket. “The overall ‘Word of Thanks’ total as of June 12 is over $12.6 million,” Roberts reports.
That’s some very serious local impact. One thing not included in the piece and something I haven’t ever seen raised about “Word of Thanks,” though, is how Clark might feel about endorsing and asking his audience to support an organization that one day might wind up needing some accountability reporting from him or the station.
Over email, he said it is something 9NEWS had discussed since the start.
“If a non-profit featured through the Word of Thanks microgiving campaigns was ever accused of serious wrongdoing, that reporting would be handled by other journalists at 9NEWS and that would be disclosed to our audience,” Clark said. “Given that nearly all media outlets and some individual journalists publicly support non-profits in our community, hopefully every media organization has had similar conversations about how they would handle and disclose possible conflicts involving those non-profits.”
He’s right about 9NEWS not standing particularly alone in this regard.
Denver7, for instance, “features the stories of people who need help” and makes it easy to “help them with a cash donation” through a program called “Denver7 Gives” where it states “one hundred percent of contributions to the fund will be used to help people in our local community.” Beyond nonprofits, I’ve written before about the questionable practice of local TV stations in Colorado helping raise money for local police departments they cover. And, yes, individual journalists do openly support nonprofits (including this journalist) that reflect their values like, say, the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, or others.
Back to the Westword piece, here are some nuggets from it:
“Because Next skews younger than most local newscasts, the incentive to replicate its format would seem high. But there are no overt Next clones airing anywhere in the U.S. and relatively few efforts to do something fresh with the age-old TV news format.”
“…the attention Clark has received from beyond Colorado lately, raises the prospect that a big station in a larger market or a major network might poach him. But when asked twice about whether he's had inquiries from such operations, he initially slides to another subject without addressing the odds of such a jump, then gives the sort of non-answer answer that would do a dodgy politician proud: ‘I’ve had lots of conversations with lots of people.’ But he hastens to add that he loves his current job and has concluded that local TV is even more important now than when he joined 9News seventeen years ago.”
Clark, 40, put in about a 14-hour day on June 12 by Roberts’ calculations. “But Linda Kicak, who joined 9News as news director in March after spending twenty years at Fox31 and KWGN/Channel 2, already knows better than to tell Clark to slow down. ‘That’s how he’s built, and I have to trust that when he needs a break, he’ll take a break,’ she says. But she thinks his work ethic ‘shows how much responsibility he feels and how important it is to him.’”
“These days, convincing average folks — especially those under age fifty — to turn on a television and watch a local news program is tougher than ever. Scads of people in their twenties and thirties follow Clark on social media (he has more than 204,000 followers on X alone) but never tune in, which doesn't do anything for 9News's ratings. News director Kicak concedes that getting more of them to become regular viewers is high on her to-do list.”
Read the whole thing here.
☁️ This week’s newsletter is supported in part by the Regional Air Quality Council, the Front Range’s lead air quality planning organization. They are a great resource for reporters and others in media who cover the science, policy, and progress on local air quality issues, especially the Front Range’s biggest challenge in the summer: colorless, odorless ground-level ozone. June through August are usually the worst months each year for this invisible pollutant in Colorado, so if you’re working on any timely air quality stories, email David Sabados, Communications, Programs, and Government Affairs Director (dsabados@raqc.org) to learn more about the RAQC’s work and how they can be a reporting resource. ☁️
Another printing plant wheezes out in Colorado
Prairie Mountain Media, a brand representing a cluster of Colorado newspapers financially controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund, announced this week that it will shut down its plant in Berthoud.
Set for Aug. 12, the closure of this 60,000-square-foot printing facility located between Denver and Fort Collins will cost 40 people their jobs. Newspapers formerly printed there will now roll out of the Denver Post’s production plant.
From the Greeley Tribune:
In recent years, high production costs and a shortage of skilled press operators have presented challenges for PMM’s printing plant, with a press malfunction affecting production over several days in late December and again this weekend causing delayed delivery of several newspapers.
The move comes one year after the nation’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, abruptly mothballed its workhorse printing plant at the Pueblo Chieftain, throwing some 80 publications into a tailspin.
Last fall, a working group of Colorado journalism advocacy organizations published a report about the state’s newspaper printing industry that painted a dire picture.
However, in March, the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that owns the roughly two-dozen Denver-area Colorado Community Media newspapers, bought a used printing press from Canada and moved it to Denver.
That also meant the Denver Post lost CCM as a client. The Aspen Daily News also left Prairie Mountain Media this month for another press in Gypsum, the announcement read.
“The strategic changes made by two of our commercial partners, the challenge of recruiting skilled press operators and the need for significant and costly press upgrades forced our hand,” PMM General Manager Jill Stravolemos said in a statement. “The Denver production team has successfully and reliably printed the Boulder Daily Camera and the Cañon City Daily Record for years. I’m confident they’ll do a great job.”
Local media regurgitate ‘bogus’ fentanyl stats
Once again, a local journalist in Colorado is warning others about stepping on rakes when writing about fentanyl.
In 2022, this newsletter covered how local media were uncritically reporting questionable claims by law enforcement that officers were falling ill simply by being near the substance. Some news outlets eventually walked back their reporting after then-Denver Gazette reporter Seth Klamann, a thoughtful journalist who often writes about substance use, challenged the narrative.
“We’re still dealing with the fallouts of how heroin and crack were discussed publicly decades ago,” he told me at the time. He had gone further than just quoting police, and consulted medical toxicology experts and addiction specialists.
This week, it was reporter Chase Woodruff for the nonprofit digital site Colorado Newsline who was chastising some in local media for uncritically regurgitating a statistic from a conservative think tank.
From his story, headlined “No, DEA didn’t seize enough fentanyl in 2023 to kill everyone in Colorado ‘36 times over’”:
A conservative think tank’s false claim about the amount of fentanyl seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in Colorado last year is being spread by media and political figures.
The Common Sense Institute’s eye-catching assertion that the DEA seized enough fentanyl to “kill every Coloradan 36 times over” headlined a report it released this week on the costs of the synthetic opioid crisis. A CSI researcher led off an interview with Fox31 in Denver on Thursday repeating the claim, and it was cited in a Friday editorial by the conservative Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board.
But the claim rests on an elementary misunderstanding of the data reported by the DEA and the form in which fentanyl is most commonly used and distributed. Calculations included in the report, authored by CSI economist Steven Byers and former Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey, show that the authors assumed the 425 kilograms of fentanyl pills seized in Colorado in 2023 represented pure fentanyl.
After Woodruff raised the issue with a DEA spokesman, that person “confirmed to Newsline that its ‘stats do not reflect pure fentanyl.’” More from the piece:
If all 2.61 million pills seized by the DEA in Colorado last year contained 2 milligrams of fentanyl — considered a potentially fatal dose, especially for first-time users — their total lethal dosage is more than 80 times smaller than what CSI’s report claimed.
Following a Newsline inquiry, the group updated the report’s findings to read: “Depending on the purity of the seized drugs, 2023’s seizures could be enough to kill every Coloradan 36 times or to kill one in every three Coloradans.” But even at the upper limit of 5.1 milligrams per pill, the seized drugs would contain only about 6.5 fatal million doses. Colorado’s population is 5.9 million.
Seth Klamann, who now writes for the Denver Post, took notice.
“More to the point, the ‘enough to kill XXX people’ framing of fentanyl perpetuates the false narrative that it’s a chemical weapon or a WMD,” he said on social media in response to Newsline’s reporting. “Fentanyl is a drug. It is more potent and too often fatal. But it’s still a drug, and framing it otherwise doesn’t help folks using it.”
There are some news outlets in Colorado who are very quick to re-publish almost anything this think tank in question produces.
For his part, Woodruff, who is one of the few Colorado journalists to consistently write standalone stories that point out when other media outlets fall prey to misinformation, had some warnings for some in the press who might be willing to continue doing so.
“Every Colorado journalist should take note of the Common Sense Institute crossing the line into unambiguous misinformation,” he said online. “They’re continuing to spread this claim, which remains false even with all of the stealth-edited qualifiers.”
He added that the think tank continued to include a “bogus chart and several additional claims making the same elementary error over and over again” and there was “no note or transparency about the error, and the claim remains uncorrected by media who cited the CSI report.”
Furthermore, “there is good reason to believe that this misinformation causes real harm, as bystanders and even first responders who may be in a position to offer someone help instead hesitate out of fear that has no basis in reality,” Woodruff said.
In hopes of getting more eyes on this, I’ve submitted it as a claim to the Colorado Sun’s “Fact Brief” initiative for potential inclusion.
A rural-urban divide in the cost of publishing obits in Colorado newspapers?
Sue Kerr penned a first-person essay in the Pittsburgh news outlet PublicSource about how costly it can be these days to publish an obituary in a major metropolitan newspaper.
“I did the math after a [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette] employee sent me a rate sheet,” she wrote. “By my estimate, the obituary I wanted to run would have cost more than $600, including funeral home fees, for a one-day notice.”
Here in Colorado, some journalists who have recently tried to place obits weighed in and shared the cost.
When Colorado Times Recorder reporter Heidi Beedle’s friend died this week, she wrote her obituary and submitted it to the local paper. The Gazette “wanted $985 to run the one I wrote (500-ish words) with a photo,” Beedle said.
When Denver 9NEWS reporter Steve Staeger’s dad died and he wrote his obit, he says a local funeral home told him it would cost around $1,000 to place.
Things seem to change, though, when you get out of a large Colorado city.
Those prices are “insane,” Ouray County Plaindealer co-owner Erin McIntyre said online. “We’ve purposely kept the price low for obits at the Plaindealer, finding ways to make ends meet otherwise, because we think they're so important to the families and the community... and for historical records.”
Most obits that run in her West Slope paper cost less than $75 and include a photo.
“We don’t charge for obits with a local connection to the county,” says Niki Turner, who publishes the Rio Blanco Herald Times in the rural Meeker area. Meanwhile, “we publish obits for free,” says Jordan Hedberg, publisher of the Wet Mountain Tribune newspaper in Custer County.
Laura Frank, who runs the Colorado News Collaborative that works to help our state’s local news organizations thrive, said some large newspapers here are using an obit company that “takes almost all the revenue, thus the high costs for consumers.”
The issue, she added, might make for a ripe market opportunity, perhaps for an entrepreneur or software developer.
📢 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. 🌿
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.
⚙️ About a month after his private settlement over his firing from Colorado Public Radio, former host Vic Vela, who created the “Back from Broken” podcast, has announced he has taken the position of host of New Mexico in Focus at New Mexico PBS. “I’m simply over the moon about being back in New Mexico, a place that has such profound personal, familial and spiritual meaning in my life,” he said in a statement.
📰 Shavonne Blades, publisher of the monthly Yellow Scene magazine in Boulder County, wrote an item this week about how much she hates “arguing with others about how advertising works.”
🐕💩 “The thing I’ve really liked and learned about journalism is that every time you get on a roll — you have three great days, you have scoops and stories that you know everyone’s reading, and you’re feeling really cocky and you’re feeling good — that fourth day, you make a major mistake on a story or you get scooped on a story that’s important to you. And you feel like dog shit,” said Scott Condon, 62, who reflected on “39 years of valley journalism” with Josie Taris of the Aspen Daily News.
📲 “I’m not sure us parents need definitive cause and effect about mental health to do something about the scourge of social media,” wrote Gazette executive editor Vince Bzdek in a personal column this week. “We all know it creates problems for our kids.”
❌ In last week’s newsletter, I wrote that 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark had “sarcastically” said a political figure was being subtle by likening Clark to a Denver talk-radio host who was murdered by neo-Nazis. I had read Clark’s statement too quickly. He very clearly said the reference was “not subtle.” And no kidding! Following the unhinged post, the individual’s Twitter account was suspended.
💨 Nicholas Hunt has left Denver’s 5280 magazine as its senior editor. “It’s been the best job I’ve ever had, but an amazing opportunity came up I couldn’t turn down,” he said on social media. “More on that later.”
🆕 The College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder has “named five exceptional journalists to its 2024-25 class of Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism.”
⚖️ “David Wheeler, who sued U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert for defamation, announced Wednesday that he arrived at a settlement agreement with the congresswoman from Colorado,” Quentin Young reported for Colorado Newsline. “Nothing in the settlement agreement prevents him from further reporting … on Boebert,” Wheeler’s lawyer said. Wheeler did not reveal the terms of the settlement, telling a Newsline reporter they were “confidential.”
☀️ “Thanks to more than 380 Sun readers, we have met our goal of raising $30,000 in donations over the past six weeks,” the outlet reported. “That $30,000 (and counting!) will go a long way in supporting everything it takes to run our nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom — including writing, photographing, editing and producing the in-depth stories you count on from The Sun.” The fundraising campaign was branded as “Democracy Days.”
🎙 Aspen Public Radio’s All Things Considered Host Halle Zander interviewed “local, regional, and national journalists, local elected officials, and program leaders about how civic engagement plays a role in strengthening our democracies.”
🔗 A New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof headlined “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?” links to a news story in the Willamette Week alt-weekly by Colorado College journalism student Veronica Bianco who is interning there this summer.
📍 “I’m happy to report we’ve broken through to real communication with the folks at the Medill Local News map project, and they’re now taking our requests for corrections seriously,” wrote Alice Dreger for Local News Blues.
🏳️🌈 “Pride Parade in Denver with our CBS News Colorado team!,” the station’s general manager, Tim Wieland, posted on LinkedIn including a photo of the staff with a banner reading “CBS Colorado Celebrates PRIDE.”
🪦 Longtime journalist Donald Charles Bauder died “at his home in Salida, Colorado,” the Times of San Diego reported. “After retiring from the San Diego Union-Tribune, he and Ellen moved to Salida where he continued for 15 years to write columns and feature articles for the San Diego Reader, the wonders of the internet allowing him to work remotely. He fully retired in 2018.”
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.