Pro-journalism campaign 'Free Press, Free Country' hits Colorado TV airwaves

The news behind the news in Colorado

A multi-media campaign is rolling out across Colorado aimed at educating viewers about the importance of a free and independent press.

Called “Free Press, Free Country,” the project includes a broadcast documentary, short video segments, a social media campaign, and more.

One part of the initiative, called “A Matter of Fact,” launched this Thursday, Aug. 21, on the much-watched 9NEWS nightly newscast “Next with Kyle Clark.”

“A Matter of Fact” features 90-second video clips in which Colorado journalist Jessica Duran presents snackable educational lessons over graphics and text.

The inaugural video, which aired this week, outlines the importance of the First Amendment. “Next” plans to air a new one each Thursday for the next 12 weeks.

“As Americans, we all have a right to a free and open press, to ask questions and openly criticize those in power, and hold them accountable,” Duran says in the opening salvo. “It’s why the press is often called the Fourth Estate.”

Duran is a recent Colorado College graduate who minored in journalism. She freelances for KRCC, does stand-up comedy, and works as a paraprof in CC’s Film and Media Studies department. She said what attracted her to the project was changes in the way people perceive journalism.

“I felt as though this project was a way to help move the needle back in the right direction,” she said.

Future clips are slated to include explainers about press freedom, algorithm bias, the importance of issuing corrections, open-records laws, identifying the difference between news and opinion (and sponsored content), and more.

A landing page on the 9NEWS website outlines 12 chapters from the project and offers a glimpse of what’s to come throughout the next several weeks.

Writers for “Free Press, Free Country” are Colorado filmmakers Brian and Cindy Malone, former 9NEWS news director Tim Ryan, and writer Stuart Silloway. An advisory board, on which I participated, includes Colorado journalists, journalism educators, and journalism advocates.

“The intent is civic education on its very basic level,” said Brian Malone of Malone Media Group and Fast Forward Films. “This is to remind all of us of the core values of the First Amendment and the importance of journalism in our free and open society.”

In 2021, Malone released the documentary film “News Matters” that focused on Colorado news outlets amid a local news industry in crisis.

“I see dark clouds coming our way for journalism and for a free press,” Malone said over the phone this week. “And I am hoping that human beings will always want the truth.”

The filmmaker said he recently wrapped up shooting the one-hour documentary for the project. The work took him into newsrooms across the state where he followed local TV, print, digital, and radio journalists. The film’s title will be “Truth be Told.”

The point of it is to show the impact and importance of local journalism and how those who practice it connect with their communities, he said. Once the film premieres on TV in early November, Malone said he plans a screening tour in communities across Colorado with Q-and-As featuring local journalists.

Funding for “Free Press, Free Country” came through the Irving Family Fund, which partnered with the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition that serves as its fiscal sponsor.

While 9NEWS is the initial distributor for the campaign, Malone said he owns the copyright and intends for its content to serve as educational material for the entire Colorado press community.

“If you’re a paper in Yuma, if you’re a paper in Burlington, if you’re a radio station in Ignacio, this material will be available for you to share — and you’re encouraged to share it,” Malone said. “This is civic education that benefits all of us in the journalism industry.”

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Denver mayor says Fox31 takeover of 9NEWS ‘bad,’ CO AG says he’ll ‘closely review' it

Top Democratic Colorado public officials this week weighed in on a pending media deregulation deal that would consolidate two TV stations in the Mile High City.

The major transaction is one in which Nexstar, the parent company of KDVR Fox31, would take over Tegna, the parent company of KUSA 9NEWS.

“I get tough questions from local reporters every day, and I’m grateful for that. A strong, diverse press makes communities stronger,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a public statement.

“But,” the mayor added, “when we lose reporters and newsrooms, we lose the stories that connect us to our neighbors and inform our city. This deal would be bad for journalism and bad for Denver.”

Meanwhile, Colorado’s Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, who is a former telecommunications lawyer and is running for governor, told this newsletter in a statement that he “will closely review this proposed merger to determine if it will harm Coloradans.”

Asked what Weiser could do if he determines that it will, a spokesperson said the office would have to get through the review first.

Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, posted on social media that he believed the merger “could be troubling for Colorado and our local press,” adding, “we value a free and independent press, and welcome the oversight and transparency driven by our local media.”

Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, who is also running to replace the term-limited Polis, weighed in as well, saying on social media that an FCC-approved merger of the two companies “would greatly weaken Colorado’s civic infrastructure.”

Media experts have said a merger is likely to mean layoffs and, therefore, less local news in Denver.

The approach to local news from 9NEWS has been different than Fox31 in that the former is known more for investigative accountability journalism, commentary crusades, speaking truth to power, and aggressively questioning public officials.

On the air this week, 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark of the nightly newscast “Next” said he has told his staff that no day doing work that matters serving the community is a day wasted.

“Every one of those days is a chance to hold politicians accountable rather than just repeating what they say,” he said, “a chance to call out disinformation.”

Denver losing arguably its best local TV news station would happen because of who is in the White House.

From the Denver Post’s John Wenzel:

The Nexstar-Tegna announcement follows an aggressive push for deregulation by the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees media ownership in the U.S., and a recent federal court ruling friendly to media consolidation. President Donald Trump’s administration has long advocated for a loosening of what it calls overly restrictive media-ownership regulations, and current FCC chairman Brendan Carr in March vowed to “delete, delete, delete” outdated regulations.

The parent company of Fox31 wasn’t getting much praise from some in the state’s press corps this week.

Writing in the Colorado Sun, liberal columnist Mike Littwin had this to say:

Nexstar is known as “Death Star” to its critics in the business, a company infamous for cutting costs and cutting investigative journalism and laying off hard-working journalists. I’m sure journalists at 9News are busy writing résumés or maybe looking for a job with a little more stability. Are there still jobs like that? Don’t tell it to civil service workers.

On CNBC this week, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Nexstar CEO Perry Sook about the loss of voices and perspectives when one local newsroom takes over another in a market.

“From a public policy perspective, is it good for one company to control all the local markets?” he asked, adding that he wondered how much autonomy the local stations would have. Sook said the company delegates local autonomy to its local managers and newsrooms. “Nobody in the organization dictates any content,” he said.

The Nexstar CEO praised the Republican president for the company being able to do what it is trying to do.

“The initiatives being pursued by the Trump administration offer local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field, and compete more effectively with the Big Tech and legacy Big Media companies that have unchecked reach and vast financial resources,” Sook said in a statement. “We believe TEGNA represents the best option for Nexstar to act on this opportunity.”

Reporting for Denver’s Westword, Brendan Joel Kelley wrote that Nexstar says the transaction is supposed to close by the second half of 2026, “leaving plenty of time for 9NEWS employees to update their résumé and for other stations in the market, like Denver7 and CBS Colorado, to poach them early.”

Writing on social media, one 9NEWS journalist, Marshall Zelinger, had a different take on all of this.

“Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” he said.

Sangre de Cristo Sentinel newspaper to return with a public official as an owner?

Mere weeks after the self-described partisan conservative Sangre de Cristo Sentinel newspaper in Westcliffe announced it was closing, a new owner has stepped up to revive it.

In an Aug. 15 item posted online at the paper, locals Michael and Reggie Foster wrote that they had been presented with a “unique and unexpected opportunity” to acquire the paper and take over its operation as owners and publishers.

From the announcement:

At their worst, newspapers can be purveyors of misinformation, contain biased reporting, and publish sensationalized narratives that negatively impact public understanding and trust. At their best they are informative, uplifting, and help people to recognize and appreciate the world around them. Our goal for The Sentinel is the latter. We’re committed to providing a trustworthy paper that is accurate, timely, and relevant. Some of our future issues will be great, some will be less so. But anywhere we fall short of the mark will be an error that is human and honest.

The couple said they hoped to have their first edition on the streets on Aug. 29.

The development means the Sentinel could join the ranks of other small-town newspapers in Colorado where a local public official has run it, which can compromise its independence.

Regina “Reggie” Foster is the president of the Custer County School Board and is also the county director for the Colorado State University extension.

In this newsletter’s previous coverage of the potentially short-lived demise of the Sentinel, it suggested a local newspaper war between that paper and its rival, the more established Wet Mountain Tribune, might be over.

This week, Tribune Publisher Jordan Hedberg said that he is currently involved in a lawsuit with the school board of which is Foster president over what he argues is an open-meetings violation.

In Westcliffe’s newspaper scene, the more things change the more they stay the same.

‘Culture of mutual support and teamwork’: Editor on what Denver Post learned from 2018

Denver Post Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo gave the morning keynote breakfast speech during last weekend’s Colorado Press Association convention.

In it, she offered an inside look at how the Post responded to the fallout from a traumatizing 2018 round of mass layoffs at the hands of the paper’s hedge-fund owner.

The bloodbath, subsequent Denver Rebellion, and defections, led to massive publicity.

Some of it contained “half-truths” and “straight-up untruths” about the newsroom, the work it could do, and the paper’s future, the editor said.

Around that time, Colacioppo said, she received some “terrible advice” to leave the paper. “But I knew one thing: a leader doesn’t just run when things get tough,” she said. “I was the one standing there, and there was only one way to find out what I could accomplish.”

She also mentioned one of the challenges she is seeing is young people and those who should be at the apex of their careers getting worn down, becoming uninspired, and giving up on the industry.

Rather than talk about what’s broken, she said she wanted to discuss what she learned leading a newsroom through some particularly tough times.

Here are some more nuggets from the speech:

• “One thing that I understood is that we had actually been given an opportunity — unusual for a legacy organization: the chance to create something new.”

• She said she sought advice from business leaders who had been through upheavals, and based on what she learned, brought in a counselor “to help people process the change and move forward.” Small groups identified what was working and what wasn’t and how much of it was under their own control.

• “Some of our culture now of support and mutual teamwork came out as a byproduct of going through a tough time together,” she said. “But it is also what guided the hiring process.”

• “To the managers here in this room, I can’t overstate this,” she said. “When people came flashing a big ego along with their big talent and their big résumé, we said no thank you. When people came in more interested in telling us what we were doing wrong than expressing a desire to join our effort, we said no thank you. I wanted people who wanted to be on team Denver Post.”

• She said one applicant who is now on staff said she was impressed by seeing so many co-bylines in the paper, which to her showed a newsroom working as a team. “It was one of the greatest things I had ever heard in an interview,” Colacioppo said.

• “We built a culture of mutual support and teamwork with people quick to credit a colleague with an idea or for a job well done,” she said. “We built a culture of doing stories that matter while always, always, always keeping our readers at the forefront of our minds.”

• Anyone in the newsroom, she said, has the ability to take time to do big work. They backed off on the number of people working weekends and doubled down on insisting reporters avoid what she called “easy, low-readership stories that take time but do nothing to advance our mission.”

• For her, what defined 2018 and the years since, she said, was the Denver Post’s determination to set a standard of excellence.

• She suggested shuffling up beats for reporters, which the paper did in 2021, and to do so with an understanding of the community and readership numbers. “We cannot be afraid of wanting to serve the people who are paying us,” she said.

Toward the end of her speech, Colacioppo urged journalists to push out of their comfort zones and get off the hamster wheel.

“Get grounded in the joy of committing journalism,” she said.

Telluride Daily Planet sold to Florida-based media company under private equity firm

Owner Randy Miller of Boulder this week announced plans to sell the Telluride Daily Planet along with its sister paper the Norwood Post to the Florida-based Hoffman Media Group.

The new owner, HMG, is part of Hoffmann Family of Companies.

In the announcement of the deal, the newspaper broker involved in it described Hoffman Family Companies as “a multi-vertical, family-owned private equity firm consisting of over 120 global brands” that “employs 17,000 employees with businesses located in 30 countries and 400 locations around the world.”

The Colorado sale also includes the publications Telluride Style and Shelter magazine. The move also means publisher Andrew Mirrington will step down; Associate Publisher Maureen Pelisson would become Publisher. Hoffmann and Pelisson are likely to name a local editor, the paper reported.

“It’s not an easy decision to say goodbye,” Mirrington said in a statement in the paper. “This is an incredible newspaper because of the people I have been fortunate to work with every day. We have such a talented, enterprising and supportive team that have made our publications beloved by thousands of readers every day. Hoffman seems to appreciate our strengths and wants to help us build upon them.”

Terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, according to Dirks, Van Essen & April, a media merger and acquisition firm based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that is representing the Planet.

The Planet launched in 1898 as the Telluride Times, the firm stated.

“We are honored to carry forward the legacy of the Telluride Daily Planet and support the talented team who bring Telluride’s stories to life,” J. Pason Gaddis, CEO of Hoffmann Media Group, said in a statement. “Telluride is a vibrant, world-class community, and we believe strong local journalism is essential to keeping it informed, connected, and resilient.”

More Colorado media odds & ends

⏩ The national Press Forward local news support campaign put a spotlight on Colorado’s chapter and Kimberly Spencer, who directs Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter. “Since its founding in 2018, the Colorado Media Project has awarded more than 280 grants totaling $7.2 million,” the item reads. “That experience now fuels one of the most developed Press Forward chapters in the country.” The post explains “how they’re doing it — and what other chapters can learn.”

🏆 See all the winners of this year’s Colorado Press Association awards here.

🎵 Speaking of, a song about Colorado media that the CPA’s Rachel Pickarski made with the help of artificial intelligence was a big hit when it played during the awards ceremony at last week’s Colorado Press Association convention. Here is a link to listen to a version of it.

⚔️ Without providing evidence or attributing the information to a source, the anonymous DoBetterDNVR social media account had alleged that the Denver mayor’s office “fed” a recent story about the account to the Post “and told their contact at the Post to CORA the CORA requests in hopes of outing me and getting the media and my followers to turn on me.” Joy Pullman of the conservative Federalist digital publication asked the Post for comment. “That particular post by DoBetterDNVR is emblematic of the type of misinformation they push,” Denver Post Editor Lee Ann Colacioppo told the Federalist. “The mayor’s office played no role whatsoever in our decision to pursue the story and it was entirely the idea of the reporter to submit the CORAs. It was an obvious course of action given DoBetter has posted extensive information about their CORAs, including when they filed them, the exact words they used in their requests, the costs, the responsive records, etc.”

👀 The Aspen Times announced it has “parted ways” with its editor who had been there since December 2023. “Publisher Sarah Girgis would not comment” on the departure in the posted item, “saying it was a personnel matter. She said the Times has implemented an interim leadership plan until a new editor is hired. Managing editor River Stingray will be the point person for newsroom matters.”

🎙 Ari Shapiro, co-host of All Things Considered, announced his departure from NPR this week. “Learn more about it when he speaks as our honoree at the Damon Runyon Awards Banquet on Oct 18,” the Denver Press Club stated on social media. Get your tickets here.

🗳 The conservative channel Newsmax agreed to pony up $67 million to Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems to settle a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit “over false claims that the voting machine company rigged the 2020 election against U.S. President Donald Trump,” Reuters reported.

🪦 Martina Will, “an award-winning writer for Front Porch for many years,” has died. “She was a force in the community and wrote beautiful stories for our readers for years,” the Denver-area community newspaper wrote.

📡 Gil Asakawa reported for Westword about how KVNF in Paonia is navigating federal funding cuts. “I’m not sad for KVNF,” said General Manager Ashley Krest. “I mean, it’s going to hurt and it’s going to be hard, but we’re here. We’re an institution. We’re not going anywhere. But I do see these smaller stations being challenged.”

🙏 Thanks to Jeremy Story for the shoutout in his DenverPRBlog, and for all the new subscribers who are reading this “Inside the News in Colorado” newsletter because of it.

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute, advisor to Colorado Media Project, and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations, including Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. Colorado Media Project 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.