The liberal media in Colorado

The news behind the news in Colorado this week

Image created with DALL-E by ChatGPT. Prompt: “Create an image of someone reading a newspaper in Colorado with a shocked and horrified scared reaction.” Followup prompt: “That’s good, but can you make the writing illegible or at least in English and the photo in the newspaper maybe the Colorado state flag?”

Over the years, Colorado Republicans in this one-party state that is controlled overwhelmingly by Democrats have attributed their electoral decline in part to “the media.”

You hear it plenty from some in that set: “the media” is too liberal. Those “leftists” in the press. The “liberal-controlled” media. Donald Trump made a whole thing about it during his presidential campaign and eventual administration some years ago, and is now out there doing it again.

Here in Colorado, conservative organizations have tried to form their own versions of “the media” to help Republicans get elected.

In 2017, when it came out that a conservative foundation based in Wisconsin was funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into Colorado to help shift the state to the right, one of the documents included interest in creating a “bureau for online journalism in Colorado.”

Later, in 2022, a Republican political consultant set up a conservative media organization called Campfire Colorado that focused on shining “a light on the politicians and members of the media who drive their own agendas at the expense of everyday Coloradans.” At the time, then-Colorado Republican Party Chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown said, “we believe that there is a need for a true, online, conservative media outlet in Colorado.”

While Campfire Colorado said it hoped to “be that media outlet,” it sputtered out after a couple years. Now, the latest effort in its lineage is Rocky Mountain Voice, founded by former Colorado Republican candidate for governor Heidi Ganahl. When introducing the outlet in a promotional video earlier this year, Ganahl described the Rocky Mountain Voice as part of a “Road to Red” project to help Republicans win elections in Colorado.

Notably, this time around, the person who is leading the editorial charge on behalf of this new conservative publication is not some party operative, but rather someone deeply entrenched in the state’s mainstream media infrastructure.

The editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain Voice is Brian Porter, who also serves as president of the board of the Colorado Press Association. Before he took on this new role at RMV, Porter was the publisher of three Denver Post sister papers on the Eastern Plains where he also covered politics as a reporter.

“I understand that people in the Press Association might have concerns,” Porter said over the phone this week about his dual role.

That’s true as evident from the reaction to a buzzy story this week that Erik Maulbetsch published for the progressive digital nonprofit news site Colorado Times Recorder. Porter didn’t comment for it, but the Press Association’s CEO did.

From the Colorado Times Recorder:

Reached for comment, Tim Regan-Porter, executive director of the Colorado Press Association, acknowledged that CPA is aware that Rocky Mountain Voice is a conservative outlet, but expressed support of Porter and noted that as an entity, RMV isn’t yet a member.

“The fact that Rocky Mountain Voice has a point of view is something we talked about,” said Porter. “There were certainly conversations. There’s a lot of trust in Brian himself… Our membership guidelines, basically say that newsroom members need to be following journalistic best practices, and don’t go a lot beyond that. I think [RMV’s] intent is to apply to become members. They have to be around for a year before they can become a full member.”

According to the CPA website, in order to join the association, an online news website “must not serve primarily as a platform to promote the interests or opinions of a special interest group, individual or cause.” 

The story also included a roundup of public comments Ganahl has made about her effort to shift Colorado red and how Rocky Mountain Voice fits into that goal.

“We need to build a messaging machine, which is the Rocky Mountain Voice,” she said, for instance.

Ganahl has also spoken about her “focus on rebuilding the grassroots and really building this messaging machine and getting people on this technology” and how “I think that’s what we need to do to win again in Colorado.”

Maulbetsch noted in his story that Rocky Mountain Voice’s calendar page “simply takes the viewer to the state GOP’s own calendar.”

Ganahl has also said, however, that “as a 501(c)(3) organization, a nonprofit, the Rocky Mountain Voice will not participate in partisan politics. As a result, the outlet will remain nimble and call balls and strikes no matter the offender, Republican or Democrat.”  

The piece in the Colorado Times Recorder, an outlet that doesn’t disclose its progressive donors, created an uncomfortable situation for the Colorado Press Association this week. One publisher, Jordan Hedberg of the Wet Mountain Tribune, publicly called for Porter to step down as president after reading it.

UPDATE, March 25: Erin McIntyre and Mike Wiggins, who own the Ouray County Plaindealer wrote a “letter of concern” to the CPA this week along with Grant Houston, publisher of the Lake City Silver World. Having Porter “serve as board president when he has taken on this new position is a conflict of interest for a membership charged with maintaining independence from special interests,” they wrote.

“When Ganahl launched RMV, a central idea of the site was that most of Colorado journalism was ‘fake news’ and was ‘silencing the truth’,” said Colorado Newsline editor Quentin Young, another CPA member. “Porter, at least, owes it to CPA members to repudiate that.”

Indeed, Ganahl has described Colorado’s mainstream media in public comments as “biased and controlled by Jared Polis and the left.” She has referred to “the biased liberal-controlled media” and said “fake news isn’t just a catchphrase, it’s a reality.” Coloradans, she has said, “don’t know the truth thanks to one-sided media partnering with the left and messaging for the Democrats.”

“Something needs to change,” Ganahl has said, adding, “I submit to you that Rocky Mountain Voice is a big part of that change. We believe that there is still hope for Colorado. We believe in the exceptionalism of Colorado and when executed we have our own ‘Road to Red.’”

For his part, asked to what extent he feels the Rocky Mountain Voice is working to get Republicans elected in Colorado, Porter said, “I don’t know that we really are. I think we’re just reporting the news.”

While he described Rocky Mountain Voice in a phone conversation as an outlet for conservatives, he said he believes it is “completely independent” from Ganahl’s larger effort to help elect more Republicans, describing RMV and whatever else she’s working on as “unique operations.” He said he got to know Ganahl from covering her on the campaign trail during her run for governor and what attracted him to the job was the opportunity to get more into digital media. He said he has never received “any pressure” from Ganahl about what to publish.

“I would define myself as a fair person … which I think is one of the reasons Heidi turned to me,” Porter said.

Asked about Ganahl’s anti-press rhetoric and offered the opportunity to repudiate any of it, the Press Association board president said he feels anyone should have the right to their opinions and he wouldn’t push back on hers — but he said it might be something worthy of further discussion in one of their weekly meetings. Like other outlets that have drawn skepticism for their affiliations, he said he hopes the public judges RMV by its work.

While editing Rocky Mountain Voice, Porter is also producing his own original content. One piece he wrote this week was a news story about the conservative Weld County board of commissioners deciding to remove the public’s ability to speak at meetings. Other items have included brief event previews like a Second Amendment rally at the Capitol or the annual convention of the state Libertarian Party. He has reported campaign trail dispatches from the 4th District race for Congress and has penned explainers about how write-in voting worked in the GOP presidential primary.

It should be noted that some Colorado newspaper publishers are open about their partisan activity on behalf of the Colorado Republican Party.

Charles Bonniwell, who publishes the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle, has been active as a member of the state GOP’s executive board. Bob Sweeney, who publishes multiple newspapers in Colorado and who the Press Association has named “Publisher of the Year,” attended the 2022 GOP state assembly as a delegate with voting privileges where he acknowledged he “wore two hats,” one as a “partisan and another as a journalist.” The owner of what is perhaps the largest print and digital news operation in the state is owned by a Republican megadonor.

On the radio, there are Denver-area talk-show hosts who are active in the GOP as well. In digital media, Complete Colorado has a reporter who said publicly she was excited to walk with the Weld County GOP in a parade. (I’m not aware of any publishers or reporters who are active in the Colorado Democratic Party, but ping me if you know of any who are.)

As for Porter’s service on the Colorado Press Association board, it hasn’t become much of an issue, according to the organization’s CEO Tim Regan-Porter.

The board of directors of the Colorado Press Association (of which I am a member) is a volunteer governing board. It selects a CEO to run the operations, and the CEO hires and manages staff. The board “creates broad mission, vision and policies, provides financial oversight, approves budgets and exercises due diligence to ensure the organization complies with relevant laws and regulations,” Regan-Porter (no relation to Brian Porter) said. The president of the board serves in that role for one year and presides over quarterly board meetings, liaises with the CEO, fosters board development, and performs other such duties like assigning members to specific committees. Brian Porter has served about half of his term already. In a phone conversation, he described the position as kind of like a “weak mayor.”

Something else Regan-Porter said about the CPA and Porter’s new role at Rocky Mountain Voice is that the board sought the input of its contract lobbyist who “must deal with legislators in both parties in an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature” and she “did not have any concerns with Brian remaining for the remainder of his term.”

Over the phone this week, Regan-Porter also said: “As an industry we have a left-leaning reputation and it doesn’t hurt to show we are diverse.”

So, if it’s true that Porter’s position as president of the Colorado Press Association board while running an outlet whose founder has positioned it as part of a “road to Red” messaging machine isn’t causing any practical complications for the CPA or its members, why not lean into it? This new development could be an opportunity for journalists to explain to skeptical sources or critics just how liberal the journalism industry really is in Colorado.

For instance, the next time a source for an interview gives a Colorado journalist guff with some MAGA remark about the press, consider this response:

“Boy, the liberal media — sure. [Throws up hands.] Golllllly. Hey, let me show you my press badge for a second. [Taps badge]. Did you know our Colorado Press Association board president works for the Republican Party’s most recent candidate for governor and runs a conservative publication she says is part of an effort to shift our state to the right? Aw, I’ve heard all that FOX News Trumpy stuff about the press, too, but listen, let me tell you how Colorado is different, and why it’s so cool…”

Let me know how that goes.

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A college radio station makes history in Colorado

Radio 1190, also known as KVCU on the airwaves at the University of Colorado Boulder, recently made history when it took home a pair of awards at a national broadcasting conference.

From Olivia Doak at the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper:

Jack Armstrong, a junior at CU Boulder and the station’s news director, transformed a three-person operation into a 40-person team within a couple of years, turning a once-weekly news broadcast into daily programming, shows and podcasts.

“I had to find people who wanted to be part of this news team the same way I did,” Armstrong said. “So I had to build the whole program from the bottom up.”

Armstrong said about 3,000 universities submit to the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System Conference annually, and only a handful get chosen to attend the conference. CU Boulder’s Radio 1190, established in the 1990s, was nominated this year for the first time.

Armstrong told the reporter that starting a station from the ground up hasn’t been easy. He said he even heard from some that radio is dead. “But now we are becoming an emergent student media outlet,” he said.

Another excerpt:

Juanita Hurtado, a junior and the assistant news director, said one of the biggest advantages of the station is uplifting students’ voices, especially those from underrepresented communities.

“It’s a beautiful thing to think that we are providing a space for students where they could feel safe and make themselves heard through their own cultural backgrounds,” Hurtado said.

Check out the station for yourself here.

Resurrected Colorado Springs Indy hires editor, posts job listings for staff

Things have been quiet since an announcement a month ago that two local developers in Colorado Springs would try to resurrect the Indy alternative weekly brand into a direct-mail publication.

But behind the scenes things are taking shape.

“We do have a new editor, his name is Ben Trollinger,” said publisher Fran Zankowski, who has been wrangled in to build a newsroom in the Springs while also publishing Boulder Weekly. Trollinger spent half a dozen years as managing editor of the Summit Daily News until 2019 when he left to work for a national sustainable farming magazine.

A handful of job postings also made the listing boards this week.

The newly created Pikes Peak Media Company is offering $45,000 to $50,000 for an arts and entertainment reporter, and the same salary range for a junior reporter. A graphic designer position is open for $50,000 to $58,000. A distribution manager can make $40,000 to $45,000 with the company. A senior reporter can earn $63,000 to $68,000.

Zankowksi said the paper is also looking for freelancers and sales staff. “We’re moving right along and it’s pretty exciting,” he said.

Solutions Journalism Network is training up rural newsrooms

The Solutions Journalism Network is “building a cohort of U.S.-based, rural-serving newsrooms.”

Each of them will receive six months of training and mentorship that “supports the integration of solutions journalism into the newsroom workflow,” says Melissa Cassutt, the organization’s rural media manager.

More from SJN and how to get involved:

This cohort is designed to help rural-serving media (from any medium) incorporate solutions journalism into regular practice. Participating newsrooms will receive professional development from the Solutions Journalism Network and support from each other. In two-hour monthly meetings, newsrooms will learn the basics of solutions journalism, and how to find meaningful solutions journalism stories in coverage like county board meetings, press releases, and regular beat coverage.

This cohort will show editors and journalists how to evaluate story ideas, spot solutions opportunities and effectively execute on solutions stories, all while meeting deadlines. Newsrooms will also meet monthly with a partner newsroom and a solutions journalism coach, as well as receive guidance on ways to showcase this reporting to their audience and grow revenue opportunities from it.

Find more details and how to apply here. Deadline is April 2.

Colorado Community Media’s new website update grew its newsletters by 50%

Last week’s newsletter led with a scoop about a new printing press coming to Denver to print the two dozen Colorado Community Newspapers (and more).

And while I wrote for Harvard’s Nieman Lab that the move is “decidedly retro,” CCM this week earned some ink for what it’s been doing beyond the printed product.

Amalie Nash, who heads up transformation for the National Trust for Local News, which owns CCM, has an item at the American Press Institute about how the newspaper chain’s new website, launched six months ago, allowed it to leave behind “antiquated infrastructure.”

An excerpt from the piece:

The new site, which went live Sept. 23, was a partnership between local leadership, Newspack (for the CMS) and BlueLena (for audience acquisition work). Grants from the Google News Initiative and Colorado Media Project helped to fund it. …

Despite close geographic proximity between titles, Colorado Community Media’s websites have always been separate, meaning readers could not easily navigate from news in their city to news in the neighboring city. The sites were not mobile-friendly and lacked multimedia capabilities. News was slow to go live on a content management system that frequently created delays during busy publishing times.

To prepare for a new site, Colorado Community Media surveyed its audience of subscribers and registered users by email in July, asking such questions as where people get their news, what topics are of highest interest and what subscriber benefits appeal to them most.

Among the findings: subscribers value access to the e-edition (electronic replica of the newspaper) and want more coverage of local government, things to do and local real estate, among other things. They were fairly evenly divided on the platforms in which they prefer to consume their news.

One “surprising but welcome result” of the website update was that growth in CCM’s newsletters “exploded since the relaunch,” Nash wrote — with all of them growing more than 50%.

Read the whole thing at the link above for more details and lessons learned.

More Colorado media odds & ends

😬 Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain that publishes the Coloradoan in Fort Collins and the Pueblo Chieftain, two newspapers bookending Colorado’s Front Range, will no longer use content from the Associated Press nonprofit newswire service. Laura Wagner wrote in the Washington Post what the move means for readers.

👀 Ouray City Council member Peggy Lindsey, who apparently didn’t like a story the Plaindealer printed a month ago, mailed the newspaper owners a “threatening note” saying karma was coming and “may your days be numbered.” So the newspaper reprinted the note along with a column by co-publisher Erin McIntyre. “We can’t do our jobs in fear of losing money or being attacked,” the publisher wrote. “If we did, we would become paralyzed with all the ‘what ifs’ and trepidation could color our work.”

⬆️ Denverite editor Obed Manuel, who previously served as Colorado Public Radio’s audience editor, is leaving. (CPR owns Denverite.) He will be moving to the Washington, D.C. area to join NPR’s Morning Edition team where he’ll start next month. “I’m super excited to take this challenge on during an election year,” he said.

☘️ The Denver Press Club held a limerick contest for its St. Patrick’s Day party … but then decided it better not publish one of the winners.

🦫 This week, the grand opening of a Buc-ee’s rest stop in Colorado was the latest pseudo event since the opening of Casa Bonita and In-N-Out Burger before it. The saturated local media hype coverage and pack journalism likely comes from this news judgement thinking: If we don’t do it everyone else will. Kyle Clark, a TV anchor for 9NEWS who often critiques his own industry, had this idea: “What if brand-new locally-owned businesses could enter a monthly raffle and the winner’s grand opening would … receive non-stop coverage from the local media like IKEA, In-and-Out, Casa Bonita, Buccee’s, etc?”

💳 Colorado Public Radio and its former host Vic Vela were fundraising in different capacities this week. As the station’s CEO sent an email to donors trying to allay fears about the outlet’s layoffs and financial outlook — and news about its fired host — Vela was posting links to a GoFundMe set up by friends to raise money on his behalf as the station fights his unemployment claims. (As of press time he had raised nearly $9,000 of a $15,000 goal.) Colorado Public Radio topped PR pro Jeremy Story’s “Who Had The Worst Week” item at his Denver PR Blog where he wrote, “to political progressives, it must feel like mommy and daddy are fighting.”

📉 Jason Van Tatenhove of the Colorado Switchblade writes that Gov. Jared Polis’s bill-signing statement and subsequent silence on the legislature’s new anti-Sunshine Law is “a letdown from a leader I once believed in.”

🎙 Colorado Press Association CEO Tim Regan-Porter had Frank Mungeam, chief innovation officer at the Local Media Association, on his Local News Matters podcast to discuss a new report that “outlines a strategic approach to building a sustainable philanthropy model, starting with grassroots support and leveraging impactful journalism to attract funders.”

🐯 Student researchers from Colorado College documented abuses at New Mexico detention centers. “Based out of Albuquerque as part of Colorado College’s Activism Institute, the students spent six weeks in November and December conducting extensive interviews with 20 asylum seekers detained in civil immigration custody in the facilities. They did so in partnership with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center,” reported Austin Fisher for Source New Mexico.

💸 The Denver City Council this week “approved two bills that will allow the city to raise up to $115 million to buy a downtown office building formerly occupied by the Denver Post,” Joe Rubino reported for the Denver Post.

🤖 “After shutting down for 2 weeks after my story published, it appears Roger Hudson’s conservative news site The Lobby is back,” Erik Maulbetsch of the Colorado Times Recorder wrote on social media about the Republican consultant’s AI news and commentary site. “An unbylined March 16 story, he noted, “essentially rewrites” a story from CPR by John Daley, though “it does name CPR & link” to the original piece.

📺 Writing in the Denver Gazette, John Moore profiled Colorado actress Melissa Benoist for her new Max (formerly HBO) show “Girls on the Bus” — what he called “both an entertaining and enlightening look behind the curtain of political reporting. Or, as we call it, ‘pack journalism’ – where feral reporters all travel together and are exposed to the same old stupid stump speeches and have to seriously scramble to come up with anything original or meaningful.”

⛅️ The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition has had to update its online Sunshine Guide following a new state law that redefines “public business” as it applies to lawmakers “and lets lawmakers exchange emails and text messages without it being a ‘meeting’” under Colorado’s Sunshine Laws.

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.