How some Colorado newsrooms are using artificial intelligence

The news behind the news in Colorado

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

This week, John Hickenlooper, who represents Colorado in the U.S. Senate, spoke at a CU Boulder conference where he warned of a “historic inflection point” involving artificial intelligence.

“The biggest question we should be asking ourselves today is if we want to recreate the social media self-policing tragedy with AI,” the state’s former Democratic governor said. He added: “Do we want to live in a world where Generative AI potentially displaces thousands of workers?”

The federal lawmaker’s comments came as he signed on to a proposed new law that would set up some guardrails for companies that are rapidly developing and deploying AI technology.

Meanwhile, as Colorado newsrooms covered Hickenlooper’s speech and set out to report on his legislation, behind the scenes they were already using AI tools themselves or grappling with how they can and should responsibly do so as journalists.

Consider the Denver Post where the newsroom has held staff-wide discussions about AI and its potential — and where its journalists don’t want to go with the tools.

Such talks have left the newsroom with a “broad understanding” about how, where, and when not to deploy AI — like reporters using it to write stories, says Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo. But Post journalists are still thinking through other aspects of AI including whether and how to use it in helping craft good headlines or even distill large amounts of information. In both of those cases, Colacioppo said, humans would still review any eventual output.

The newsroom leader also said she hoped the Post will be able to create a written policy to guide its journalists moving forward, with the understanding that AI is a “fast-changing field” and what might be workable today may not be in the future. “We also want to be sure we are transparent with readers about our use of AI,” she added.

Now for some transparency of my own: I bought a few shares of Microsoft when I learned it was pumping billions into the OpenAI research lab that created ChatGPT, and I got into Nvidia before I really understood that it makes hardware used for AI; I also invest in ETFs that likely benefit from AI holdings in other capacities. Make of that what you will.

Last April, around the time ChatGPT and its AI brethren were beginning to really rumble through American newsrooms, this newsletter checked in with some Colorado news managers to learn how they were thinking about it.

The responses were mixed. Some sounded knee-jerk antithetical to ChatGPT while others appeared open to synergies and other uses. Back then, some managers I spoke with hadn’t yet received or created any policies around using AI, and others were working on drafting something. Colorado Sun founder and editor Larry Ryckman offered one assessment at the time, saying, “I think we’re being naive to think that it will never play a role in newsrooms. What I do think is that we have to find a way to use it responsibly and with integrity.”

Since then, AI companies have entered into agreements with journalism groups and newsrooms. OpenAI announced a $5 million “partnership” with the American Journalism Project. The ChatGPT creator also has a deal with the Associated Press to license its story archive. This week, Microsoft announced it has launched “several collaborations with news organizations to adopt generative AI,” and a major journalism school as created an “AI Journalism Lab.”

In Colorado, newsroom leaders who weighed in for an update nine moths after I first queried them essentially acknowledged AI tools would play a role, and they discussed how they are integrating them into their workflow — whether inside or outside of their journalistic endeavors.

“While there is an inherent journalistic responsibility to research and produce original work, it’s hard to deny AI’s ability to enhance newsroom efficiency, productivity and reach — especially as our newsroom staff is stretched in covering their communities,” said Colorado Community Media Publisher Linda Shapley and Digital Editor Deborah Grigsby Smith in a joint statement.

This summer, CCM, which includes roughly two dozen newspapers in the Denver-area suburbs, crafted an AI policy that includes a “strict requirement for human oversight” and addresses accuracy, accountability, transparency, bias mitigation and copyright, and intellectual property. But it doesn’t yet address photos, predictive imagery, or video.

“Fun fact: We did use ChatGPT to write the first draft of that policy,” Shapley and Grigsby Smith said.

Like some other Colorado newsrooms, CCM uses for its online content management system a Wordpress platform called Newspack. The product contains Jetpack, an AI assistant and search tool among its offerings.

“The tools, ID’d as experimental, offer ideas for clarity, tone and organization,” the CCM managers said, adding that their digital team is vetting those options before “official deployment.”

On the airwaves, Colorado Public Radio has a policy that “AI cannot be used to generate content or drafts,” said the station’s executive editor, Kevin Dale. Furthermore, CPR journalists cannot upload any of its original reporting or drafts into generative artificial intelligence tools. (The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI, arguing that they used the newspaper’s copyrighted articles to train their chatbots.)

Dale said it is OK for journalists to round up links to research, “but not to summarize research,” and that “our work is for humans by humans.” Still, Dale added that management has told staff that CPR is always open to new ideas but will want to vet them before using.

On broadcast TV, Rocky Mountain PBS was, just this week, expecting its chief technology officer to present an “AI guidelines” document to its newsroom, journalism director Jeremy Moore said. A strategy team will review and edit it before submitting a draft to the Human Resources department.

Outside of the newsroom, some journalists say they’re using AI tools as part of their work but in ways that aren’t particularly public-facing.

Quentin Young, editor of the nonprofit digital Colorado Newsline, said in April that he hadn’t issued any guidance for his newsroom around AI chatbots “because we expect our journalists to be journalists.” But, he has since found ChatGPT a useful tool for some aspects of his job outside of journalism.

“I recently interviewed more than a dozen members of the community as part of a fundraising effort, and I used ChatGPT to summarize the interviews and identify main themes for my own use,” he said. “I can foresee using AI for other similar administrative tasks when such use does not compromise but rather enhances my performance as a manager.”

Young described Colorado Newsline’s published journalism as “produced entirely by the exertion of human synapses.”

In the newsletter world, “Axios is embracing AI in various ways — whether internally to make our jobs easier or externally to make our reporting stronger,” said John Frank of Axios Denver. For a recent story headlined “Colorado leaders want a crackdown on AI and deepfakes,” Frank included this at the end: “Go deeper: Can you spot deepfakes? Take our quiz.” Frank also wrote a separate story this week about “how Colorado candidates are using AI in the 2024 election.”

At Boulder Reporting Lab, founder Stacy Feldman says the nonprofit digital newsroom is using AI tools for “derivative blurbs” for its newsletter, “headlines, SEO, dataset organization, code writing for visualizations,” and some marketing copy. “Nothing groundbreaking,” she called it.

“Human editors are always involved, and if AI generates an article one day, we’ll clearly disclose it,” Feldman says. “In the long term, AI looks transformative for our industry, but in the short term, it’s very uncertain. We’re learning and experimenting, hoping AI helps us do more with less for our editorial and revenue goals in the ever-uncertain news business model.”

Not every outlet was as open to discussing the ways in which they are approaching this new technology.

Vince Bzdek, the executive editor overseeing the Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs, its digital counterpart in Denver, and Colorado Politics, is thus far keeping any AI experiments close to the vest, saying higher-ups would rather he not discuss it.

As for this newsletter, I noted my own experimentation with the AI image generator DALL-E last week, and I’ve previously mentioned that I sometimes run my copy through a paid version of ChatGPT, asking it to identify errors, typos, or grammatical mistakes. For an experiment in September, I allowed ChatGPT to suggest edits to a sentence, and then consulted editors from the Associated Press, the Denver Post, and Colorado Community Media to decide which was better.

Two of three chose ChatGPT’s suggestion over what I had originally written.

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Denverite, CPR, and KRCC drop the word ‘migrant’ from coverage. Will others follow?

There was a time when you might see “illegal alien” in traditional mainstream local news coverage. Same perhaps with “addict,” “the disabled,” or “the homeless.”

In recent years, some newsrooms have moved toward more people-first language in their coverage just as they’ve been apologizing for past harm to certain communities, adopting policies like the “right to be forgotten,” and thinking better about the ways they cover “crime” stories. Three years ago, a 9NEWS reporter decided he would stop using the term “grandfathered in” after learning it had roots in racist voter suppression.

This week, Denverite, Colorado Public Radio, and KRCC made a public style change involving the word “migrant.”

From Denverite Editor Obed Manuel in a Feb. 6 note to readers:

On Jan. 31, Denverite, CPR and KRCC began moving away from using this term when referring to the group of recent arrivals and those who may yet be on the way. We will avoid using “migrant” in our headlines, news stories, newsletters, social media and CPR radio stories.

Instead, we will refer to the people arriving in Denver and Colorado from the border as new immigrants.

A reason for the change is because of the “heavy political charge” of the word, Manuel added. “After so much use, without self-interrogation by the media, we feel as a newsroom that the word has lost much of the humanity behind it. It also may not accurately describe a person’s reason for arriving in Colorado.”

Notably, because the outlets rely on coverage from NPR, listeners might still hear the term since the change is a local style decision.

“Currently, we are not aware of any plans by National Public Radio to discontinue the use of the word ‘migrant,’ meaning that non-CPR news programming that airs on our airwaves may still contain the word,” Manuel wrote.

The outlets under the CPR umbrella are by no means the only ones covering stories about people moving to and through Denver, so it will be interesting to see whether any others follow suit.

A quick Google search showed the Denver Post, Westword, 9NEWS, KDVR, Denver7, CBS Colorado, and the Denver Gazette using “migrant crisis,” “migrant” or “migrants” in headlines this week.

Once a pioneer, Colorado’s film and TV industry now ‘lags behind’ other states

While Colorado is known to shell out tax dollars to out-of-state travel writers in order to lure in tourists, it isn’t exactly making it rain when it comes to film and TV subsidies.

Not as much as neighbors Arizona and New Mexico, anyway, according to Andrea Kramar at Rocky Mountain PBS. From her recent story:

Over the past eight years, the state has spent an average of $3 million per year in incentives to bring productions to Colorado. Comparatively, Georgia spent $1.3 billion in 2022 while New Mexico spent $60 million over the same time period.

Some of the biggest names in entertainment film in those states — “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Ozark” and “Stranger Things” were all shot in Georgia, for example, and “Oppenheimer,” “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” rolled in New Mexico.

Tax incentives for the film industry remain controversial because they involve large subsidies from the state coffers, with sometimes lackluster returns to the economy. But they have become common practice since the early 2000s and production companies have come to rely on them.

Kramar notes that the “seeming lack of interest in the film industry from the state is a departure from its history,” reporting that in 1969, Colorado created the “first government sanctioned film commission in the country.”

Meanwhile, the TV networks Starz and Encore “launched in Colorado in the 1990s,” she wrote, “Yet, much of the media infrastructure that once existed, such as soundstages and rental houses, shrunk in size or left the state entirely in the last few decades.”

For more context, Kramar spoke with Arielle Brachfeld, who serves as deputy commissioner of Colorado’s Office of TV and Film, which is inside of the state’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

Read the Q-and-A at the link above.

Longtime Boulder and Longmont newspaper editor retires

Ronda Haskins, an editor of the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper and the Longmont Times-Call, has retired after 45 years.

From Amber Carlson in the Daily Camera:

Many who know Haskins have remarked on her versatile skill set and the number of different jobs she did in the newsroom over the years. Haskins held editing roles in the features, business and editorial departments. At various points in time, she also supervised interns, did copy editing and worked as part of the design team, and she eventually also started working for the Times-Call when both papers came under the ownership of Prairie Mountain Media. …

Matt Sebastian, now the managing editor of the Denver Post, started working for the Camera in 1997 and stayed for about 20 years before moving on. Haskins was his first editor there, and he characterized her retirement as “the end of an era” for the paper.

“I always enjoyed working with Ronda. … Her departure really is a big loss in terms of institutional memory,” Sebastian said. “As newspapers get smaller, people tend to stay there for shorter periods of time and move on to different jobs. And I think that kind of longevity is not something we see a whole lot of anymore. It’s very valuable.”

Haskins’ departing quote to the paper about her retirement read: “There’s always going to be new ways to get information, but people still need the information. The need for responsible local journalism is not going to go away.”

More Colorado media odds & ends

🤔 The Colorado Times Recorder analyzed local news coverage that cited the conservative Common Sense Institute think tank and found “Of 31 news articles mentioning CSI during December and January, only four … informed readers that the organization is ‘conservative,’” Jason Salzman wrote this week. “During the two months that we studied CSI coverage, conservative media outlets owned by GOP billionaire Phil Anschutz (Colorado Politics and the Denver and Colorado Springs Gazette) published the most stories mentioning CSI (16 total) — over half of the articles that mentioned CSI during the months studied,” he wrote.

📰 Sheila Flynn of the U.K.-based Independent has an on-the-ground feature story about the Ouray County Plaindealer stolen newspapers saga.

💰 BridgeTower Media, “which operates business publications across the country, had acquired ColoradoBiz for an undisclosed amount,” Chris Roush of Talking Biz News reported. “Founded in 1973,” he wrote, “ColoradoBiz is the largest business publication in Colorado. It has a monthly print magazine and a website.”

📲 Colorado “wants to curb the danger that doomscrolling on social media poses for young people,” Alayna Alvarez reported for Axios Denver.

📺 Marshall Zelinger of 9NEWS in Denver attended the U.S. Supreme Court hearing this week about whether Colorado can keep former Republican President Donald Trump off the ballot. While there, a courtroom sketch artist sketched a sketch of Zellinger sketching a sketch of the action. See it here.

⚖️ The Douglas County School District “will join hundreds of other districts around the country to sue social media companies for the harm they inflict on students,” McKenna Harford reported for Douglas County News-Press.

🔗 A Colorado-based integrated marketing agency, Backbone Media, announced a “significant partnership” with Colorado Mountain College “aimed at nurturing future talent in the marketing field,” Taylor Cramer wrote for the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent.

⬆️ Nexstar Media Group announced that Bill Dallman is the vice president and general manager of its broadcasting and digital operations serving Grand Junction and Montrose, Colorado. The stations include KREX-TV, KGJT-TV, WesternSlopeNow, “and their related digital and social media channels.” 

👩‍💻 “Good journalism is vital to a democracy,” said the Gazette’s Aurora city government reporter Kyla Pearce as part of the news organization’s initiative to introduce its team to its audience.

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.