🗳 Could Colorado's political journalism be the best in the nation in 2024?

The news behind the news in Colorado this week

More than two dozen Colorado newsrooms have launched an unprecedented collaboration to better cover the 2024 elections.

Led by the Colorado News Collaborative, also known as COLab, the statewide initiative, called Voter Voices 2024, is the latest recognition that lazy political coverage is failing the electorate.

At newsrooms large and small across the country, insider, horse-race coverage of elections that prioritizes process and personality is, more and more, dissolving in favor of something more meaningful. That’s a commitment to serious, thoughtful reporting on the real-world stakes about what would actually happen to the everyday lives of residents if one candidate wins over another. And it comes with prioritizing issues voters want to hear about over what candidates are saying.

Examples of cut-rate political coverage, which is easy and quick to do, include uncritical publicity of internal campaign polls, focusing on process and campaign strategy, context-free some-say-this-some-say-that dreck, and stenographic write-ups about the latest campaign ad to hit the airwaves.

A better form of political journalism has been taking root, proselytized by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen with his “Citizens Agenda” approach to covering U.S. elections.

In Colorado, the new collaboration announced this week is “without precedent in the history of the citizens agenda approach to campaign coverage, which goes back to 1990-92,” Rosen said in responding to the news.

Megan Verlee at Colorado Public Radio has the background:

Newsrooms across Colorado are teaming up and embarking on an effort to reach out to voters and learn what they want candidates to focus on, the issues they are most concerned with in this election, and how much trust they have — or don’t — in the system itself. …

The organizations participating in Voter Voices are large and small, urban, suburban and rural. Many of us are long standing-competitors, whose reporters compete every day for audience and stories. But at this moment, when the political landscape is as divided as it’s ever been and finding common ground is increasingly rare, all of us are committed to working together to ensure that the concerns of Coloradans, not the talking points of politicians, drive our election coverage.

That Colorado has taken such a lead shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.

For the past five years, our state’s local news scene has embraced an orthodoxy of collaboration perhaps unseen anywhere else. Colorado often serves as a pioneer for experiments and a place where national organizations often test pilot projects.

This latest pioneering initiative flows from a Colorado Engaged Elections 2023 Fellowship in which 13 newsrooms received training in the basics of engaged elections. Support for last year’s project came from the Gates Family Foundation and the Colorado Media Project in partnership with COLab.

“I think you have to plan ahead and give people the tools, and then they can pull something like this off,” said Melissa Davis of the Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter.

For this year’s effort, COLab, an independent, nonprofit, statewide journalism coalition based in Denver that counts as partners journalists from more than 160 news outlets across Colorado, recruited newsrooms to join.

More than 30 Colorado newsrooms already on board include those in rural, suburban, and urban Colorado from print to digital, including radio, and outlets that serve communities of color, COLab Managing Editor Tina Griego said on social media this week. “And, honestly, we didn’t have to ask but once. Newsrooms wanted to be a part of this.”

The organization plans to publish a list of participating newsrooms in Colorado. Missing from a draft list I’ve seen thus far are local commercial TV stations whose viewers would greatly benefit from such an initiative. I hope they’ll consider signing on — as well as any outlets focused heavily on politics, lest they believe they couldn’t possibly learn anything about doing it better by listening to voters.

The core of the project is a survey created by the audience and community engagement company Hearken. Throughout the week, newsrooms that signed on to Voter Voices told their audiences what their participation will mean.

In a staff report, the Colorado Sun acknowledged that its coverage of elections this year would be “breaking” with a tradition of political reporting that is “too driven by the horse race, by polls and pundits, by the competition to be first and by listening too much to candidates and not enough to you, the voters.” 

Colorado Public Radio reported that in the coming weeks its reporters will be “out in communities around Colorado, talking to people on the street and at events, to gain an even wider perspective and to ensure that we are hearing from Coloradans of all stripes.”

In a column, Colorado Newsline Editor Quentin Young wrote, “We told readers in October that ‘we’re demoting the horse race and elevating constituent interests.’ In other words, we want to focus less on polls, dollars and endorsements and more on families, individuals and every resident who is affected by the outcome of elections.”

The Denver Post reported it is “joining newsrooms across the state in doing something that we all need to get better at: listening.”

Here’s to seeing what the cumulative effect of this unique-in-the-nation project looks like during this campaign season and whether others elsewhere might take note.

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Colorado officials and DU still won’t say what ended a prison journalism program

Last month, this newsletter noted how Inside Wire, a unique-in-the-nation statewide prison radio program that gave incarcerated individuals the ability to broadcast stories for other incarcerated people across Colorado, had shut down.

Also lost in the sudden closure was Inside Report, a prison newspaper that saw its final “authorized issue” publish last winter.

Kyle Cooke at Rocky Mountain PBS had broken the unexpected news last fall about the dissolving contract between a partnership between the Colorado Department of Corrections and the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative.

This week, though, Cooke connected with a formerly incarcerated Denver man named Bob Eisenman who transitioned from copy editor for the paper to its development coordinator, and offered more details about Inside Report’s demise.

“We were getting ready to go to print with one of our special issues,” he told Cooke. “We were ready to go, and it was literally like an overnight thing — we were finalizing the product on a Thursday and then Friday we were [told], ‘You're not allowed to go in the newsroom.’”

Prison officials and DU’s Prison Arts Initiative are remaining tight-lipped about what happened and why. “Unfortunately we still aren’t on the other side and in a place to speak publicly,” an assistant director of programming at the DU project told RMPBS.

For his piece, Cooke offered some context about American prison journalism:

Prison journalism is nearly as old as the United States. On March 24, 1800 — just 23 years after the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence — prisoners in a New York state penitentiary published Forlorn Hope, the first prison newspaper in America. 

More than 450 prison newspapers followed in the ensuing centuries, resulting in first-person reports and accountability journalism within a historically nontransparent corrections system.

As the journalist and filmmaker Olivia Heffernan noted in Jacobin, prison media has social benefits, too. “Prison journalism is a medium through which incarcerated writers are able to express themselves,” Heffernan wrote.

Read the whole story at the link above.

The ‘closest thing agriculture in Colorado has to a celebrity’ is a … journalist?

“Walking through the Colorado Farm Show with Rachel Gabel is like walking down Fifth Avenue with Taylor Swift; everybody wants to talk to her.”

So wrote Jeff Rice who profiled the agricultural journalist in a recent story in the Sterling Journal Advocate newspaper on the Eastern Plains.

An excerpt:

Though not yet 50 years old, Gabel already has nearly four decades of journalism under her belt, and all of it covering Colorado agriculture. She started when she was 12, writing up 4-H meeting minutes for the Douglas County News Press. The editor was so impressed with her writing style he suggested she submit her reports to The Fence Post. She did, the reports were published, and a career was launched.

Rice noted that Gabels’ identity and non-journalism life informs her work for the Fence Post. She “doesn’t just write about agriculture; she writes from inside agriculture,” he wrote, adding that Gabel and her husband farm, raise show goats, and operate a cow-calf operation.

And, while in a different context some might pooh-pooh a journalist openly cheerleading an industry they cover, Rice reports Gabel “sees herself as an advocate for ag producers. She concedes that there is a ‘gap of understanding’ between urban and rural Coloradans, but believes it can be bridged.”

They probably don’t do this anymore. Longtime Colorado journalist Lou Kilzer dead at 73

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist known as a “reporter’s reporter” died “due to various ongoing illnesses, according to his wife,” media reported.

Former Denver Post reporter Robert Kowalski, a close friend, described him to the Post’s Katie Langford as a Columbo-type interviewer and shoe-leather reporter.

“Kilzer would require reporters to go through every line of a story and prove, through interview transcripts or other documentation, the facts they contained. The process took weeks, Kowalski said,” according to Langford’s obit.

Such attention to detail is likely rare in today’s high-metabolism, traffic-centric late-capitalist industrial journalism. Gotta get that story online and move on to the next. Weeks? Who has ‘em?

Writing in the Denver Gazette, Sage Kelley quoted 9NEWS investigative reporter and former Rocky Mountain News colleague Kevin Vaughan describing Kilzer as a “full-blown newsroom character” in a rumpled Oxford shirt and tweed sport jacket.

Current Denver Gazette executive editor Vince Bzdek recalled the watchdog reporter as “referring to his method of accountability journalism as ‘rolling thunder’ … He’d hit wrongdoers with a big story exposing their dirty deeds, then he’d follow up again and again with more stories until something was finally done to right the wrong. The man had thunder in his pen.”

Boulder Daily Camera publishes letter slamming the paper and praising its nonprofit competitor

In a development oddly representative of the state of local news these days, Boulder’s daily newspaper, which is financially controlled by the newsroom-gutting Alden Global Capital hedge fund, published a letter to the editor that is not likely good for its own self interest.

Here it is in full, submitted under the name Stephanie Bryan of Boulder:

Bring back local journalism for the benefit of all of us

The Daily Camera is supposed to be our “local” paper. The Boulder County Democratic Party met on March 23 to select candidates for the Democratic primary on June 25. History was made that day. Three Women of Color made it onto the primary ballot for their respective races: Representative Junie Joseph for Colorado House District 10, Boulder County Commissioner Martha Loachamin, both running for reelection, and candidate Jovita Schiffer running for Senate House District 18. Eagerly I looked for results in both the Sunday and Monday papers and there was nothing. I complained to a friend who sent me the link to another news-outlet, the Boulder Reporting Lab (BRL), Boulder County’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit newsroom, which had extensive reporting on the assembly. BRL is free and I pay $53.08/month for the Camera. What’s wrong with this picture? How are people supposed to be knowledgeable about local political events if our supposed local paper isn’t giving this basic information to everybody? Please bring back local journalism for the benefit of all of us.

Two years ago, Boulder Reporting Lab founder Stacy Feldman told Sarah Scire of Harvard’s Nieman Lab, “We will not survive if we’re not meeting the information needs of our community. It’s not a side project we have. It’s just who we are.”

Responding to the letter, Feldman mentioned on social media that this is not the first letter of this kind to make it into the Camera. Indeed, the newspaper has run brutal letters about itself in the past. In 2021 the paper printed one that read in part, “I would suggest to the entire staff of the Daily Camera that you leave this slowly dying institution and form a new online paper, a la the Colorado Sun.”

The paper’s then-opinion page editor, Julie Marshall, told me at the time she felt like the paper “belongs to our readers in many respects and it was a fair commentary from a loyal longtime reader.”

More recently, this January, the paper, under a new opinion page editor, published a letter that read in part, “Maybe it’s time for an alternative to the Daily Camera. I’m hoping the Boulder Reporting Lab will succeed in that.”

As for this latest one mentioning the Boulder Reporting Lab, Feldman said, “to the Camera’s credit, they almost always credit us with links to our work when they cover a big news story after us,” and added, “The same goes for their opinion page when our stories are mentioned.”

On social media, Mitchell Byars, deputy city editor at the Camera, wrote: “This makes it sound as if we never bothered to cover the primaries. This is false. Our story came out a day or two later because @aecwrites wanted to make sure we also included #Boulder County Republican results as well in the interest of fairness.”

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🎓 Attention Colorado newsrooms and higher-ed institutions 🎓

It’s internship season for college students who are scouting for summer newsroom positions to help build experience and provide a public service in communities across the state.

In the coming weeks, Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, will publish a white paper I helped research about the workforce pipeline for journalism in Colorado with a focus on internships.

Is your newsroom looking to hire interns right now or in the near future? Or are you involved in a higher-ed institution in Colorado looking to place students in a newsroom? Email me at coreyhutchins[at]gmail[dot]com if you’d like inclusion in a roundup to accompany the report.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

🎙 “This year has been particularly difficult for the local media news business,” I told Erin O’Toole at KUNC this week for the station’s In The NoCo program where we discussed media layoffs, artificial intelligence, fading Sunshine Laws, and more.

👀 Colorado newspaper publisher Bob Sweeney wrote a “Barbwire Bob” column this week that threw shade at a trend of newspapers converting to nonprofits. “What may be left are newspapers funded by foundations with whatever mission they may possess from their donors and founders,” he wrote. “Not all bad, but we sing for our supper, so to speak, and if we don’t perform and produce an interesting newspaper under the free enterprise form of capitalism, we should fail.” (He also wrote in the same column that the Denver Gazette has “gone the nonprofit route” — and that’s not true, so.)

🗞 “After four years of publishing online only, the University of Denver's (DU) student newspaper, The Clarion, has resurrected its print edition just in time for this election year,” Shannon Ogden reported this week for Denver7. Kyle Cooke wrote about the development for Rocky Mountain PBS in February.

🚔 The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is “nearly finished with its inquiry into potential criminal activity surrounding the raid on the Marion County Record last year and will turn over findings to special prosecutors later this month,” Sherman Smith reported for the Kansas Reflector, citing state authorities.

💨 Last week was Chris Walker’s last as an editor at 5280 magazine, though he said he hopes not the last time you’ll see his byline in it. He said he is pursuing “longer, independent projects.”

🤯 Denver journalist David Sirota, whose mere name makes some in Colorado’s politics and media scene look like the emoji that leads this item, said the opening of last week’s NPR segment for “On the Media” was “the first time in my entire life that any major media has mentioned my past work for Bernie Sanders in a respectful, non-sneering way.”

🗽 Formula One’s owner Liberty Media, which is led by one of Colorado’s wealthiest residents, John Malone, “has announced a takeover of MotoGP’s parent company Dorna,” The Guardian reported. Dorna will stay an independently run company attributed to Liberty Media’s Formula One Group tracking stock and continue to be based in Madrid, with the long-serving Dorna chief executive Carmelo Ezpeleta remaining in his position, the statement said.”

☀️ The Colorado Sun got a new home page. “It’s the same Colorado Sun site you’re used to, but refreshed in the ways that matter to improve your reading experience,” wrote Lauren Whynott, director of membership, marketing & audience engagement, in an email to members.

📻 Weeks after Colorado Public Radio laid off 15, gutting its podcasting unit, Chicago Public Media this week laid off 14 staffers, citing financial troubles, and said its “podcasting unit will be scaled back dramatically.”

🎩 Longtime Gazette advertising executive Tom McClung, who the paper reported is known around Colorado Springs as “the guy with the hat,” is moving on, Eric Young reported for the paper.

🗣 The Denver Press Club announced it will bring Ann Curry as the keynote speaker for April 27 for the Damon Runyon Awards banquet. Register here.

📱 Gretchen A. Peck wrote a piece for Editor & Publisher this week titled “Ethics in the era of social media: Editors balance giving journalists the freedom to post while avoiding potential pitfalls” that quotes, among others, Danika Worthington, the Colorado Sun’s social and presentation editor.

♽ Around this time last year, this newsletter reported how longtime legislative reporter Ed Sealover had left the Denver Business Journal for a vice president position at the Colorado Chamber of Commerce where he’d author a “a new chamber-owned online publication that will cover Colorado’s legislative and political news related to the business community.” Colorado Politics recently republished one of Sealover’s pieces.

🚗 This week, 9NEWS reporter Jeremy Jojola said he got into an Uber to head to the station and the driver began antagonizing him for being part of the media. “It was a seriously terrible experience,” the journalist wrote on Threads. “I asked him to pull over because the ride felt extremely unpleasant. I’ve never had a ride like this before. Trying to figure out what the appropriate thing is to do next.” (His post gained more than 1,000 replies.) “This man did not recognize me but when he saw the destination was a news station when I got into the car, his tone and demeanor was immediately accusatory and demeaning,” Jojola wrote. “He asked what my job is. I told him and he went off about how media is evil. For those of you who feel this is justified behavior because of my profession, you don’t know me or my work on the local level.”

🏆 CBS Colorado journalists Romi Bean and Michelle Griego won Gracie Awards from the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation.

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.