Colorado journalists talk DEI in their newsroom

The news behind the news in Colorado

As Republican President Donald Trump and his administration attempt to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, one Colorado news outlet has “leaned in.”

That’s according to a handful of journalists working for Colorado Public Radio who appeared for a panel discussion at the Denver Press Club on Wednesday.

Moderator Esteban Hernandez of Axios Denver had asked the journalists how Trump 2.0, and a crackdown on DEI specifically, might have changed the way they go about their work.

“I have changed nothing in what I personally do,” said Chandra Thomas Whitfield, a host and producer for the statewide show Colorado Matters. “In fact, I’ve probably leaned in a little bit.”

Asked for examples, Whitfield said she has recently started inviting members of the Colorado Ethnic Media Exchange onto the show to highlight what they’re doing.

“I would say at CPR, we have pushed back on this idea that we cannot acknowledge differences and uplift and educate people about other communities,” she said. “I think we all have to make that decision, and we’ve decided to lean into it, specifically on Colorado Matters.”

Paolo Zialcita, a neighborhood reporter for Denverite, which is owned by CPR, said he agreed that the work of the organization’s journalists hasn’t changed.

Newsrooms, he said, “need to take stock of who they employ.” He said they also should understand that having people on staff who can speak multiple languages and gain the trust of some communities faster than someone who might not is important.

Nathan Fernando-Frescas, senior host of All Things Considered at CPR, said he agreed with a lot of what his colleagues said. He added that he makes an effort to let community members know he lives here — and isn’t flying in from above to report on them.

Marco Cummings of the Denver Post organized the event, titled “DEI on Deadline,” on behalf of the state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, of which we are both board members.

The comments from the journalists offered a counter to a national trend as DEI efforts at news organizations across the country have seen some decline. In September, Hanaa’ Tameez reported in Nieman Lab that “race, diversity, and identity products” were “being shut down” at publications including Politico, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post.

In November, Riddhi Setty asked in a headline for Columbia Journalism Review, “Has the Media Reached the End of Its DEI Era?”

Last year, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, which owns the newspapers in Fort Collins and Pueblo that bookend Colorado’s Front Range, announced it would stop publishing demographic and diversity data about those in its company as it adapts to the “evolving regulatory environment.” (The company also “revamped its corporate site to remove mentions of diversity,” Nieman Lab reported.)

In a report last month, the media reform group Free Press published what it called an “authoritative report analyzing the retreat in 2025 of the nation’s largest media companies from prior commitments to promote diversity, equity and inclusion principles in their workplaces and policies.”

Five months ago, Colorado Public Radio ended its years-long partnership with Denver7 on its Real Talk program, saying, “in today’s current fiscal climate, we have to focus on our core platforms of radio and digital.” The show had launched in 2023, promising to focus on “stories and experiences of underserved communities.”

Six years ago, alongside the Black Lives Matter movement and protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, news outlets across the country, including CPR, were reckoning with the experiences of journalists of color as outlets grappled with the makeup of their newsrooms and their approaches to coverage.

In June of that year, at least five newsrooms in Colorado made public pledges about how they were approaching their work — from hiring practices and denouncing racism to their plans for future coverage. Two separate outlets used the same phrase: “Silence is not an option.”

On Wednesday’s panel, Hernandez mentioned that he currently works for a news organization that “initially allowed reporters to participate in the George Floyd protests in 2020,” but has “since reversed that policy.”

Here were some more nuggets from the conversation:

• Asked about the Trump administration cutting public funding for NPR and what impacts it has had on CPR, Zialcita said he has never seen the station’s audience more united and supportive. “It’s not only showing financially … it’s also showing on the streets.” Whitfield said CPR has benefited from “a lot of rage giving,” but the problem is “will that be sustainable?” (Colorado Public Radio has joined a lawsuit with NPR in suing the Trump administration over the funding cuts.)

• “There are audiences that have never held our trust,” Zialcita said at one point. He referenced some recent difficulty doing a story in Denver’s Little Saigon District. “People there, they were inherently distrustful even though I looked just like them,” he said. “They would tell me they don’t talk to press. They would tell me some TV station barged in the other day and tried to talk to them and they just didn’t want to get involved.” He said he was able to win some sources over by explaining his goals, but some needed more time.

• Yolánda L. Chase, the founder and CEO of Diversity Way-Maker and Intersect Global Leadership Institute, was also on the panel and added her perspective from a non-journalist point of view.

• When artificial intelligence came up, some on the panel talked about the limitations of software CPR uses to track what sources its journalists are quoting in stories, and also some issues with transcription services for non-English-speaking sources. Fernando-Frescas described the intent of the software as a good thing.

There was plenty more, so watch a video of the discussion here.

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➡️ 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 will be working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.

• As diversity, equity, and inclusion rollbacks and funding gaps put pressure on media outlets serving Coloradans of color, the Colorado Ethnic Media Exchange is building collective power for trusted, community‑rooted outlets to thrive. Read how this coalition is strengthening local journalism and why it matters for equity, democracy, and health across Colorado.

Recently, 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. ⬅️

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‘Complete mess’ involving Indy alt-weekly archives should serve as a warning

Publishers and writers might learn from an attempt by a local news organization in Colorado Springs to bring back the digital archives of a 30-year-old newspaper after acquiring its assets.

A story this week by Heila Ershadi in the nonprofit Pikes Peak Bulletin newspaper details what a headache it has been for publisher Dirk Hobbs to revive the online archives of the former Indy alternative weekly in a meaningful way.

“Hobbs told the Bulletin in December he’d make the Indy archives available in January of this year – but those plans have collided with a harsh technical reality,” Ershadi wrote.

More from the story:

Currently, digital issues from 2023 are accessible with no paywall via socoinsider.com and housed on the reader platform Issuu. Individual issues may be searched, but there is no way to search the collection as a whole. And, of course, it’s only one year’s worth of material.

“The older Indy files from previous ownership teams and archivist that were given to us are a complete mess,” Hobbs told the Bulletin. “[It is] not necessarily anyone’s fault – since different and less capable technology was used during the former years and ownership periods.”

Hobbs said the “severely scattered files” spanned “nearly 7 [terabytes] of data in a file system that is not easily managed.” For reference, today’s desktop computers typically come with 1-2 terabytes of data storage.

“As a result, we’re now spending an inordinate amount of time piecing them together,” he said. “This is proving to be a massive undertaking since the files were not done in a consistent manner through the years and as technology evolved. There are numerous corrupt files as well.”

As more and more local newspapers change hands, maintaining proper digital archives will become increasingly important.

Now would be a ripe opportunity for any local news organization in Colorado to take a look at how it is currently storing its archives, assess what might happen to them if the paper went under or was sold, and make appropriate safeguards.

It’s also a good time for writers to consider making PDF files of all of their published work in the event that an outlet they published it in succumbs to link rot or loses their archives in a digital sinkhole.

For her story, Ershadi reached out to get my take on how this particular archival mess has played out in Colorado’s second largest city.

“We often hear about newspapers disappearing from communities and what that means for the future, but we should also be as concerned with what it can mean for the past when digital archives vanish,” I told her. “We’re talking about decades of civic memory that is very important for this city. I’m sure there are plenty of fat cats and power brokers in Colorado Springs who would be pretty pleased to know that certain things the Indy reported about them are no longer readily available. Ask yourself who that serves.”

Coloradans could vote on a ‘Right to Know’ ballot measure for more transparency

“It is declared to be the public policy of this state that all public records shall be open for inspection by any person at reasonable times,” reads Colorado’s state law.

But a coalition has organized to put a question to voters on the upcoming November ballot that would enshrine a “Right to Know” in the state’s Constitution.

From Sara Wilson at Colorado Newsline:

A ballot initiative filed Friday by the Independence Institute and the League of Women Voters of Colorado would codify that value in Article II of the constitution by establishing the “fundamental constitutional right of all persons to know the affairs of all levels of state and local government that guarantees access to public proceedings and public records.”

The Colorado Open Meetings Law, first passed in 1972, requires that most meetings of state and local governmental bodies are properly noticed and open to the public. That means everyone can attend a city council meeting, for example, or request correspondence between state lawmakers, with some exceptions.

But the initiative mentions recent restrictions on that law. In 2024, the Legislature narrowed the definition of “public business” within the state’s open meeting law as it applies to the General Assembly. Last year, the Legislature passed a bill that would have extended the response timeline for records requests, but Gov. Jared Polis vetoed it. Both bills have drawn [criticism] from the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition and other groups.

“A healthy democracy requires informed understanding and public participation in government decision-making. The League of Women Voters of Colorado believes that the people’s right to know is fundamental in a government of, by and for the people,” Beth Hendrix, the executive director of the LWV of Colorado, said in a statement.

Here’s more on the background for how this came together, from Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition:

The transparency proposal is the product of several months’ work by a diverse alliance of groups that also includes the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, Colorado Common Cause, the Colorado Broadcasters Association, the Colorado Press Association and the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.

“The most amazing part of this process has been the incredibly diverse group of organizations and activists who are demanding the right to know what goes on in government,” co-proponent Jon Caldara, president of the libertarian Independence Institute, told CFOIC. “Groups that have been pitted against each other on every conceivable political issue agree on one thing — government in Colorado is becoming dramatically more opaque, and democracy cannot last when those in power work in the dark.”

Violators of the new measure could have to pay a minimum of $1,000 per violation. At least 55% of voters would have to approve the question for it to pass if it gets on the ballot.

Meanwhile, a judge awards nearly $150K in suit over a ‘vague’ public meeting notice

As advocates push for more transparency from public officials in Colorado, one judge has put governments across the state on notice.

From the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition:

A judge ordered the payment of $148,822 in attorney fees and court costs to a parent who won an open meetings case against the Woodland Park school board for its discussion of a charter school MOU under a vague “BOARD HOUSEKEEPING” agenda item.

Erin O’Connell’s lawsuit “sent a message to public bodies across Colorado,” wrote Teller County District Court Judge William Moller in a decision issued Friday. “Based on the ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court, government entities can be held accountable for their actions by being forced to pay an opposing party’s fees and costs. Consequently, I find the results of the litigation far exceeded what defendants’ counsel argues because the litigation results have state-wide implications.”

It took four years of legal wrangling for this to play out.

Colorado’s Sunshine Laws require governments to post notice of meetings at least 24 hours in advance with “specific agenda information where possible.”

Basically, the judge found that a citizen had called out a local school board for violating that law. One judge said the school board had made “a conscious decision to hide a controversial issue.”

The school board cleaned up its act after getting sued and then tried to argue it shouldn’t have to pay attorney’s fees and court costs to the citizen who filed the suit because it had pulled itself together in a subsequent meeting.

The judge said the school board should pay.

“The position argued by the School Board would, had the Colorado Supreme Court adopted it, have allowed the School Board to escape repercussions for its actions,” the judge wrote. “Similarly, it would have allowed this school board, and other public bodies, to violate the COML with relative impunity because any violation could be remedied by a remedial cure.”

No doubt, headlines like these are likely to bolster any campaign seeking to persuade voters that Colorado has a transparency problem that a certain ballot measure might help mitigate.

He’s baaaack. West Slope man ‘competent’ to stand trial for accused strangling of TV reporter

A 40-year-old 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 has been cleared to stand trial.

A month ago, a Grand Junction judge had declared a mistrial because she thought the defendant, Patrick Egan, might be off his rocker.

But the same judge has now given him the A-OK to get back in the dock.

From Amanda Pampuro of Courthouse News:

“I will make the finding that based on the evaluation presented, Mr. Egan is competent to proceed with the matters,” said 21st Judicial District Judge Jennilynn Lawrence. … Lawrence will release Egan on a $20,000 cash bond with requirements to undergo mental health treatment, continue taking prescribed medications, and remain 100 yards away from the victim and his former employer.

Victoria Fazzino, deputy attorney for Colorado’s 21st Judicial District, reiterated her concerns about Egan taking his prescribed medications.

“The report shows there are still concerns with staying on meds, even in the jail,” Fazzino told the court.

Following the mistrial, Egan requested a hearing before a new judge to appoint a new public defender, a matter Lawrence is seeking to address this week so that trial dates may be scheduled.

The weeklong trial last month was a bit of a clown show and ended up completely off the rails on its final day.

Some testimony from the trial centered around the extent to which Egan tried to allegedly strangle reporter Ja’Ronn Alex, who was working for KKCO/KJCT in Grand Junction, at the time before Alex’s co-workers and another witness pulled him off. Part of the incident, including audio of Egan yelling at Alex from his taxi until he rushed the reporter at the station, was caught on Egan’s taxi dashcam. The news station’s security camera also recorded part of the incident but testimony indicated some of it was obscured by a Christmas tree.

Some of Egan’s friends testified that they didn’t think he was some big Trumper. And his attorney said there was a reason for why Egan did what he did. The attack, his lawyer said at the trial, was “because of a medical reaction to Benadryl, not a political bias,” according to the Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction.

But the jury never got to decide because the judge took issue with Egan’s bizarre behavior in court, including comments he made about the clocks in the courthouse.

“I dream of a day when the mental health services in this state are such that I can recess this trial, get Mr. Egan the help he needs, and pick this up next week,” the Polis-appointed judge said when declaring the mistrial. “Unfortunately, we are not in this place in this state or this country. It’s going to take months to get Mr. Egan the help he needs to stand trial before this court.”

We’ll see if the next trial, should it happen, goes any more smoothly.

Industry site wonders if 9NEWS suitor Nexstar will ‘allow’ more ‘solid’ journalism

Denver’s 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark is once again ruminating about his role as a man on an island among his colleagues in the MSM in the way he chooses to cover state politicians.

“Should journalists cover extremism or ignore it and deny it oxygen?” he asked on social media.

His question came as he made waves this week by confronting a Republican lawmaker who is running for governor about some serious allegations the candidate has made on the stump. That lawmaker, Scott Bottoms, told a crowd recently that when he becomes governor he will shut down what he called “pedophile rings” in state government.

In a broadcast about it, Clark’s co-anchor said the candidate’s comments, made without providing evidence, have “a lot of state leaders worried about political violence and what this will lead to.”

In Clark’s “unscheduled interview” with Bottoms at the Capitol, the candidate denied saying some things. Clark brought the receipts and rolled some tape of Bottoms making claims at campaign events and on talk radio.

In our polarized political moment, it’s not a stretch to imagine people who like Bottoms or have sympathies to his tribe simply won’t appreciate a journalist asking him to back up things he’s said during his campaign or to provide clarifications about conflicting statements he has made.

On air, Clark and his co-anchors talked about why they believe it’s important to do so.

“If he’s telling the truth, this is a horrific scandal that’s been victimizing children and should be dealt with right away,” Clark said from the anchor desk. “And if he’s not telling the truth about something this important, and something that could potentially put his colleagues’ lives in danger, that’s really important, too.”

Because of the way Colorado’s Republican Party has shifted in the past decade or so, the largely ceremonial gubernatorial primary this year is likely to feature some off-the-wall characters, bonkers antics, and wild allegations in service of a kind of audience that might incentivize it.

At the end of his broadcast, Clark said whether it’s unsubstantiated claims about pedo rings at the Capitol or calls by another candidate for hanging Democratic politicians he’s called “Satan Jews,” the broader electorate should know about them.

That’s particularly the case, Clark said, because “When they appear before other media outlets, they might just get asked about how to pave the roads and how to fund the schools.”

Following Clark’s reporting on Bottoms this week, Scott Jones, who runs a widely-read TV industry site, wondered how this kind of approach might play with Nexstar, the station’s potential new owner.

From FTVLive:

While the journalism appears solid and the questions needed to be asked, will Nexstar allow this to take place once they take over Tegna? You see, right now KUSA is owned by Tegna, but will soon be under Nexstar.

I get the feeling that Clark’s days under Nexstar will not be long if he keeps this up.

But if he does keep it up, I think he will find a place that still wants to employ journalists. I’m just not sure that Nexstar will be that place.

Nexstar needs a green light from the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission, whose leadership Trump has appointed.

Trump last week said he supports the deal for Nexstar to takeover Tegna.

More Colorado media odds & ends

👏 The University of Colorado Boulder “has found student journalist Ašiihkionkonci Parker not guilty of any student code of conduct charges after it banned Parker from campus in October after covering a pro-Palestine protest, records show,” Olivia Doak reported for the Boulder Daily Camera.

🗣 “The Pikes Peak Bulletin is not partisan, but that does not mean it is neutral – no newsroom has ever been completely neutral,” wrote Managing Editor Heila Ershadi in a column about why she deleted political memes she had posted on social media. “I’m not a formally trained journalist but started freelancing during my council term, and got more into it once I was out of office. One of the reasons I love journalism is I don’t have fiery opinions on many things (the more I look into the nuances of issues, the truer this becomes) but I do have endless curiosity and a general interest in people. I believe in democracy and that journalism is key to its success.”

🏛 “As part of our work with the Local News Policy Coalition, supported by the Colorado Media Project, we’ll also host our first Local News Day at the Capitol next month, where the Senate will introduce a formal resolution recognizing the importance of local journalism in Colorado,” wrote Colorado Press Association CEO Tim Regan-Porter in an email blast this week.

💰 Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, is offering Microgrants for Newsroom Safety and Resilience of up to $5,000 to “help small newsrooms invest in urgent safety and resilience needs, and can support liability insurance, digital security tools, encrypted communications, or physical safety upgrades.” Learn more here.

🌵 “And as parts of Colorado and the American West start to look more like deserts, they’re becoming news deserts, as well,” wrote Joe Arney for CU Boulder. “Cuts, closures and consolidations are shuttering newsrooms and robbing reporters of resources, making it harder to ensure the public is getting trustworthy, verified information about the scope of this crisis.”

🎥 Watch the latest monthly meeting hosted by the Colorado News Collaborative.

⚖️ “It’s a bit of a random fluke that Colorado’s second-largest newspaper has a full-time reporter covering the state’s federal court,” wrote Michael Karlik of Colorado Politics and the Gazettes. “Beyond informing the public about cases, or trends in cases, dedicated courts reporters can nudge the institutions they cover.”

➡️ Colorado journalist Chris Walker, who is serving as a fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism CU Boulder, answered five questions about his work on the fellowship so far.

📡 As KUNC is shaking up its programming, the station stated that the changes come as it “continues to navigate financial pressure tied to last summer’s annual CPB funding loss and reflect research around news-burnout. Audiences value and rely on trusted, independent journalism, but also want more variety — and, at times, a break from the intensity of nonstop news. Research has shown rising news avoidance and feelings of overload among audiences.”

🆕 I launched a new newsletter project, “Community Newswire,” for the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont that seeks to create more connective tissue among the higher-ed journalism community, students, and local news. Find the first edition here.

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 nearly a decade, I 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.