Fewer Colorado journalists covering the arts is 'bad for everyone'

And more news behind the news in Colorado this week

Photo by Allie Reefer on Unsplash

A dozen years ago, critic and commentator John Moore left the Denver Post.

Typically, a journalist accepting a buyout at a local newspaper might not make headlines at a rival news outlet, but this one did. His exit left a “void” in the state’s theater scene, the alternative weekly Westword reported at the time.

That wasn’t a generation ago, but it can still feel like a long time. (For cultural reference, our former Democratic U.S. president, Barack Obama, hadn’t even gotten around to endorsing gay marriage yet.)

But Moore’s departure at the end of 2011 put him in a “regrettable place in history,” he wrote in a personal column this week: that of the “last salaried critic” who was fully dedicated to covering live theater for a Colorado news organization. “There will not be another,” he wrote.

Since then, arts journalism in the state has continued to thin out. Here is Moore’s assessment from his weekend column in the Denver Gazette where he is now on staff:

We’re not talking about a crisis. More like a massive crisis that coincides with the overall decline of an industry that continues to lose jobs faster than the coal industry — to the dread of some and to the grave-stomping delight of many others who have willfully turned away from principled journalism in favor of agenda-driven disinformation, propaganda and brainless TikTok videos.

Oftentimes when assessing the crisis in local news we hear about the impacts that newsroom retrenchment has had on local civic information needs, like elections, public health and safety, the environment, and public affairs.

Moore’s column, running nearly 2,000 words, puts into sharp perspective what has been lost on the cultural front.

“When you have fewer journalists covering the arts, it is bad for journalists and it is bad for local arts organizations,” he wrote. “But more than anything, it is bad for everyone in Colorado who is becoming increasingly oblivious to the cultural lifeblood of their communities.”

On his final day at the Post, Moore counted 17 writers and editors covering arts, entertainment, and features at the paper — a number he thought at the time was “apocalyptic.” But today, he says, 17 “is an absurd fantasy.”

More from Moore:

The only full-time writer covering “the arts” — all of them — for The Post now is my friend John Wenzel. I am a hybrid columnist/reporter covering “the arts” — all of them — for The Denver Gazette. Eden Lane just passed the two-year mark covering “the arts” — all of them — for Colorado Public Radio.

After publication, he added this note to the bottom of the story: “Addendum: Isaac Vargas is a full-time arts and culture reporter at Denverite. Parker Yamasaki is a full-time arts and culture reporter for the Colorado Sun. Emily Ferguson is a full-time music and culture editor at Westword.”

As for my own addendum, Jezy Gray is a full-time culture editor and reporter covering the arts at Boulder Weekly, Gray told me via email after this newsletter went out. The Intermountain Jewish News also does “a lot of arts coverage, mostly reporting,” assistant publisher Shana Goldberg said.

Interestingly, when 93 news outlets across Colorado responded to a Colorado News Collaborative survey last fall asking them to name the top five topics covered by their newsroom, the number one topic they named was arts and culture.

Moore cites the American Theatre Critics Association stating “only about a dozen” full-time theater critics remain — in the entire country.

A focus on diminished arts and culture coverage in a major American city comes as executives at some dominant social media platforms like Meta, née, Facebook, have said they are less interested in prioritizing political news in the feeds of their users.

“News about sports, music, fashion, culture is something we’re actively pursuing,” Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said just this week. “Political news is the topic where [we’re] looking to be more careful. Politics is already on Threads, and that’s okay, we’re just not looking to amplify it.”

Moore’s Denver-centric story also gets into the Great Fragmentation of the Mile High City’s media scene in a post-Rocky Mountain News era and how that looks up close specifically in the city’s arts and culture coverage. While there might be a host of “citizen champions and cheerleaders” who produce uncompensated content, Moore reports, such a model “incentivizes them to err on the positive side and blurs the line between journalism and boosterism.”

So, what to do about it? Moore takes a stab:

The CBCA is an organization whose mantra is simple: A thriving arts community is good for business. So what can the business community do to support arts journalism? By supporting any forward-thinking initiative that employs actual arts journalists, especially in nontraditional ways. Every arts organization has a story to tell. They just don’t have as many journalists available to tell them. So, hire one to tell yours.

The CBCA could do that. Or it could take a page from a newspaper in Greensboro, North Carolina.

In 2014, I wrote for Columbia Journalism Review about an umbrella arts organization in Greensboro that had approached the local News & Record with an idea: it would raise money from its private donors into a dedicated account and give the money to the newspaper to fund more arts-and-culture coverage. The paper decided to do it.

A decade ago, I was more critical of such an arrangement than I might be now. Since then, we’ve seen other like-minded models for specific beats in Colorado.

A few years ago, a network of 18 Denver nonprofits banded together to fund a “housing and hunger” beat at Denverite. A pot company in Northern Colorado funded an education beat for the local Gannett-owned newspaper. Advocacy groups took over Streetsblog Denver. A “selection of stalwart local businesses bundled into a sponsorship group” has allowed Colorado Springs culinary scene reporter Matt Schniper to produce independent journalism on Substack. Colorado Media Project underwrites the bulk of this newsletter about media you’re currently reading so I don’t have to charge you to subscribe. The Waltons are essentially keeping water journalism alive in the West.

This is where funding for niche news is moving, and while “beat funding” isn’t particularly new, some of the models for it, like those mentioned above, might be.

Before Moore’s move to the Denver Gazette, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts actually hired him to create a NewsCenter where he acted as a “semi-independent” journalist covering the entire local arts community with more than half of the coverage related to the DCPA, he told me in a Facebook comment.

“It was real journalism, and it benefited orgs from around the entire state in a variety of arts disciplines, but it was admittedly all ‘advocacy journalism,’” he said, though he added, “I told people there was nothing I ever wrote for the NewsCenter that I wouldn't have also written for The Post, which was true.”

In his Gazette lament column, Moore included an interesting mini-profile of the prolific Front Range arts-and-culture scribe Toni Tresca, “a self-starting, self-taught journalist who has emerged as the most promising counter to declining arts journalism in Denver in years.” Notably, Moore says Tresca has “completely rewritten the long-entrenched rules of freelance.”

Moore’s column also posed an opportunity for someone. Check this part out, emphasis mine:

Ironically, the destruction of the empires that were once The Denver Post and the late Rocky Mountain News has given rise to some spectacular one-off freelance arts journalism that you will come across in the Colorado Sun, Westword, Denverite, Boulder Weekly, Aurora Sentinel, Boulder Daily Camera, Denver Gazette and many others, including just about every neighborhood publication that falls under the Colorado Community Media umbrella.

If you were to ever see it all, in one place, the totality of the daily snapshot of local arts journalism on any given day is impressive. Problem is, no one can keep up with all of those separate outlets, and none that remain has remotely the same reach once enjoyed by The Post or The News — including The Post.

The reach those papers had is not coming back, but here’s an idea: Someone could start a newsletter rounding up all that disparate coverage in (wait for it) one place each week. (Your move, Tresca.)

In the meantime, read Moore’s entire column here.

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Denver Post opinion page editor pops Pueblo mayor for ghost-written column

Earlier this month, Pueblo’s mayor had published a personal column in the Denver Post and Pueblo Chieftain that journalists discovered had been ghostwritten for her by a lobbyist representing a steel mill in her city.

Last week, the Denver Post’s opinion page editor, Megan Schrader, who had published the column in her section, addressed the issue. In it, she took umbrage to Mayor Heather Graham’s nothing-to-see-here defense that all public officials let publicity agents and special interests publish words for them under their names.

“I want to take this opportunity to clarify that The Denver Post expects the byline on anything we publish, whether that is a news story or a column, to reflect who actually wrote the piece,” Schrader wrote. “Certainly, there is room for collaboration on opinion columns – including dual bylines and seeking input from colleagues and media relations experts.”

More from the column:

Graham may be right, that elected officials frequently put their names on things written by lobbyists, campaign donors or other special interests, but I suspect her blasé attitude about it has more to do with her lack of experience in public office than her grasp of what other public figures submit as their own writing.

I want to state firmly that the expectation at The Denver Post is that pieces submitted to us have been drafted by the named author. As long as I’ve been the editor of The Post’s opinion pages, I’ve known city council members, waiters, U.S. senators and engineers who agonize over their writing. Sometimes the writing is not the best, but I’d take an imperfect authentic voice on these pages over sterilized talking points any day. There is a difference between a staffer paid by an elected official helping with drafts and edits and a special interest sending over a completed copy for cursory review.

Schrader also said that she would try to do a better job herself “notifying readers when columns have been submitted on behalf of someone by a third party” since the mayor’s column had come her way via Sean Duffy, the lobbyist who wrote it.

Advice for older journalists from younger ones

With college graduations over and young journalists now entering the workforce, Kristen Hare at the Poynter Institute journalism organization offered a twist on the advice-for-young-journalists beat.

Instead of the usual, she rounded up advice from young emerging journalists to older ones. “Instead of offering advice to our newer colleagues,” she wrote, “how about we listen to them a little more?”

Two of them came from Colorado. Here they are:

Parker Yamasaki, The Colorado Sun: “… don’t equate youth with social media savvy. Younger journalists are probably more intuitively comfortable on social media, but it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily excited or skilled enough to produce for it. Generating a sound social media presence in a newsroom requires curiosity and adaptability from the newsroom, including editors, the same way launching a newsletter or developing a special series would. If that task does get handed off to a younger journalist, still ask questions and be involved.

And…

Nina Joss, Colorado Community Media: “Be open-minded! Our job often involves opening our minds to many sides of a story. Remember that attitude in conversations with younger colleagues as well. We all have different experiences that inform our work, and we can all learn a lot from each other!”

Read the whole thing here, including a bit of blistering advice to newsroom hiring managers from Hare herself.

Estes Park newspaper responds to a new digital rival: Let’s work together

Last week’s lead item in this newsletter reported the emergence of the latest digital news outlet angling to “fill a void” left by a shrinking legacy newspaper, this time in Estes Park.

This week, Michael Romero, the publisher of the Estes Park Trail-Gazette, which is a sister paper of the Denver Post, sounded off.

It was, Romero wrote, “disheartening” to see the new Estes Valley Voice digital site announce its intentions with a message urging locals to “turn the page to better journalism in the Estes Valley.” (It’s not “Leave the Post in the past,” at least.)

More from Romero:

Ouch. I implore you… please don’t “turn the page” on ANY local journalist! We need more journalists! Not less. Sadly, according to Pew Research, US Newsroom employment has fallen a staggering 26% since 2008. Therefore, I applaud any start-up efforts whose mission aligns with that of local media and who resources desperately needed journalists for our communities. Don’t read less. Instead, inform yourself! Consume great local news content. Then consume more! That’s what we need—an informed, educated, and engaged society.

This newsletter has previously explored the ways digital local news startups in Colorado can — and do — work together with local legacy publications. The publisher of the Trail-Gazette signaled he is interested in doing so.

“I would love to see better collaboration and partnership with all local media in the Estes Valley, including content sharing, reporter resourcing, enterprise story collaborations, etc,” he wrote. “Together, we are stronger, and together, our community is better.”

City Cast Denver goes longform. On … Lauren Boebert

Since the City Cast hyperlocal podcasting network launched in 2021, Denver’s version, called City Cast Denver, has been a leader, building the largest audio market for the brand with 30,000 listeners.

The small editorial team of host Bree Davies, producers Paul Karolyi and Olivia Jewell Love, and newsletter editor Peyton Garcia, cranks out daily news podcasts at 30 to 45 minutes in length. Its website offers verticals like “Denver Explained,” “A Day in Denver History,” and even an “Urban Almanac.”

Recently, City Cast decided to do something it hasn’t quite done before. The team went in-depth with a multi-part long-form podcast about Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert.

“With only a month until her make-or-break primary, we’re diving deeper than anyone has before,” Davies promises in the show’s teaser. (Boebert recently switched districts from one on the Western Slope to one on the Front Range where she thinks she has a better chance of winning. Donald Trump has endorsed her.)

The City Cast team delayed their first installment of “Lauren Boebert Can’t Lose” after the 37-year-old congresswoman granted them a 90-minute kitchen table interview that included her mom and dog.

The first 32-minute episode, which dropped May 22, titled “The Escort Rumors,” tackles a federal First Amendment lawsuit that David Wheeler, a North Carolina political activist who founded the American Muckrakers PAC, filed against Boebert for defamation.

Wheeler had used his PAC to help bring down a Republican congressman in North Carolina and then he decided to go after Boebert with salacious accusations that made their way into the state and national press. Some of those accusations “lacked corroborating evidence or were shown to be false,” according to Colorado Newsline. Newsline also reported that Wheeler’s lawsuit essentially claims “Boebert defamed Wheeler by falsely accusing him of defaming her.”

City Cast’s Karolyi interviewed Wheeler extensively for the podcast where they talked about his methods and about the case. Karolyi also consults First Amendment Attorney Steve Zansberg.

“It’s not he-said-she-said in the press anymore,” Karolyi says in the episode. “It’s going to court.”

More Colorado media odds & ends

🔗 Colorado Media Project and Local Media Association announced a new partnership they say will “bring the proven, in-depth training and coaching program of the LMA Lab for Journalism Funding to local newsrooms across Colorado.” Find out how to get involved here.

✅ Rocky Mountain PBS has created Reality Check, “a nonpartisan education initiative of the Rocky Mountain PBS journalism team to create a more media-literate Colorado.”

❌ In last week’s newsletter about a new digital news startup in Estes Park, I’d indicated that the local Estes Park Trail-Gazette was a “daily” newspaper. Although it is the town’s newspaper of record it does not come out every day. Clarification: The emailed version of this newsletter described Toni Tresca as a “Denver scribe.” While Tresca writes for some Denver publications, the journalist lives in Boulder County.

💉🐎 Renowned NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen recently spoke via video to Colorado newsrooms that have committed to participating in a Voter Voices initiative this election season in which they resolve to quit lazy horse-race campaign coverage for reporting that actually matters to voters. “The citizens agenda style is my dorky name for it,” Rosen wrote in an item that explains reporting on the stakes not the odds.

🌞 As part of the statewide Voter Voices initiative, the Colorado Sun explained to readers how it plans to cover the upcoming 2024 elections. “Ultimately, The Sun’s goal is to focus on policy over politics, with an emphasis on what Coloradans need to know to fill out and cast their ballots.”

📺 Denver 7 published an explainer from executives Christina Hartman and Sarah Fine of its parent company Scripps Media that details the “steps we take to protect the identity and security of our sources.”

🗞 Writing in the Estes Park Trail-Gazette, columnist Jason Van Tatenhove penned a paean to local newspapers and why they are important.

🗓 The results are in. Last week’s poll found the vast majority of you saying you’ll read this newsletter whenever I send it. So enjoy it again on a Thursday so I can take tomorrow off. (The 13% of you who asked for it on Thursdays can tip me here.)

🆕 Bradley King has joined Denver7 as a sports reporter. She previously worked at KOAA in Colorado Springs. “Truly a dream come true,” she said.

📡 The religious broadcasting group Pillar Media has “tripled its presence in the Denver area after closing its acquisition of Max Media’s KJHM and KFCO,” Radio Ink reported. “KJHM, formerly Jammin’ 101.5, is now Star 101.5, while KFCO switched from Hot 107.1 to Christian hip-hop Kingdom 107.1.”

🤔 “Imagine if journalists covered guns like they do abortion,” wrote Northeastern Junior College math and physics instructor Cory Gaines of Sterling in Complete Colorado.

📸 Writing in the Gazette, Eric Sondermann told stories about “the Colorado roots behind some of the iconic photos of our time.”

🍻 After remaining open for three Saturdays in May to test whether doing so is feasible, the Denver Press Club has “decided to continue for another month,” said its executive director, Alby Segall. Attendance and bar revenue has been decreasing, he added, but he is hopeful. Here are the stats for those keeping score: May 11: 30 people and about $400. May 18: 25 people and about $350. May 25: 20 people and about $200.

⚙️ The Colorado Ethnic Media Exchange is now known as the Colorado Diverse Media Collective.

⚖️ A judge has “ordered the Lakewood Police Department to release blurred body-worn camera footage of officers shooting and killing a 17-year-old crime suspect in March 2023,” Jeff Roberts reported for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

🌤 “Pueblo City Council violated Colorado open meeting law on May 13 when it inadequately announced a closed-door discussion with the city’s lawyer,” Anna Lynn Winfrey reported in the Pueblo Chieftain. “That’s according to Steve Zansberg, a Colorado attorney with expertise in the First Amendment and Colorado Sunshine Law.”

🪦 While Westword contributor Skyler McKinley was reporting a recent feature about the neglected Riverside Cemetery in Denver, he also uncovered some Denver Press Club history, he said on social media. “The tombstone for a late member buried in our plot at Riverside claims he was a colonel in the Civil War, something historians tell me they can’t substantiate,” he said. “Unlike in newspapers, nobody fact-checks what you write on tombstones!”

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.