Could Colorado see ‘AI-driven personas’ delivering local news?

The news behind the news in Colorado

Image created with AI. Obvious, no?

A digital media startup is aiming to launch a local news endeavor in the picturesque Western Slope Colorado mountain town of Telluride.

Those behind it indicate they also plan to lean heavily on new technology and crowd-sourced content.

“We’re building an innovative, scalable, AI-powered local news and citizen journalism platform,” reads a recent job posting. “And we’re looking for the right software partner to make this vision a reality.”

Here’s more from the posting:

Our ambitious goal is to launch a groundbreaking local news platform that empowers communities through citizen journalism, automated content aggregation, AI-driven news curation, and seamless publishing across multiple channels—without native mobile apps (using Progressive Web Apps for flexibility and efficiency).

Key Platform Features Include: Frictionless citizen-submitted content via email automation. AI-powered content ingestion, moderation, and publishing. Multi-channel content distribution: Web (PWA), social media, and email. Intelligent AI-based moderation for classifieds. Engaging, customizable AI-driven personas delivering daily community radio and future video broadcasts.

“AI-driven personas” who deliver broadcast news? That would be … new in Colorado, I believe.

So-called “AI personas” are roiling industries as the rapidly developing technology becomes cheaper and easier to use.

Law firms, for instance, have been starting to use AI personas “to mimic specific attorneys at certain tasks, such as partners providing feedback to associates,” Law360’s Sarah Martinson has reported.

Law enforcement officers are using AI personas “designed to interact with and collect intelligence” on college protesters, Jason Koebler reported for Wired. An experiment with AI personas on Reddit sparked an ethics scandal in academia. In the news industry, some people have been using AI to create fake news personalities.

One tech program that costs $250 a month can help anyone “generate high-quality videos with realistic physiques, human expressions, and in any film style, even that of TV news anchors, saying almost anything,” Brian Roche reported for WGAL in Pennsylvania.

Some have accused AI personas of taking away journalism jobs.

Last year, the investigative journalist Guthrie Scrimgeour wrote a widely read personal essay about how a rural Hawaiian island newspaper where he used to work replaced him with an “AI bot named James.” On the other hand, in Venezuela, media have reported how “AI news anchors” aren’t replacing journalists as much as they are protecting them.

As for this newsletter you’re reading, I once reported how Google’s NotebookLM startled me when I uploaded a newsletter edition into its podcast generator and it created two AI personas to discuss my work. The quality — and the fact-based content it produced — was astonishing. When I played it for a journalism class last fall, some students were terrified.

This newsletter has also reported on the different ways Colorado newsrooms are using AI.

Lately, KRDO TV in the Springs has been including this at the end of its online stories: “Hi 👋 I’m your AI news assistant, trained on KRDO content! Have any questions about this story? Tap a prompt below or ask me about anything!”

Meanwhile, multiple Colorado cities have become targets of AI-generated newsletters created by someone in New York City. And one political consultant in Colorado shut down a website he’d created after being outed for using AI to rip off the work of legit local reporters.

Whether we’ll see any “AI-driven personas” pop up in Telluride’s local news scene remains to be seen.

The job listing mentions a company called Small Towns, Big Mountain Productions, which is also behind a Facebook page for a soon-to-launch news outlet called The Telluridian. (I sent an email Wednesday morning to an address on The Telluridian’s Facebook page seeking to speak with someone behind the company, but haven’t yet heard back.)

“Our mission is to help knit this mountain town closer together through a focused, near real-time platform that serves parents, students, skiers, skaters, business owners, and everyday citizens,” reads the Facebook page for The Telluridian. “Whether you’re reading up on the next Ski Club event, checking rink hours at Hanley, posting a school fundraiser, or finding out if the gondola’s delayed—we want you to find it here first.”

There are also hints that Telluride might not be the end-all-be-all of this effort.

Small Town, Big Mountain Productions states this on its Facebook page (emphasis mine): “We’re a modern daily newspaper for mountain towns across the United States — rooted in community, rich with local insight, and fiercely independent.”

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🤠 Howdy! I’m Skyler McKinley. You may remember me from your television sets on slow news days, my work at the Denver Press Club, or the historic little saloon I own in Routt County, Colorado. Well, I reckon I’m still doing all that stuff, but I’m doing a new thing, too: I get a real kick out of connecting public policy makers, stakeholders, and reporters like you. Some folks say that I’m “the lobbyist who loves the media.” Sure enough: If you’ve got a story on a pressing matter of public concern, let me know. I just may be able to help! I’m at skyler@wzstrategies.com or 303-720-9200. As for that story above, hey, nobody’s ever accused me of having a robotic personality! 🤠

What’s a WZ? It’s an in-joke about license plates.

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Can a Denver TV anchor and his nightly newscast sink the governor’s bridge project?

If Colorado’s term-limited outgoing Democratic governor, Jared Polis, fails to build a $29 million bridge from the Capitol to a nearby park, one local TV station might deserve beaucoup credit.

For weeks, Denver’s 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark and the team at the nightly newscast ‘Next’ have been relentlessly crusading against the governor’s pet project with a mix of reporting and commentary.

On Tuesday, though, the show upped the ante. Clark broadcast an entire six minutes of sustained advocacy against what he has framed as an unnecessary and unmitigated boondoggle.

“There’s no good reason to build this,” Clark said during the segment filmed at the Capitol, in the park, and along where the project he has dubbed the “Bridge to Nowhere” would be.

“I don’t know if this monument to government waste can be stopped,” he said. “But we ought to try.”

Clark is no stranger to commentary, but the move marked the first time he and his show shot an extended-length, on-location opinion segment from outside the studio.

In a conversation this week, Clark said he wrestled with whether he should straight-up say he was trying to scuttle construction of the bridge. He decided it was ethical as long as he was clear about it and the show labeled his commentary properly.

“In a different media ecosystem, editorial boards would have buried this thing and TV station I-Teams would have been on it like flies on shit,” he said.

Thus far, the ‘Next’ team seems like the project’s most prominent skeptic. The show has relied on open records requests to reveal it will be more expensive than initially disclosed. The show’s reporters conducted interviews that indicated the governor’s office couldn’t put forward anyone who is for the project who wouldn’t benefit from its construction.

Clark has an idea about why he might be fighting a lonely battle.

“I think media outlets are stretched thin with a lot of news happening at once,” he said via text. “And challenging Colorado’s most powerful politician and wealthiest political and civic donors comes with risk.”

A Colorado local news Substacker makes ‘difficult decision’ to pause publication

For the past eight months, Adam Steininger has been publishing the Longmont Herald as a Substack newsletter covering local news.

A veteran of the digital Longmont Observer and Longmont Leader outlets, Steininger started out on his own with an “unbiased” publication he described as “truly for and by the people of Longmont.” He hoped it would help fill gaps in a community served by a shrinking hedge-fund-owned newspaper with an office outside of town.

Steininger joined the ranks of several indie journalists in Colorado who operate one-person newsrooms. But doing so was difficult, he acknowledged this week.

“I’ve sacrificed a lot, probably too much, to try to make this work,” he wrote in a June 21 post. “And despite my best efforts, the Herald hasn’t yet reached the point where it can support me in return.”

More from the item:

That’s why I’m pressing pause, not out of defeat, but out of necessity. I’m currently exploring other avenues of income, trying to figure out how I can continue doing what I love—journalism, storytelling, community reporting—in a way that’s also livable.

I don’t know exactly what the future looks like, but I hope it’s one where I can have the best of both worlds: a sustainable income and the ability to keep informing the public through the Herald. That’s the dream, and I haven’t let go of it.

The development highlights the economic reality of independent local journalism in a city of a certain size.

Not long ago, in the same county, journalist Shay Castle, who had founded and ran the local digital Boulder Beat site, left it to go back to a more institutional role as editor of Boulder Weekly.

Others, like Dylan Anderson, who runs the Yampa Valley Bugle in Steamboat Springs, or Kelly Ragan of the NoCo Optimist in Northern Colorado, are still keeping on.

Matthew Schniper, who publishes the Side Dish newsletter on Substack in Colorado Springs, has found economic success with a unique business model.

As for Steininger, “I’m hopeful,” he wrote. “I still believe in unbiased local journalism. I still believe in Longmont. And I still believe there’s a future for the Herald—even if it takes a different form, or a slower pace, or the long way around to get there.”

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This week’s newsletter is supported in part by the Regional Air Quality Council, the Front Range’s lead air quality planning organization. The RAQC collaborates with state governments, organizations, and individuals to improve air quality and protect Colorado’s health and environment through planning, policy development, and program implementation. The RAQC’s current priority is ground-level ozone, the Front Range’s most pressing air quality issue. For more information, please visit RAQC.org.

To learn more about ground-level ozone, what individuals can do to protect their health, and how to help improve our summer air quality, please visit SimpleStepsBetterAir.org. You can also sign up for timely text or email alerts to know when it matters most.

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West Slope newspaper laments ‘substantial costs’ of bulk mail and printing

A recent issue of the weekly Ouray County Plaindealer on the Western Slope offers a window into the bleak economics of publishing a print newspaper.

Co-owner Mike Wiggins wrote a column all but begging subscribers to read the paper’s E-edition online because of rising print costs coupled with a deteriorating Postal Service delivery system.

From the column:

Last month, the Postal Regulatory Commission approved another price increase: an average 9.4% hike on the Plaindealer and other periodicals that will take effect in July. It will be the ninth rate increase since January 2020. And we just received notice that our printing costs are also going to increase.

Those are substantial costs we’ve absorbed in the last five years while trying to limit our own price increases for single copies and subscriptions.

Each week, the mighty Plaindealer goes out via mail to nearly 900 post office boxes and street addresses in more than 40 states and lands in more than 1,300 email inboxes.

In recent years, Wiggins wrote, the Postal Service “has struggled to deliver mail in a consistent and timely fashion.” Some subscribers who live in town and get the paper by mail sometimes don’t get their copy for a week.

“We have no plans to eliminate a printed newspaper anytime soon,” the column went on. “As long as our friends in Montrose are willing to print the Plaindealer, as long as it’s financially sustainable, we will continue to produce and deliver a product you can enjoy with your morning coffee while smudging your fingers with ink.”

In 2021, the Plaindealer instituted its first price increase in 30 years, from $0.50 to $1, and it’s not a stretch to imagine the owners might have to do it again.

• ❓ A QUESTION for any reader who publishes or subscribes to a weekly print newspaper in Colorado: What’s the going rate for a single print copy these days?

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More Colorado media odds & ends

💰 Applications are due Monday, June 30 for two active calls for proposals from Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter. The grants address newsroom sustainability and community coverage gaps. Apply for a grant here.

🏆 The Intermountain Jewish News won eight Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism for articles published in 2024, the publication announced. “The awards were announced at the American Jewish Press Association’s annual meeting June 23.”

❌ The emailed newsletter version of this post mistakenly conflated the publication Law360 with Law Week.

🎙 Boulder Reporting Lab founder Stacy Feldman appeared on the podcast What Works: The Future of Local News with hosts Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy about how the digital nonprofit covered the recent Boulder firebombing attack. She said the outlet’s guiding principle is “moral clarity.” Feldman also described the process for how BRL decided to use words like “antisemitism” in coverage.

🥊 First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg, who is representing four Colorado public radio stations in their lawsuit along with NPR against President Donald Trump, wrote a rebuttal to writer Ari Armstrong in Complete Colorado. Armstrong had written that government funding of news media is “inherently corruptive.” Zansberg punched back, writing that Armstrong made a “fundamental error.”

🗣 Meanwhile, Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, issued a statement saying it “stands in solidarity with Colorado Public Radio, Aspen Public Radio, KSUT Public Radio, and all public media organizations that champion journalistic independence.”

☀️ As the Colorado Sun newsroom approaches its seventh birthday, the digital nonprofit newsroom reflected on its decision to “fight for local news.”

⚖️ A judge has ordered the City of Aurora “to release all unedited body-worn camera footage of police shooting and killing Kilyn Lewis, finding that the city denied 9NEWS’ requests for the video in violation of Colorado’s Law Enforcement Integrity Act,” Jeff Roberts wrote for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

🗳 Denver journalist Alan Prendergast has a piece in Slate about “MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell’s defamation trial in Denver and what Predergast calls “the Stupid Defense,” which amounted to arguing that Lindell couldn’t be held liable for defamation because he “actually believed all the false statements he was making, despite the lack of evidence—and still does.”

👀 From Lucas High at BizWest about a recent CEO roundtable of marketers: “The decades-long trend of media consolidation has widespread impacts for marketers, both in terms of where advertising is placed and how well informed consumers are, Greenlight Strategy principal Bill Rigler said. ‘The collapse of local journalism … is going to have real long-term consequences for our clients,’ who are often real estate developers engaged in potentially controversial projects.”

⚖️ In an online item headlined “False claims, real consequences: Judge rejects activist’s First Amendment defense” in the conservative Rocky Mountain Voice digital outlet, author Jen Schumann wrote about a defamation case in which a judge rejected an argument that a speaker’s words were protected under the First Amendment.

💨 Meanwhile, Brian Porter, the former Colorado Press Association board president who resigned because of his affiliation with the Rocky Mountain Voice, confirmed to this newsletter that he has since resigned from the Rocky Mountain Voice and is currently pursuing other opportunities.

📻 iHeartMedia announced it has elevated Rob Dawson “to serve as the News Director of the Rocky Mountain Region for its 24/7 News service.” Dawson “will step into the role vacated by the semi-retirement of Kathy Walker. Walker has worked for iHeartMedia for 35 years and will now be transitioning to a part-time role in the company’s Denver newsroom.”

🆕 Destiny Hale is the new associate editor of Yellow Scene magazine. “We’re in a transitional moment: the magazine is undergoing a kind of internal reorganization and realignment, the kind that comes after 20+ years of publishing and evolving,” Hale wrote.

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. 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.