💥🍾 What happened in Colorado's media world in 2024
A year in the news behind the news in Colorado
Hello, and welcome to 2025 at Inside the News in Colorado.
Each January, I write a year-in-review column for the Colorado Sun, rounding up reporting from this newsletter by month across the calendar.
Typically, there’s a theme.
In 2020 it was chaos. For 2021 it was changes in local media ownership. In 2022 it was Colorado newspapers turning into nonprofits. 2023 was the year that broke Colorado’s newspaper printing industry.
2024? Well, some day in the future, a media historian might look back to it as a hinge year for Colorado’s small-town newspapers.
In the summer, a colony collapse hit the rural Eastern Plains when five newspapers announced they would shut down for financial reasons. While two of them bounced back, others blinked out from the San Luis Valley and Denver to the Four Corners.
The news might have surprised some who watched a June minidocumentary on Denver’s 9NEWS titled “Small town newspapers making a comeback.” But as one paper featured in it later said, “It really did not paint a complete picture of the Plainsman Herald’s dire outlook and many other small papers like it.”
By August, Rocky Mountain PBS was airing its own broadcast about the state of our state’s smaller papers under the headline “Bought-out, priced out, burned out: the individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado.”
But 2024 also showed promise when a national fundraising campaign to support local news, along with other philanthropic initiatives, pumped millions of dollars into Colorado newsrooms to help them thrive and become more sustainable. They clearly needed it. A survey of the state’s local news outlets this year found their funding wasn’t secure, burnout and shortages were affecting staff, and they were struggling to keep up with journalistic best practices while maintaining quality.
Meanwhile, while some of the state’s rural residents were becoming less informed about issues in their communities, Democratic lawmakers at the Capitol in Denver were at work making the business of state government less transparent. In the judiciary, court of appeals justices and the State Supreme Court ruled against news organizations that were trying to shine more sunlight onto our school administrators and police.
On the airwaves, public radio took a hit with layoffs, our state’s unique prison radio network mysteriously went dark, and a university’s student station made history. On TV, a prominent Denver news anchor wondered why his counterparts weren’t reporting more robustly on extremism. Some more new digital news outlets emerged, reporters had an impact when they held those in power accountable, and the Colorado Association of Black Journalists revitalized their organization.
Throughout the year, as artificial intelligence tools became more ubiquitous, newsrooms grappled with how best to use them and how their use by others would affect their work.
The annual year-in-review Sun column came out Jan. 1 and you can read it here as my attempt at rounding up the year’s news behind the news (by month), or continue reading below. But it’s only the first few months here since the whole thing is way too long for an email. (I had to take out most of the links, too, so the full column is really better. The regular odds & ends is at the bottom of this email, though.)
🙏 A special thanks this year to Colorado Media Project, Grasslands, One Chance to Grow Up, Regional Air Quality Council, and Colorado Press Association for underwriting and sponsorships that kept this newsletter free for subscribers in 2024.
January brought international attention to a small Western Slope town when an upset reader stole copies of the Ouray County Plaindealer from area newspaper boxes. (He later pleaded guilty to a civil infraction and was fined $150.) The month also marked a burst of newsroom organizing when staffers at High Country News, the venerable Paonia-based magazine, announced their intention to form a “wall-to-wall” labor union. Across the Continental Divide, around 75 staffers at FOX31 and Channel 2 declared their intent to unionize. In the newspaper world, Colorado Community Media launched La Ciudad, a bilingual newsletter for the Commerce City community, and sports writer Mark Kiszla bolted from the Denver Post after 40 years to join the Denver Gazette. On the airwaves, Vic Vela, the popular weekend host and voice behind the award-winning “Back From Broken” podcast, surprisingly departed Colorado Public Radio after nine years, leaving colleagues scratching their heads about the circumstances. As the judges on our nation's highest court came under increased scrutiny for accepting lavish gifts from wealthy Americans who might benefit from their rulings, The Guardian examined Colorado-based U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s ties to billionaire Colorado newspaper owner Philip Anschutz. A new book by Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy called “What Works in Community News” included a chapter about The Colorado Sun. Only two weeks into the new year, the Four Corners Free Press monthly newspaper in Cortez announced it would close up shop after 20 years in business, citing rising printing costs and a loss of advertisers.
🌿 This week’s newsletter is proudly supported by PR firm Grasslands: A Journalism-Minded Agency™, founded by Ricardo Baca (ex-Denver Post, ex-Rocky Mountain News, and current Colorado Public Radio board of directors). We understand journalists because we were journalists — and we’re here to help. Need expert sources or compelling stories? Our diverse client roster includes beloved Colorado institutions (Naropa University, Illegal Pete’s, Anythink Libraries), innovative wellness brands (Boulder County Farmers Markets, Naturally Colorado, Eden Health Club), bold natural products businesses (Wild Zora, Flatiron Food Factory, Flower Union Brands), and other purpose-driven organizations. As creators of the Colorado Journalist Meet-Up and longtime champions of quality journalism, Grasslands recognizes the essential role reporters play in our communities. Our team is ready to connect you with sources, data, and unique perspectives that elevate your reporting.
Have a story you’re working on? Email Ricardo directly: ricardo@mygrasslands.com. Together, we’re crafting better narratives — one story at a time. 🌿
In February, newsrooms across Colorado were explaining the ways in which they were using new artificial intelligence tools. Some had initially seemed knee-jerk allergic to AI while others saw it as inevitable. Many were thinking about how to use it ethically. (I showed my audience what happened when I used ChatGPT to create an image for the newsletter.) In Colorado Springs, two high-profile Republican donors and major developers bought the defunct Indy alternative weekly and its sister publication, the Colorado Springs Business Journal. Joining a new national fundraising initiative to help support local news, Colorado created a Press Forward chapter. As newcomers came under increasing scrutiny in Colorado’s capital, news outlets Denverite, Colorado Public Radio and KRCC made changes to their style guides to drop the word “migrant” from news coverage. On TV, some 9NEWS journalists departed from their local TV news brethren by doing a story about why some people thought crime was increasing when data showed it was on the decline. (Surprise: They found “media plays a big role.”) The Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab, joined with the Colorado Press Association to create a joint weekly newsletter. After four years of running the University of Denver campus newspaper as a digital-only product, students there brought back printing physical copies of the Clarion. When billboards for a dubious newspaper popped up around the state, Rocky Mountain PBS wrote how “despite its claims, the Epoch Times is not the most-trusted news outlet by any official measure.” Reporters for the Gazette won the prestigious Polk Award for exposing Colorado’s “dysfunctional and dangerous family court system.” Colorado Media Project announced more than $360,000 would flow to journalism projects at more than two dozen local newsrooms and organizations throughout the year.
March came with a man-bites-dog story when the National Trust for Local News bought a used printing press from Canada and shipped it to Denver. In radio land, Colorado Public Radio joined its newspaper brethren in earning unfortunate headlines about layoffs. (The station let 15 people go, cutting its standalone podcasting unit and attributing the move to financial challenges.) Elsewhere on the airwaves, Colorado’s unique statewide prison radio program mysteriously went dark. At Cableland in Denver, the Colorado Association of Black Journalists rejuvenated the organization with a gala and awards ceremony. One of the state’s most prominent journalists, Kyle Clark, said it was “baffling” to him that in a time when journalists know that a lot of people get their news and information from local TV news, that it can “just be a space where extremism is not discussed in any significant way.” Colorado Springs independent Substack journalist Matthew Schniper, who covers the city’s culinary scene for his Side Dish newsletter, wrote about how he had come up with creative sponsorships in order to “be able to pay myself a real salary this year instead of working full-time-plus hours for barely part-time pay.” Author and journalist Bill Lascher took a deep dive into how a “wash of Walton family funding to news media is creating echo chambers in environmental journalism, and beyond,” and asked whether “editorial firewalls” are “up to the task.” (The Colorado Sune, where you’re reading this, has been a beneficiary.) Brian Porter, the board president of the Colorado Press Association, left his job as publisher of three Denver Post sister papers on the Eastern Plains to become editor and publisher of a new online political news site, Rocky Mountain Voice, which is run by former Republican candidate for governor Heidi Ganahl. (He later resigned from his role at the Press Association.) In student journalism news, Radio 1190 in Boulder, also known as KVCU at the University of Colorado, made history when it took home a pair of awards at a national broadcasting conference. A Republican consultant appeared to have scrapped a local news and commentary site he’d created that relied on artificial intelligence and irked local reporters for copying their work. In a cruel coincidence, potential ignorance, straight-up trolling, or a dull sense of timing, Democratic lawmakers at the Capitol chose of all times Sunshine Week to pass a legislative secrecy law and send it to the governor.
In April, Colorado’s local media scene did something unprecedented for the state and the nation when more than two dozen outlets banded together on a pledge to better cover the November elections with a voter-centric style. Led by COLab, the news organizations took inspiration from NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and his “Citizens Agenda” approach to covering U.S. elections. Rosen called Colorado’s Voter Voices initiative “without precedent in the history of the citizens agenda approach to campaign coverage, which goes back to 1990-92.” Meanwhile, the nonprofit Colorado Sun saw thousands of dollars pour in to support it after the state’s pro-Trump Republican Party chairman had Sun journalist Sandra Fish escorted by police out of the GOP’s state assembly in Pueblo. (The incident made national news.) In Colorado Springs, a KKTV anchor boasted that the local CBS affiliate there had “the most advanced broadcast facility in the region.” One of Colorado’s most veteran newspaper publishers threw some shade at a trend involving newspapers in the state shifting to the nonprofit model. “What may be left are newspapers funded by foundations with whatever mission they may possess from their donors and founders,” he wrote. “Not all bad, but we sing for our supper, so to speak, and if we don’t perform and produce an interesting newspaper under the free enterprise form of capitalism, we should fail.” A rare local media feud erupted in Colorado Springs between the Gazette newspaper and the KRDO TV station over who was right in their vastly different coverage about the extent to which the state’s second-largest city deserves the title of “Olympic City USA.”
➡️ As a new board member of the Society of Professional Journalists Colorado Pro chapter, I’d like to invite you to join the nation’s foremost organization for journalists. SPJ is a fierce national advocate for First Amendment rights, journalistic ethics, and other values important to a free and vital press. The Colorado Pro chapter offers professional training programs and events, including the four-state Top of the Rockies competition, the region’s broadest platform for honoring journalism excellence. We’re making plans for a regional conference next spring. And each year, the chapter provides thousands of dollars in scholarships to the young journalists of tomorrow. At a time when journalists are under fire from all sides, joining SPJ is your chance to make a stand for journalism. Learn more about the chapter here, and find out how to join here. ⬅️
More Colorado media odds & ends
🛩 This newsletter is in travel mode, meaning I might not be as quick to respond to emails, texts, voicemails, or DMs.
💥 Last week’s attempt in this newsletter to bring more attention to an underreported story of a nonwhite Western Slope TV journalist’s reported attack by a man he said shouted “This is Trump’s America now” worked. The Associated Press picked it up and it went international.
🤔 The AP, however, made a decision to name the victim, as Dan Kennedy notes at his Media Nation site.
⚖️ A Larimer County judge this week ruled in favor of the Estes Valley Voice digital site in a lawsuit, saying the Estes Valley Fire Protection District, a government entity, violated the state’s open meetings law when it hired its chief during an executive session. “Today’s ruling is bittersweet,” said Voice Editor Patti Brown in a statement. “No one wants to sue the fire department. But one of the most important roles of the media is to serve as a watchdog of the government and to hold power accountable.” The Voice’s lawyer, Steve Zansberg, said on Linked In it is “oddly satisfying when a court gets it so right (even in the ‘open-and-shut,’ EASY cases; at the end of oral argument, the judge said ‘I’ve had harder cases.’”
👀 Speaking of Steve Zansberg, right before Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser announced this week that he will run for governor in 2026, the prominent First Amendment attorney published a column in the Gazette slamming Weiser and his office for “withholding public records.” If Weiser “continues to deny reporters access to the same set of records that his predecessors in office freely provided,” Zansberg wrote, “he should face the consequences for so choosing, the next time he asks for your vote.”
📺 Gray Media has named Jacque Harms as “the next general manager of KKTV, the CBS affiliate in Colorado Springs,” according to an announcement this week.
❓ Jon Caldara, who leads the Denver-based libertarian-leaning Independence Institute think tank, asked in a guest column in the Gazette, “Why aren’t journalists curious about their credibility problem?” In the column he writes: “I don’t trust the media because it oozes disdain for me. The message they send me is clear — the way you see the world is simply so perverse, we make no effort to hire people like you. Except for the Gazette, I have never seen a Colorado outlet be proactive in hiring for ideological diversity.” Asked who the news-side journalists he was referring to are and how he knew they were hired for their ideological diversity, Caldara said via email, “As an opinion columnist, I’ll just say it’s my opinion that there is an awareness of the need for ideological diversity at the Gazette, which I find encouraging.”
☀️ The nonprofit Colorado Sun digital site is hiring a membership director it will pay between $90,000 and $110,000.
🗞 Kevin Simpson of the Colorado Sun reported on Tom Bredehoft’s decision to close the Flagler News newspaper on the Eastern Plains. “Most people are very obviously hurt — I mean, I haven’t even gotten on Facebook or seen anything,” Bredehoft said. “But I got quite a few texts, quite a few emails, phone calls, just people saying, ‘Wow.’ They knew I wanted to keep it going.”
🗓 “It’s been a year since we launched La Ciudad,” wrote Rossana Longo Better about Colorado Community Media’s bilingual newsletter. “Here’s what I learned.”
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.
Bob Sweeney, in the column you linked, is nowhere near right on "If the government can support public radio, why not newspapers." Anybody who knows anything about PBS and NPR know that less than 10 percent of their revenue comes from the government, and zip (AFAIK) in the case of nonprofit newspapers. He is right to a degree about problems that can arise with foundations; Dick Tofel has covered various angles on this.