Denver7 pulls 3 TV journalists away from 9NEWS in roughly a year

The news behind the news in Colorado

Oct 04, 2024

You’ve heard the saying: three’s a trend.

Over roughly the past year, Denver7 has drawn three journalists away from its competitor 9NEWS and into larger roles at the Scripps ABC affiliate also known as KMGH.

Last year, Denver7 hired Megan Jurgemeyer away from the local NBC affiliate where she was a news director.* She now leads the KMGH news department as its senior news director.

“I made the move to Denver7 last year because I was excited about the station’s vision and the company’s desire to find ways to stay relevant against the challenges of a shrinking audience for traditional broadcast news,” she said this week via email. “It’s a messy and difficult process, but I wanted to join a team unafraid to try new things to keep local journalism alive.”

Since then, meteorologist Danielle Grant traded her 9NEWS peacock logo for a Denver7 green screen after a decade at KUSA.

“I feel like I’m on cloud nine, but maybe I should say cloud seven here,” Grant said on air in April.

And now, this week, Anusha Roy, who was a 9NEWS reporter and anchor, announced she too has joined Denver7. She will be a morning anchor and will begin appearing on air later this month.

“I’ve always had just incredible respect for the Denver7 team,” Roy said in a statement. “There’s a lot of thoughtfulness into how the station covers the news.”

KUSA 9NEWS had its own shakeup at the top earlier this year when Linda Kicak left Denver’s KDVR FOX31 as its assistant news director to run the news division at 9NEWS. I sent some emails yesterday and left a voicemail for Kicak at the station this morning but didn’t hear back; I’ve not interacted with her before, and can’t be sure the messages reached her.

This summer, Denver7 moved from its iconic Brutalist building on Speer Boulevard and into new digs in Five Points where its general manager said they “built the TV station of the future.”

As for the recent hires from KUSA, Jurgemeyer, the now-Denver7 news director, said she’s always looking for talented people who she believes can help the station continue to build on work that has already made her proud.

“There are great folks at all the stations in town,” she said. “In fact, I’d put the Denver market up against any in the top 10. It just so happens that because I spent a decade at 9NEWS, many of the people I know and have worked closely with are there. I consider it a gift that I get to work with them again.”

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Gannett wouldn’t say how a headline howler happened in Pueblo

Readers who take the Pueblo Chieftain with their breakfast might have let out a howl this week when they opened the newspaper to the sports section.

“BULLDOGS PREVAIL,” blared the headline on page 1B, Monday, Sept. 30. A photo captured the prevailing team, dressed in blue football uniforms, hoisting a large bell on the field in celebration.

“When it comes to rivalry games, there is none more famous west of the Mississippi than the great Bell Game between Pueblo Central and Pueblo Centennial,” read the story’s lede.

Problem is, if you read the story, you’d realize quickly that the Bulldogs didn’t win — the Pueblo Central Wildcats did. Oof.

The Chieftain’s editor, Zach Hillstrom, addressed the major mix-up in the paper’s Oct. 3 edition, writing that while the Chieftain “immediately issued a correction in the following day’s paper, we know the error made the Sept. 30 sports page a disappointing and inaccurate keepsake.”

But the column didn’t say how it happened, noting only that it was “made during the paper’s design.”

As photos of the headline howler made their way around social media, I wondered how something like this can happen. My suspicion is that it’s a consequence of out-of-town headline writing in an age of consolidation and centralized design hubs where newspaper processing happens far away from the communities local newspapers serve.

Asked to what extent this particular SNAFU might have stemmed from that, Hillstrom directed the question to Gannett’s corporate public relations team, which dodged the central and important point of it.

Here’s Gannett’s statement:

For context: The headline of a sports story in the Sept. 30 Pueblo Chieftain mistakenly stated: ‘Bulldogs prevail: Pueblo Central shuts out Pueblo Centennial in 4th straight Bell Game.’ The Pueblo Central Wildcats won the Bell Game 56-0 over the Pueblo Centennial Bulldogs.
“The Chieftain makes every effort to print all news stories accurately. We regret the error in the Sept. 30 issue, and have issued a correction.”

These kinds of big boo-boos happen from time to time, and sometimes journalists get grumpy when others point them out, noting that everyone is trying their best these days under cost-cutting corporate pressure, and we should focus on the wins.

But we don’t say that about other local public service institutions when they err, like police departments or hospitals, and journalists typically seek to identify if there might be systemic issues leading to mistakes that are important to know for context.

I asked Gannett’s PR team multiple times if the headline was crafted in the Chieftain’s newsroom or somewhere else, but didn’t hear back.

For what it’s worth, the paper’s correction also misidentified the Pueblo Central team as the Bulldogs, and I imagine that’s not an out-of-town thing.

Colorado journalist Scott Carney has an idea about legal insurance for content creators

You might know the Denver-based investigative journalist and anthropologist Scott Carney for his books “The Wedge,” “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” or his journalism in WIRED magazine, Mother Jones, and others.

He also runs a YouTube channel (among other enterprises), and this week he recorded one of himself explaining an idea he has to help support content creators.

As the content-creation industry becomes more democratized, those using it to practice independent journalism might find themselves exposed to potential defamation lawsuits.

In the video below, Carney recommends an entity like a college create, house, or administer a certification course and partner with an insurance firm for a “large policy for all sorts of different content creators” who are “no longer as risky.”

“This creates a market for a product that then they make money on, because insurance is a business,” he says. “There are lots of people with YouTube channels and with Substacks and other things where they need insurance.”

📢 Amplify your message: When you reach journalists, you reach their audiences

Each Friday, this “Inside the News in Colorado” newsletter reaches perhaps more influential Colorado journalists and media-adjacent readers in one place than any publication and has a record of raising awareness among the state’s press corps and newsmakers. Get in touch about a sponsorship box in this newsletter. Email me at coreyhutchins[at]gmail[dot]com.

’Interesting fiction’: Ex-GOP governor nominee complains about phantom reporters

Colorado’s former Republican nominee for governor, Heidi Ganahl, got into some back-and-forth on social media with members of the press corps this week.

Specifically, she complained that journalists from the Denver Post and 9NEWS, among others, had attended a recent press conference she held at the Capitol but then didn’t write about it.

The comments came in the context of her lament that the mainstream media is ignoring her belief that the numbers from her 2022 race (in which she lost by a large margin) “seemed off” to her in conservative Douglas County, along with some other races.

Ganahl has made no secret about her contempt for what she’s called the “liberal media” in Colorado as she cranks up her own Rocky Mountain Voice outlet as an alternative for conservatives.

“Despite major CO news outlets … attending our press conference on the 2022 election findings last week—not one of them has covered the findings yet,” Ganahl tweeted, name-checking the Denver Post, 9NEWS, Colorado Public Radio, and KDVR specifically.

Responding, Jon Murray, a Denver Post editor, said she was incorrect: No one from the Post was at the event. “Claiming that news outlets attended your presser and then didn’t write about/cover it is quite the interesting fiction for a former major-party gubernatorial nominee to be peddling,” he said in a public comment. “We weren’t there. And I know we're not the only outlet she cites that wasn’t.”

Ganahl said she saw someone with a Denver Post accessory.

“After Ms. Ganahl replied that someone with a Denver Post badge on their bag was seen at the presser, notebook in hand, we exchanged some direct messages,” Murray said. “The description she offered of the person didn’t match anyone on our staff, as far as I and others here can tell.”

Meanwhile, 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark said, “Just checked with our assignment desk. 9NEWS did not send a representative to the event.”

Ganahl replied that she had spoken to a 9NEWS producer who called prior to the press conference and asked if it would be streamed or if the station should send someone.

The mini-drama led one reader to wonder: “Isn’t this kind of performance art? Making wild ass accusations and then getting her story even more play when the media responds.”

Spotlight glows on Colorado Community Media’s national owner

The National Trust for Local News earned some ink this week after one of its executives gave a presentation at the Online News Association conference in Atlanta.

That’s the nonprofit that owns Colorado Community Media and its string of two dozen newspapers in the Denver suburbs.

From Sarah Scire at Nieman Lab:

When newspaper veteran Ross McDuffie became the first-ever chief portfolio officer for the National Trust for Local News, the nonprofit organization owned two dozen newspapers in Colorado and generated around $5 million in earned revenue.
A little more than a year and a half later, the Trust has grown rapidly by nearly every measure.

The NTLN now has 65 papers in Colorado, Maine, and Georgia; 500 employees; 100,000 paying subscribers; $50 million in revenue, and 2.5 million unique monthly viewers, Scire wrote.

Some more nuggets from the piece:

“The Trust has raised $38 million in philanthropic support, Poynter reported in July.”
“The nonprofit has focused on raising funds specifically to acquire news brands and to make what McDuffie calls ‘catalytic investments’ designed to “future-proof” the newsrooms.”
“The Trust has plans to expand to more states. The nonprofit news organization has heard from dozens of interested local news organizations.”

Here in Colorado, the National Trust for Local News bought a used printing press from Canada, moved it to Denver, had hoped to have it up and running four months ago. Delays have pushed it back, though it should be operational soon, I’m told.

Last month, CCM laid off its editor and business manager amid a reorganization.

Vail Daily editor: ‘We’re shifting our opinion section’

Following a recent local “Above the Noise” forum hosted by Rocky Mountain PBS, Vail Daily Editor Nate Peterson wrote a column dedicated to “changing the conversation” in the paper’s commentary pages.

From the column:

I keep coming back to that room full of strangers and the idea of somehow being above the noise. There was a time, pre-internet, when locals and national columnists writing about national issues on the local opinion page carried significant weight. But, in 2024, the amount of takes you can find on national issues — especially those that conform to your worldview — is overwhelming.
Meanwhile, a lot of letters from readers writing about local issues — proposed developments, dwindling wildlife, decreasing snowpack, I-70 accidents, and shortages of child care and housing, among others — draw considerably more eyeballs than some of the columns on national issues that take up valuable real estate in our print pages and online.
That’s why we’re shifting our opinion section by focusing more on local issues and perspectives and moving away from the national political discourse that seems to dominate so many conversations.
This isn’t a retreat from our toxic national politics but rather a renewed focus on the mission statement that has been printed beneath our flag for decades: Bringing Communities Together.

The column also gets into details about what Peterson learned about his community at the forum and why he won’t publish certain opinions in the paper.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

❌* The newsletter version of this post listed an earlier job description for the journalist. She was a news director, not a senior weekend producer when hired by Denver7.

💵 “Locally owned and non-profit newsrooms serving communities across Colorado are invited to apply to join the 2024 #NewsCONeeds Year-End Giving Challenge and apply for matching grant funding” from Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter. Learn more details and apply here. (Deadline: Oct. 14.)

🏆 Pauline Rivera, owner and publisher of La Voz Colorado, Denver’s “first and oldest bilingual newspaper, was inducted into the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the Curtis Hotel on Sept. 28,” Linda Shapley wrote for Colorado Community Media.

🤺 “Colorado media are fighting against the right-wing smear that a Venezuelan gang has ‘taken over’ the city of Aurora,” wrote Casey Wexler and Sage Hodil for Media Matters for America.

👀 After a judge sentenced former Republican Mesa County elections clerk Tina Peters for a scheme of crimes related to a data breach and what a judge called her “lies” about election fraud, Colorado writer Logan M. Davis wrote this: “Now that Tina Peters has been sentenced to 9 years in prison, it’s probably fine for me to tell y’all that this thread brought the FBI to my house 2.5 years ago because they couldn’t find this recording, asked if I could give it to them. Then they asked me not to tell anyone.” (Davis was a researcher at the time and now writes for the progressive nonprofit Colorado Times Recorder site.)

🐟 Retired journalist Sandra Fish spoke to the Colorado Press Women group this week. “As she retires from a journalism career with its emphasis on truth gained through data journalism, Fish looks forward to moderating forums and hopes to do a bit of freelance work and travel,” wrote Sharon Almirall in a dispatch about the talk.

👻 More than a year has passed since leaders of Colorado Public Radio said the statewide broadcaster had accepted at least $8.3 million to move into a new headquarters with money from a secret donor whose name it has not publicly disclosed.

❓ The reason CPR didn’t disclose its secret donor at the outset is because they were in a “quiet phase” of a capital campaign with a public phase to follow. “We’re months away from that public phase at which point we will acknowledge our lead donor and any other donors we have,” CPR CEO Stewart Vanderwilt said last September. He said the donors are “just folks with means,” adding that it’s “not a CEO, it’s not someone who has an interest that they’re trying to advance other than their belief in CPR and our role in society.” (Want to start a betting pool about who it might be? Email me potential names, and if you wind up being right, I’ll buy you a year’s membership in the Colorado chapter of SPJ. Depending on how many names come through, I might start publishing them here.)

🆕 Daniel Webb has joined the Estes Park Trail-Gazette newspaper as a reporter. On Oct. 2, Webb had six separate bylined posts on the Trail-Gazette’s website starting at 6:51 a.m. and ending 12 hours and two minutes later.

🪧 “In the first authorization for an open-ended strike ever taken by journalists at a newsroom owned by the secretive Alden Global Capital, the Southern California News Group union … announced its members have voted overwhelmingly in favor of striking,” the labor union reported. (Alden Global financially controls several newspapers in Colorado including the Denver Post.)

🆕 Eleanor Bennett is rejoining Aspen Public Radio “as the reporter on a joint Social Justice Desk in collaboration with Aspen Journalism,” the station announced this week. "I am thrilled to be back home in the valley reporting after a summer studying Spanish,” Bennett said in a statement. “I look forward to covering a range of challenges impacting our community, from a lack of affordable housing to mental health access barriers — as well as local efforts to solve these issues. I also hope to continue practicing my Spanish and building relationships with fellow community members."

🎒 Roughly 1,400 high school students involved in journalism across Colorado flooded the campus of CU Boulder on Tuesday for the Colorado Student Media Association’s annual J-Day. “We can’t stop thinking about how cool it was to host them,” the account for CU’s College of Media Communication and Information stated.

🆕 Skyler Stark-Ragsdale has joined the Aspen Times as a reporter. Ragsdale is a graduate of Colorado College and Emerson College who “won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Award to Mozambique.”

💸 “As restaurants come forward with allegations of broken promises against The Denver Foodie, 9NEWS viewers are pointing out the influencer has not been marking his videos as branded content, which appear to violate social media and Federal Trade Commission rules,” the station’s investigative journalist Jeremy Jojola reported. “Social media policies, like on Instagram, and regulations outlined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) say influencers must disclose on their videos if they are being compensated to mention a business or brand.”

✍️ “Although the Venezuelan gang accusations are more fiction than fact, even the true tragedies that taint the city don’t fully reflect my reality of being born and raised in Aurora,” wrote Westword staff writer Hannah Metzger. And the Rocky Mountain Reader this week reported how when “misinformation trumpeted by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance wrought chaos in Springfield, Ohio,” a writer “transplanted from Colorado” defended her adopted hometown.

🆕 Karin Zeitvogel has joined the Colorado Springs Independent newspaper as a reporter. She has reported from Europe and the Middle East and previously served as editor of the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper.

🦬 “Wow, I’m blessed beyond belief to have witnessed [CU Buffs football coach] @DeionSanders giving me a shoutout telling me he’s proud of me and all the work I do especially with the adversity I deal with from my physical disability,” said Andrew Cherico, a student reporter at the University of Central Florida. “Thank you Coach Prime it means the world.”

🇺🇦 “Ostensibly, three Ukrainian journalists visited Gazette newsrooms last week to learn techniques from us that will help them report the war more powerfully,” wrote Vince Bzdek, executive editor of the Gazette in Colorado Springs and Denver, and Colorado Politics. “But I’m not sure we didn’t learn more from them than they did from us — about practicing journalism in a war zone, about battling down disinformation through courageous fact-checking, about staying alive when your schools and homes and hospitals are getting shelled.”

✍️ The Longmont Leader said last week it “is excited to announce that [it is] searching for freelance writers. We are ready to grow our news coverage and we need your help.”

☀️ “It’s a surreal experience to pick up el Sol del Valle on a Friday. Here is a full newspaper, all in Spanish, now hovering at 20 pages packed with local and regional news as well as original art and cultural anecdotes,” wrote Raleigh Burleigh, editor of the nonprofit Sopris Sun newspaper in Carbondale. “I am delighted, turning each page and lingering on a photo or headline, making mental notes to flip back to a story later or finding myself already immersed in reading and unable to stop.”

💡 Free idea: If your local news organization is running a local police blotter, how about a public defender blotter? Ask the local public defender’s office for a list and narratives of recent arrests and accusations that turned out incorrect or fell apart under scrutiny.

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. 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.) Reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.