Colorado Springs Indy RETURNS as a bi-weekly newspaper

The news behind the news in Colorado this week

Three months after two wealthy local developers announced they would relaunch the iconic Indy alternative weekly newspaper in Colorado’s second-largest city, the first edition has rolled off the presses.

In a note to readers, Ben Trollinger, the paper’s editor who is new to Colorado Springs, introduced himself and acknowledged some haunted history.

“I am fully aware there are mixed feelings on the legacy of this newspaper,” he wrote. “Believe me, the archeology of grudges and grievances runs deep.”

Trollinger comes from Frisco, Colorado where he edited the Summit Daily News for several years before working for a national sustainable and organic farming magazine.

The Indy blinked out at the beginning of this year after converting into a nonprofit, a messy several months of self-inflicted financial troubles, and a re-branding misfire. Its vanishing act tracked an unfortunate trend for many of our nation’s punchy counterculture alternative newsweeklies.

Now, it’s back under new ownership as a for-profit enterprise that will publish twice a month. The effort comes with a new editorial staff and is bankrolled by a pair of local businessmen, Kevin O’Neil and J.W. Roth, who say they want a voice in the growing city.

“Having local ownership of a newspaper means you can hold them accountable,” Trollinger wrote about his new bosses in the new Indy’s debut. “You can give them a piece of your mind, in a letter to the editor or in line at the grocery store. That matters.” (Indeed. Just ask the new local billionaire owner of the Park City Record newspaper in Utah.)

More from the editor:

There are two things that set the new Independent apart and to me they are connected. We are now mailing 40,000 copies to neighborhoods throughout the city—East, West, North, South, and Downtown. That’s in addition to 10,000 copies that will be delivered to racks in high-traffic areas throughout the city. Like in the past, the Independent is still free. But this time, nearly everyone gets it.  

Obviously, this is an attractive proposition for advertisers. But it also represents a unique challenge for a newsroom. How do we bring together the distinct, and sometimes diametrically opposed, neighborhoods of Colorado Springs? We start with respect. We start with fairness. We listen closely. We stay curious. We hold power accountable. We help find solutions. We stick to facts.  

The relaunched paper, under the auspices of the new Pikes Peak Media Company, promises to capture “the essence of this city, engaging with its political and environmental issues while highlighting its vibrant cultural scene.” Serving as publisher is Fran Zankowski who also publishes Boulder Weekly and is a veteran of the former Indy.

The outlet’s lead reporter thus far is Andrew Rogers, who came over from KRDO as a radio program director. Editorial designer Adam Biddle migrated from the Gazette. Catherine Higley-Hopkinson is doing graphic design, and Sean Cassady is managing digital and marketing. The Indy says it is looking for community contributors to offer content.

In recent years, news organizations across the country and in Colorado have sought to ensure their newsrooms are diverse and reflective of the communities they serve. Industry watchers will likely want to see the extent to which the Indy does that as it fleshes out its staff.

The first meaty news stories in the paper included items about downtown real estate development (the print edition comes with a disclosure about O’Neil’s real estate interests), the defeat of an assault-weapons ban at the Capitol, detailed coverage of the local GOP primary for Congress, and items about local business. A news-brief section comes under the banner of “JUSTCOS,” which could raise an eyebrow at the local left-wing JUSTCOS community activist group who provide “revolutionary news and views from the grassroots of Colorado Springs.”

An arts and culture section included an in-depth feature by Cannon Taylor about how local record stores, bookshops, and video game emporiums are hanging on in the digital age.

Adam Leech, owner of the iconic Leechpit record store and the promulgator of those “Keep Colorado Springs Lame” bumper stickers, has a stream-of-consciousness introductory “Columnizer” column. In it, he hypes some upcoming acts at Indy owner Roth’s Sunset Amphitheater venue while noting its name “conjures images of a suburban nursing home.” Also a columnist is Lauren Ciborowski, owner of a hip downtown art gallery.

All in all, the 44-page paper provides a good gulp of what’s going on in the 40th largest city in the United States — a city that could most certainly use more local news. As editor Trollinger wrote in his column, “Colorado Springs is once again a two-newspaper town.”

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Pikes Peak Bulletin celebrates a year after its own rebirth

Speaking of relaunched news outlets in the Springs region, the Pikes Peak Bulletin weekly newspaper based in Manitou Springs notched a year after its own rebirth.

The paper had disappeared when the Indy rolled up several of its sister papers as part of an unsuccessful restructuring maneuver in 2022. A year later, a group of locals banded together to revive it as a nonprofit.

“This was the hardest and best thing we’ve ever done,” staff of the paper wrote in last week’s edition.

The paper produced a timeline of its success and how it wrangled support. For instance:

Our fundraising efforts included participating in the Give! campaign and [Colorado Media Project’s] Colorado Needs Philanthropy program. We successfully applied for small grants from the Manitou Arts, Culture, and Heritage program and the Manitou Springs Community Foundation. 

“We acknowledge that we still have work to do to make the Bulletin sustainable. We believe that the recipe for creating sustainability is pursuing more grants and acquiring more subscribers, donors and advertisers,” the paper wrote. “The work continues.”

Recently, the paper’s Jon Huang reported a multi-part investigative reporting series about a 2022 police killing in which four officers pumped nearly two-dozen bullets into an intoxicated man in downtown Manitou Springs.

Included in the paper’s one-year anniversary editorial package is a column from COLab’s business innovation director, Carol Wood, about ripple effects that the impact of robust hyperlocal news can have.

I contributed a guest column about how the people of Manitou Springs are lucky to have a group willing to revive its local paper, and what other communities might learn from it.

Pueblo mayor’s newspaper column ghostwriter is a lobbyist for a steel mill

When you read letters to the editor in newspapers, you have to wonder if the name they appear under is the person who actually wrote them.

While it might not be common knowledge among the reading public, it’s common knowledge among the communications industry that PR firms often write the letters and find someone in the community willing to put their name on them so they look authentic and “grassroots.” (Sometimes they get busted for it.)

That also goes for newspaper columns. Whole agencies exist that are dedicated to ghostwriting for public figures who can’t write so well. They then sometimes help get those columns placed in influential news organizations.

This week, Pueblo’s mayor, Heather Graham, threw her fellow public officials and their publicity agents under the entire bus station when she told the Pueblo Chieftain just how common the practice is.

“This is something that frequently happens with public officials, that you have people who are, you know, much better writers than yourself put together an op-ed,” she told reporter Anna Lynn Winfrey, adding, “I think as long as your ideas come along in it, and it’s something that you can back, I think it's completely acceptable and it happens with all elected officials.”

From Winfrey’s story:

Pueblo Mayor Heather Graham recently submitted similar opinion pieces to two Colorado newspapers — the Pueblo Chieftain and the Denver Post — but she didn’t write them herself.

A Colorado lobbyist working for Evraz, the company that owns Pueblo’s storied steel mill and is one of the city’s largest employers, penned the op-ed as part of an advocacy push to defeat some bills introduced at the Colorado Legislature that business leaders said could hurt Pueblo.

First reported by the Colorado Times Recorder, the Chieftain verified through an open records request that the op-eds were written by a representative for Evraz.

Sean Duffy, a lobbyist for Evraz who wrote the column, agreed, telling the reporter in an interview that writing op-eds for others is “common practice.”

Sometimes when newspaper editors figure out a column they published under the byline of a public official is actually industry marketing, they take the column down — even if they might be too embarrassed to talk about it.

As for the ghosts and the ghostwriters themselves, they don’t appear too unwilling to say boo.

How our press-friendly 2019 anti-SLAPP law ‘protected’ a Denver documentary film

Colorado journalist Julian Rubinstein gave a one-two punch to the City of Denver in recent years. In 2021, he published “The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood,” which won a Colorado Book Award.

Last year, he followed it up with an award-winning documentary that John Moore of the Denver Gazette wrote had “all the makings of becoming Denver’s very own ‘Bonfire of the Vanities.’”

As the dual projects racked up professional accolades, behind the scenes the author and filmmaker feared threats on his life. He became what he believed was the first journalist accepted into Colorado’s address confidentiality program.

“The state is now paying to protect me from men whom the city and the federal government hired to work as ‘anti-gang’ activists in a corrupt program that had seen violence skyrocket,” Rubinstein said in a recent interview for the International Documentary Association.

In an interview for the website of the IDA, Rubinstein and his attorney spoke out about how they fended off a defamation lawsuit before the film even came out. They were able to swiftly brush the court action away, they said, because of Colorado’s anti-SLAPP statute signed by the governor in 2019.

Two men had sued Rubinstein for portraying them as active gang members. Here’s an excerpt from the interview, with Robert S. Gutierrez of the law firm Ballard Spahr speaking:

I knew time was of the essence for Julian. He was trying to sell the film and wasn’t sure if the legal cloud hovering over him would hamper that effort. …

Fortunately, Colorado has an anti-SLAPP statute, modeled after California’s. If we could file our anti-SLAPP motion quickly, the two men suing the film would only have days to present evidence to support their claims or their case would be dismissed. The first order of business was therefore collecting evidence and strategizing with Julian for an anti-SLAPP motion to seek an early dismissal of the case, including a declaration by Julian explaining and attaching documentary evidence supporting statements made in the film or demonstrating that certain alleged statements were not made in the film. 

The Q-and-A gets more into the legal nitty-gritty about what went down between two law firms. Part of it deals with what eventually led Gutierrez to say: “It isn’t often that a phone conversation with a plaintiff’s lawyer can lead to such a quick dismissal. But this was exactly the type of frivolous case that the anti-SLAPP statute was enacted to fight.”

Denver’s Bucket List Community Cafe profiled

If you thought 285 Hustler was an odd name for a Colorado print publication, how about Bucket List Community Cafe?

No, the hyperlocal Denver online news site “does not serve coffee,” wrote Faith Schilmoeller in a soon-to-be published profile. “Instead, it is an online news publication founded by Vicky Collins in 2019 where the emphasis rests on ‘community’ and bringing people together through stories.”

An excerpt:

It was a bucket-list endeavor for Collins to pursue, and she has been chasing the spirit of community one might find in a cafe ever since, in the form of community journalism.

Bucket List began as a blog for Collins to use her background as a television news producer to explore her neighborhood. Now, she uses all her skills to publish a community news outlet that covers a variety of Denver-centric stories and trains the next generation of journalists.

Most of Bucket List’s team are student interns studying journalism at the University of Denver, University of Colorado – Boulder and Metropolitan State University of Denver.

“With us, they are driving the train,” Collins said. “They’re not running a student publication; they’re running a community publication.”

Some other nuggets from the profile:

• “Around 50 students have reported for Bucket List Community Cafe since 2021. They earn internship credit toward degrees in journalism.”

• “Coverage spans from gun laws to online dating events to quirky business highlights, among other community stories that [London Lyle, the engagement manager], has described as “Denver-core.” Approximately 200 original stories are published a year, or roughly three to four per week.”

• “At Bucket List, Collins and editor Madison Lauterbach see themselves as mentors for the next generation of journalists.”

• “The publication is reliant on grants, fundraising, community sponsors, and monthly contributors. Collins is glad not to deal with printing and enjoys the challenges of fundraising while publishing fully online.”

• “A recent grant allows Bucket List to dedicate at least two articles per month to covering the Spanish-speaking population of Denver and translate existing articles to Spanish.”

• “With most university-outlet collaborations, [Center for Community News Research Director Hannah] Kirkpatrick said it is more common to see one school collaborating with multiple outlets, than an outlet, like Bucket List, collaborating with multiple schools. Amplify Utah is one exception she noted.”

Look out for it to appear at the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News.

Legendary crime reporter Marilyn Robinson died at 89

Journalism colleagues this week remembered Marilyn Robinson, a dogged and respected reporter, who died at 89 last weekend.

She was a “virtuoso of telephone interviewing” but also would show up at the door of a barricaded man during a police standoff and conduct an interview through the door, a colleague told Bruce Finley for an obituary in the Denver Post where she made her career. The headline of the item reported that Robinson had “set standards in reporting the news.” (A 2009 Denver Post column by Dan Haley about her is memorable.)

The reporter, who spent 45 years at the Post, had started in the “women’s department” of the paper, “then covered various topics before settling on police in the early 1960s.”

More from Finley’s obit:

Her colleague Jim Kirksey called her “the consummate journalist. It was her life.” And working beside Robinson for years in the 1990s, Billie Stanton, an early riser herself, knew Robinson as “the first one in and last one out. I used to beg her to leave,” Stanton said. “I felt: You are never going to be paid for all this overtime you are giving us. She was so committed. So relentless. She loved the work.”

On social media, Denver Gazette investigative reporter David Migoya called Robinson “one of the last of the great era” of daily newspaper journalism. He said he believed the Denver Police Department, which one former Postie noted had named its press room after Robinson about a decade ago, should honor her.

“There will never be another Marilyn Robinson,” one former longtime law enforcement spokesman told the Post.

More Colorado media odds & ends

⚖️ Public officials suing reporters for simply filing an open records request has been going on for at least a decade out here in the West. The latest is Stephen Redfearn, the interim police chief of Boulder, who filed a court action naming Boulder Reporting Lab’s senior reporter, John Herrick, after Herrick filed an open records request for documents related to a $1 million settlement over how police handled a sexual assault investigation. Herrick says he withdrew his request because he wasn’t sure the records were in the public’s interest, and the city pulled its lawsuit. “The case is now closed,” he said. Responding to the petition also would have taken time and resources away from other reporting, he added.

🤖 Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain with two papers that bookend Colorado’s Front Range, “is launching a new program that adds AI-generated bullet points at the top of journalists’ stories, according to an internal memo seen by The Verge,” reported Mia Sato.

🆕 Following “a break from news,” Ana Guerra has returned “to the anchor desk, landing a job at KDEN Telemundo Colorado,” Veronica Villafañe reported for Media Moves. “She will co-anchor Noticias Telemundo Colorado alongside Stephanie Rodríguez and Yesmani Gómez.”

📡 The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has awarded grants to public media organizations in Alaska, Colorado and Michigan “to help them upgrade their equipment and provide more reliable emergency alerts,” Julian Wyllie reported for Current. (The Colorado station is KSJD in Cortez.)

📚 An event tomorrow (Saturday, May 18 at 3 p.m.) called “Why Books Still Matter: A Panel to Honor Joyce Meskis Live at Colfax” will feature free speech attorney Steve Zansberg, Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, and bookseller Matt Miller.

🎓 In a recent “Student of the Week” highlight, the Pueblo Chieftain spotlighted Xavier Velasquez of South High School who the paper’s James Bartolo reported hopes to take his passion “to Colorado State University Pueblo in pursuit of a broadcast journalism degree.”

📰 Vince Bzdek, who serves as executive editor of the Denver Gazette, Colorado Springs Gazette, and Colorado Politics, penned a personal column this week about how his outlet “exposed Denver’s homeless industrial complex.” In an era “when information, misinformation, disinformation, AI-created information, and down-right lies all gets tossed together in the same Mixmaster known as the internet, we journalists believe it’s important for us to occasionally show our work,” he wrote.

🤖 “Could AI be the next college teaching assistant? Some Colorado professors believe so.” Emma VandenEinde has the story at KUNC.

🔎 Former Colorado journalist Arthur Kane has written a book, “The Last Story: The Murder of an Investigative Journalist In Las Vegas,” about his colleague Jeff German of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Writing for the Denver Post, which used to employ Kane, Daliah Singer reviewed the book.

📈 “The relaunched LEVER TIME just cracked the top 50 most popular politics podcasts,” reported Denver journalist David Sirota who founded the growing Lever investigative news site. “We’re making a big investment in the show — it features original reporting you won’t find anywhere else.”

🚔 “A proposal to ban the charging of fees for unedited body-worn camera footage, released to the public under the 2020 Law Enforcement Integrity Act, died … when the Colorado House amended and then defeated a controversial whistleblower bill,” Jeff Roberts reported for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

🆕 The Colorado Trust this week announced it has hired former Denver Post reporter Saja Hindi as its new senior communications manager. The private foundation that focuses on making “positive changes for people and communities” has “spent close to $3 million to support local news in Colorado,” I recently wrote in Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

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.