Colorado media odds & ends - Holiday hangover edition

Your news behind the news

🛩 This week’s newsletter was produced largely from the airport, so it’s just a roundup. Hopefully it compliments your hangover or food coma. Happy holidays and safe travels.

👎 The “vulture” hedge fund that gutted The Denver Post and recently got its claws into the Tribune newspaper chain is trying to raid a new roost. This time, Alden Global Capital is poking its beak around the Iowa-based Lee Enterprises. The Associated Press reported the chain owns papers that “include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Buffalo News, along with dozens of smaller papers in more than two dozen states,” including out here in the West.

🛑 Harvard’s Nieman Lab reported Alden Global Capital is “known far and wide as the news industry’s ever-more-engorged leech, a cost-cutting omnivore that makes every newsroom it touches worse, King Midas in reverse.” Writing in Washington Monthly, Report for America co-founder Steve Waldman makes the case that hedge-fund takeovers of the local news are not inevitable or unstoppable, saying “antitrust regulators need to look at the newspaper business differently.”

💊 Lee Enterprises might be fighting back. Its board approved a shareholder rights plan, “also known as a poison pill, that would prevent hedge fund Alden Global Capital LLC from acquiring more than 10% of the company as it considers Alden’s hostile bid for the newspaper publisher,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Of note about Lee: In 2017, the Montana journalist Ed Kemmick reported on the departure of a Lee publisher, who said on his way out: “I have watched the autonomy of the local newspaper being eroded day by day and replaced with central planning from remote corporate offices. More and more decisions about your local newspaper — from its national news and feature content to how much you pay for your subscription — are being determined in boardrooms far away.”

Gareth Rice @belfastnomad

The hollowing-out of the @chicagotribune is why secretive hedge funds should be kept well away from newspapers. You might also agree after reading @mckaycoppins' article in the latest @TheAtlantic. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

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⚖️ A Colorado man in suing KUSA 9News anchor Kyle Clark and station owner Tegna for defamation. The suit, filed Nov. 22, claims among other things that Clark and Tegna’s “use of the word ‘insurrection’ to describe the events of January 6, 2021 is … materially false.” The station isn’t commenting. Watch this space for more details.

🇨🇦 Katie Langford is leaving the Alden-controlled Boulder Daily Camera to become assistant editor* of The Broomfield Leader, a digital local news startup run by Canada’s Village Media. The site is a sister newsroom to The Longmont Leader and marks Village Media’s second newsroom launch in the United States. Langford covered higher education for the Camera and previously reported for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. (*CORRECTION: A previous version of this newsletter said Langford would be “the editor.” She’ll be an assistant editor of the publication.) Meanwhile, Brooklyn Dance is leaving the Alden-controlled Broomfield Enterprise newspaper for The Broomfield Leader startup. “I’m eager to be a part of a new outlet in Broomfield, a community that deserves more coverage,” she said on social media.

Mitchell Byars @mitchellbyars

But yeah, as it turns out, overworking and underpaying your employees is not a good strategy. (This tweet will be awkward in a few days when I send out a tweet asking if anybody wants to apply for our new openings.)

Mitchell Byars @mitchellbyars

We said goodbye today to both @Katielangford35 and @hibrookIyn. We'll miss their excellent work. And their very good doggos

📡 The Rocky Mountain Community Radio Conference took place in Crested Butte earlier this month. Gavin Dahl has a writeup about it at KVNF, and the KSUT staff has one too, with photos.

🆕 Brothers Jesse and Lloyd Mullen, and their company High Plains News North, are the new owners of The Holyoke Enterprise in Eastern Colorado and two newspapers in Nebraska. Jesse lives in Montana, Lloyd lives in Washington State. “All current staff members at the newspapers were retained by the Mullens in the transaction.” Brenda Brandt, who co-owned the papers, is a former Colorado Press Association president. She was one of at three dozen newspaper owners in Colorado looking for a succession plan as they reach retirement age or look to leave the business.

🗞 Erin McIntyre and Mike Wiggins, the local journalism hero couple of the Western Slope who left the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel in 2019 to buy The Ouray County Plaindealer newspaper, earned a profile by KUSA 9 News. “In their two years at the paper, McIntyre and Wiggins have helped uncover a lot of previously unreported material,” wrote Steve Staeger, Anne Herbst, and Laura Casillas in the piece.

🔥 Welcome to Burning Questions, “an occasional newsletter at the intersection of wildfires, climate science, and research in the West. It’s the latest student-produced newsletter coming out of the Colorado College Journalism Institute.”

🏛 The Pew Research Center is “conducting a census to count the total number of journalists who cover each of the 50 statehouses” to update its 2014 report on statehouse reporting. You can fill out a survey to help by emailing statehouse[dot]project[at]pewresearch.org.

🎙 “Remember that touching story about the 9News anchor who recovered from a stroke and returned to TV in only 6 months?” asked City Cast Denver. “Well, 9News fired her. And now she's suing for discrimination.” The local podcast hosted by Bree Davies interviewed that journalist, Kristen Aguirre, for an episode this week.

❤️ Members of the Heart of NoCo News Guild, the newsroom labor union of the Loveland Reporter Herald, a newspaper controlled by Alden Global Capital, was at a local library this week urging citizens to sign its letter to its publisher and owner in its “campaign to protect Loveland’s only newspaper against further cuts and secure a living wage.”

👀 The New Republic magazine published a lengthy detailed takedown of Denver local media during what some in the city news business dubbed the 1993 “Summer of Violence.” The author, LynNell Hancock, who teaches at the Columbia Journalism School, wrote: “That was the summer of hysteria in the media about violent crime, inflated by an old-fashioned newspaper war and local TV news stations that doubled down on the dictum ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’” An excerpt:

The gunfire was real that summer in Denver, each injury and death horrific. Story by story, the facts checked out, largely due to journalists’ heavy reliance on police and prosecutors. But the volume of media attention helped lead an already jittery public to believe the city was more dangerous than it was, a common reaction to fear-stoked coverage. Close analysis of Denver’s two newspapers at the time found that the scrappy Rocky Mountain News tabloid and the staid Denver Post broadsheet published 233 stories mentioning shootings in the summer of 1993, nearly 80 percent more than the previous summer when there were, in fact, more murders. The stories swirled around primarily seven high-profile crimes, all swept under a single banner, with a single narrative.

🦃 The Montrose Daily Press didn’t print a newspaper on Thursday because of the Thanksgiving holiday “and to give staff some needed time off.”

💉 “Some months ago, we began requiring that everyone who comes into the Denver Press Club be prepared to show proof of vaccination,” wrote its president Kevin Vaughan to members this week. “We took this step as we experienced another surge in the COVID-19 pandemic – and after coming off a year in which we were completely shut down for nine months. We heard from people who disagreed with this policy, but the club’s leadership felt it was the right thing to do to try to keep our members, our guests and our Club safe. As of today, that effort is ever-more urgent. Denver Mayor Michael Hancock announced a new mask policy Tuesday that requires organizations like ours to check proof of vaccination at the door. While I understand that some people disagree with this requirement, the reality is simple – if we do not do this, we cannot operate.”

🔘 Colorado Springs Indy journalist Heidi Beedle launched a podcast called Western Fringe about “the weird history of Colorado.”

📺 Kyle Clark, anchor and managing editor of “Next” on 9News in Denver, appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show this week to talk about a media dilemma: “the challenge of reporting on politicians like Lauren Boebert, who say ‘cruel, false, and bigoted things’ with regularity, without amplifying the message or helping publicity stunts, and the double standard that politicians who are not routinely offensive get more coverage when they cross the line than those who have no regard for the line in the first place.”

🔎 An internal affairs investigation “was only opened up after FOX31 made a records request for body-worn camera video” from an incident, the station reported.

🏫 Former University of Colorado Regent Linda Shoemaker penned a guest column in the Boulder Daily Camera about why the Boulder campus “couldn’t hold onto” famed journalist Jim Sheeler, who died recently at 53. “At the time CU declined to grant him tenure, the media studies portion of the faculty complained that his research and writing was not the kind of academic work produced by someone with a PhD,” she wrote. “So true. Even though he’d written two popular journalism books, Sheeler had only a master’s degree. Most professors in the journalism part of the school supported Sheeler. They were angry, as were the professional journalists on the Journalism School Advisory Board. That Board soon urged the Regents to discontinue the J-School so that it could be reinvented. I know that Sheeler’s treatment was a big factor in that vote because I was at that meeting and immediately joined the Advisory Board.”

📰 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery will be teaching an in-person class called “The History and Future of American News” at Colorado College in January. “I’m really excited for this course, especially at this time,” he said in a recent video address to students at a luncheon hosted by the Journalism Institute. “We live in a moment where we are debating across the industry what the future of journalism is.” 

🔗 Last Wednesday, the Northern Colorado Deliberative Journalism Project “made its public launch, with roughly 90 members of the public joining us for a discussion of Northern Colorado’s information ecosystem led by Colorado State University's Center for Public Deliberation,” the Coloradoan in Fort Collins reported.

Corey Hutchins @CoreyHutchins

🗳 Colorado Springs journalist John Hazelhurst indicated he was considering applying for an appointment to the city council on which he served in the ‘90s. “I’d be willing to quit journalism to serve the city of my birth, having figured out that council’s $6,250 stipend plus a meager expense allowance would make up for some of my lost income,” he wrote in a column about it. (He wasn’t among the 25 who applied.)

🏆 The Beacon, known as the “voice of adults 50+ in Western Colorado,” won the Best of Show award at the recent North American Mature Publishers Association convention held in San Diego. (Best publication association name ever, BTW.)

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.