How we mapped Colorado's news scene and why similar maps are exploding

The news behind the news in Colorado

Colorado was something of a pioneer in 2022.

That’s when journalists, students, academics, and others embarked on a collaborative effort to find out where people are getting their local news and information in all of our state’s 64 counties — regardless of medium.

In doing the research, a student at Colorado College, where I teach and manage the Journalism Institute, even found “an individual community member going door-to-door to tell people about certain events or occurrences.” (Indeed, we put that modern-day town crier from San Juan County on the map.)

Since then, such interactive maps have exploded in the states, though ours certainly wasn’t the first.

Oregon, Nebraska, Maryland, Minnesota, Georgia, and elsewhere all now have so-called news maps, while last year efforts began to map New Mexico, Montana, Wisconsin, Washington State, Wyoming — and very likely elsewhere.

This week, for the news site The Conversation, I wrote about the rise of these state-based mapping projects, how and why we do them, and the latest thinking and research about them. And I tied it back to Colorado.

From the story:

To make sense of Colorado’s landscape, we used a loose methodology.

We chose not to be judge and jury on the legitimacy of a source. We added something to our map if residents told us they relied on it or if it had an otherwise demonstrable impact in the community. By doing so, we sought to reflect the reality of where people look for news and information in a county and what is available.

On our map, we noted whether a source was a member of a professional journalism organization and what kind of ownership structure it has. We included a brief description about each source for context.

University of Denver researchers Kareem Raouf El Damanhoury and David Coppini initially synthesized two public databases to get a baseline of outlets in each Colorado county. They also analyzed news coverage in each county on a single weekday in 2021 and gauged the number of original and local stories produced.

Colorado College students then interviewed people in the counties to identify more sources. We sent surveys to local news organizations to publish in their communities as well.

Our map isn’t perfect. We won’t catch everything, and we’re always looking for feedback about it in specific counties.

In reporting this latest story, this passage from Sarah Stonbely of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism struck me about doing this kind of labor-intensive work:

“Just as the local news landscape has evolved, so has local news mapping,” Stonbely said. “It has become clear that journalists are no longer the gatekeepers; there are now so many ways that people get news, especially in local journalism deserts. Our efforts to provide actionable data about local news landscapes have had to evolve accordingly.”

I think of this weekly newsletter you’re currently reading as an extension of the mapping project work we began in 2021 — and that we’re still doing — in Colorado.

I hope it creates some connective tissue each week among journalists and local news organizations throughout the state. A goal is to keep everyone abreast about what’s going on and what others are doing.

Find the full story “Universities are mapping where local news outlets are still thriving − and where gaps persist” at The Conversation here. Thanks to Claire Cleveland and Emily Costello for shepherding it through.

On a personal note, the Times Union, a newspaper I delivered via bike and snow sled as an 11-year-old kid in the Albany, New York suburbs, picked up the story and published it on Thursday.

Full circle, as they say.

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Axios Boulder funded by partnership with OpenAI

Fresh off the news that Axios Denver is expanding into Boulder, we learn where the money is coming from to help fund it.

From Axios this week:

OpenAI will underwrite the expansion of Axios to four cities of its choice as part of a broader content-sharing and technology deal, the firms said Wednesday.

Why it matters: It’s the first time OpenAI is funding newsrooms as a part of a publisher deal, although the idea isn't novel.

“Fun fact: All Axios staff now have access to the enterprise version of OpenAI,” Axios reported in a different story. “50+ of our colleagues have volunteered to help team-by-team AI experimentation.”

OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT and is the entity news publishers, including the Denver Post, are suing for copyright infringement. Other news organizations, like the Associated Press, have decided not to sue, but instead to partner with Open AI on licensing agreements.

One of the four cities benefiting from this new OpenAI deal is Boulder.

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei said in an Axios report that the technology won’t be used to report stories, “but to help build a system for creation, distribution, and monetization of our journalism.”

Monetizing its journalism might be why Axios chose Boulder, a city that has a shrinking daily newspaper but also a robust nonprofit newsroom called Boulder Reporting Lab, which launched in 2021. That newsroom already does local enterprise journalism well in Boulder.

In other words, the city isn’t one like, say, Pueblo, which is of similar size but more lacking on the local journalism front — and likely does not present as attractive an advertising base. A 2023 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report listed Boulder as having one of the “highest concentration of jobs and location quotients” for journalists among metropolitan areas. (Editor’s note. I’m highly skeptical about that.)

According to Axios, “OpenAI says it wants to support a healthy news ecosystem while providing its users with quality information.” (I own stock in Microsoft, which has pumped billions into the OpenAI research lab that created ChatGPT.)

Readers should soon be able to assess how much new original local journalism an Axios Boulder reporter will bring to the market in a daily newsletter versus how much they end up needing to feed from the work of Boulder Reporting Lab and other news organizations.

If Axios Boulder winds up doing too much of the latter, I think we’d have to wonder why OpenAI wouldn’t just fund Boulder Reporting Lab or look to a city that doesn’t already have a robust digital newsroom if the goal really is about more healthy news ecosystems.

There might even be a map for where to look.

Michelle P. Fulcher retires from Colorado Public Radio

After 46 years in journalism, a veteran who was on the team to win the Pulitzer Prize at the Denver Post for its Columbine coverage and worked at the Gazette, has retired as a producer for Colorado Public Radio where she’d been since 2006.

“I barely know what work life will look like without her,” Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner said of Michele P. Fulcher on air this week.

In a four-minute send-off, Warner recalled how the producer with a nose for news could find stories anywhere — including one about a “clown museum in a shed behind a house” on the Eastern Plains. (Editor’s note: someone please find out what happened to all those clowns.)

“Thanks so much to everyone who’s taken the time to congratulate me on my retirement. It’s been fun to hear from so many people from different parts of my life,” Fulcher said on social media. “I’m glad you’ve all been part of this crazy journey and I’m looking forward to more time to play now.”

“Somebody asked earlier this week how I thought I’d feel when the time came and I said ‘elated,’” she wrote in another post. “And that’s partly right.”

Here’s more from her:

I am so looking forward to being able to do whatever I want whenever I want. I can’t wait to spend more time with friends I adore and new friends I hope to meet, to delve into classes about esoteric things, do some volunteer work and try out that waterpainting set James bought me for Christmas. I’ll also let slip that Icelandair just today announced a banger of a sale on flights to Europe. It’s fate.

And now that the day is here, elation is mixed with a lot of other feelings — mostly profound gratitude to all the people who’ve helped and supported me along the way. … Here’s hoping that the craft I gave my career to survives and thrives. We all need that.

Fulcher mentioned in a CPR audio celebration this week that she’ll also have more time for her hobby, bird watching.

Colorado spotlighted in Daily Yonder report about local news philanthropy

Ilana Newman has a story out this week in The Daily Yonder headlined “A Coalition of Funders Supports Local Newsrooms Across America.”

The story lays out how the national Press Forward campaign is raising and spending money — and focuses on its recent grants in Colorado.

From the piece:

In the San Luis Valley, in rural southern Colorado, Chris Lopez saw a space for an alternative digital news source, despite the majority of digital-only news sources being housed in urban environments.

Lopez grew up in Alamosa, Colorado —population 9,833— but spent 30 years working for several newspapers, before returning to Alamosa in 2015. Lopez and his wife, MaryAnne Talbott started the Alamosa Citizen — a digital publication with original reporting and feature stories — in 2021, as an experiment.

“We felt that there was an opportunity in the market for something more regular, more robust, and told a different type of story than police blotters and things like that,” Lopez said.

The Alamosa Citizen was one of nine Colorado newsrooms, six of which were in rural communities, to receive $100,000 over two years in the first open call for national Press Forward funding in October. While many publications are discontinuing the print side of publication due to increasing costs and fewer printers, Lopez founded the Alamosa Citizen as an online only publication intentionally.

The story also quotes Colorado Media Project Associate Director Sam Moody, me, and Maeve Conran, who is managing editor of the Rocky Mountain Community Radio coalition.

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‘Radio Silence’: Two stations go dark in Southern Colorado

At the start of this month, a popular news-and-talk radio station known as KRLN and its sister station StarCountry 104.5, which served Fremont County in southern Colorado, blinked out after more than 75 years on the air.

According to Cañon City Daily Record reporter Carrie Canterbury, locals were stopping by the station in its final days to say thanks, including the mayor.

The stations provided local news.

“There is going to be a void,” Chris Sabo, who worked for the station when he was in high school from 1983-1986 ripping news off a teletype machine, told Canterbury. “Nobody right now knows how to fill it.”

Ed Norden, who worked in multiple capacities for the station for four decades, told the reporter that he especially enjoyed live interviews with political candidates.

From the story:

The most contentious interview he ever did in his 50 years in radio, including the time he spent in Nebraska before moving to Cañon City, was with State Senate candidates Linda Powers and Ken Chlouber in the 1990s.

“It was the most contentious interview of name-calling,” he said. “When I took a commercial break, Linda Powers was so incensed at Ken Chlouber that she had to get up and leave the studio for 60 seconds because she couldn’t stand sitting next to him.”

In 2001, Norden provided live coverage during the 9/11 attack and the funeral of Jason Schwartz, the young deputy who tragically was shot and killed in the line of duty.

Megan Stanley, who manages both stations, told Breeanna Jent of the Gazette that the owners of the broadcasting company were ready to retire from the broadcasting business, adding that the stations also weren’t adapting their business models to meet some listener and customer demands.

“If there’s a prison break, or if there’s a blizzard, or if there’s a flash flood coming down the Arkansas [River], [the community] turn[s] to this radio station for that information. And for us not being here, that breaks my heart,” Lobo Loggins, who sat behind a microphone, told Tyler Cunnington of KRDO.

The closure of the two radio stations “reflects bigger trends in the region,” wrote Michael Baldauf, a semi-retired engineer in Southern Colorado, for the site Radioworld.

“Many of the local restaurants and other businesses did not survive COVID shutdowns,” he wrote. “A local landmark, Mr. Ed’s restaurant on the main street through town, was demolished recently. National chains have been squeezing the local economy for years.”

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More Colorado media odds & ends

⚖️ The Western Slope TV reporter who says a man calling himself a Marine tried to choke him out in front of the KKCO/KJCT station last month says he is trying to get attempted murder added to the charges. Protesters appeared at his accused attacker’s Thursday court hearing in Grand Junction. “I would hope that our community leaders and political representatives and political leaders in our community would be calling these things out,” one advocate told the local TV station KJCT. “It should not be, although it typically is churches, of which I am a member, that are calling this stuff out. But I would like our community and political leaders to be calling this out as well.”

👀 “A state representative threatened to sue the Colorado Times Recorder last week, in a screed laced with misspellings, delusions of grandeur, and an apparent misunderstanding of the very thing she hopes to sue us for,” Logan M. Davis wrote for the progressive nonprofit digital site. “In other words, exactly the kind of fare we have come to expect from Douglas County’s Brandi Bradley.” (CTR’s smashmouth response of a column is certainly one way of responding to threats of a lawsuit.)

⚕️ At an Association of Healthcare Journalists webinar on Jan. 29, you’ll hear from “a Colorado journalist who put transparency to the test when she was expecting a baby and learn from two experts about tools and resources you can use to find prices.”

🐿 Perhaps the most controversial news along the I-25 corridor between Colorado Springs and Denver these days is a proposed Buc-ee’s rest stop in Palmer Lake. The latest in the local battle is a lawsuit by local groups. According to Brett Forrest and Ashleigh Quintana at KOAA, the court action “alleges a multitude of complaints including improper land annexation agreements, restriction of free speech, and violation of open meeting laws” involving how the local government green-lit a development plan for the Texas-based chain.

📲 Ad Fontes Media, the company behind the Media Bias Chart founded by Colorado-based attorney Vanessa Otero, has created an app. “With the new web app, the Interactive Media Bias Chart® is faster, more responsive, and less likely to have downtime for all users,” she wrote in an announcement this week. “Access to the chart on the website is the same — there's no learning curve for our users. But now, when you click on the Interactive Chart link, you will be taken into the web app. The search functionality of the chart is exactly the same; the page just might look slightly different than before.”

📰 A story by Elise Schmelzer in the Denver Post this week headlined “San Luis Valley dispute over billionaire’s fence sparks legislation clamping down on large projects” carried this important line: “Bill sponsor Rep. Matthew Martinez, a Democrat who represents a large swath of southern Colorado, visited the fence project outside San Luis after reading stories about it in Colorado journalism outlets.”

🎽 Joshua Potts is the new MileSplit West regional editor covering California, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming. “Let’s be real, this region is the most talented in the nation,” he said. “As someone who’s competed across it from childhood through college, I’m excited to continue to call it home.”

🗽 The Colorado-based Liberty Media Corp. has “chosen a new president and CEO to lead the company two months after CEO Greg Maffei announced his departure from the role he held for nearly two decades,” Jenna Barackman reported for the Denver Business Journal. “Derek Chang, who the company described as a ‘veteran executive’ across global media, sports and entertainment, will become Liberty Media’s next top executive.”

📺 Jessica Livingstone has left KREX in Grand Junction for Fox 21 in Colorado Springs. “This transition has been so bittersweet for me as the Western Slope has truly captured my heart,” she said on air this week. “But I am excited for this new venture in life.”

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, where I’m an advisor, 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.