Afrik Digest

Afrik Digest International Magazine is a cultural and lifestyle journal with its publishing base in Colorado USA. The publication is authentic in the way it retells the story of the members of our community and gives readers a sufficient splash of entertainment, fashion, business, education-inspired stories, and information from within the United States and the continent of Africa. It has continued to own the responsibility to inform the global community on diversity, inclusion, and trends.

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Support From colorado media project

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022; #newsCOneeds 2022

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $15,000 to support Afrik Digest in meeting the news and information needs of Colorado's African immigrant residents, and continued leadership of the Ethnic Media Exchange

2023 Advancing Equity Update: In response to increasing printing costs, Afrik Digest has shifted to a digital-focused model, completing a website update and printing less frequently - and navigating the common challenges of any newsroom making such a transition: reduced certainty about audience engagement with their digital product, and a need to focus on communicating the vision behind the change to an audience used to a different product. Their founder, Vera Idam, has been an active participant in the CPA’s Ethnic Media Ad Network working group, and has reconvened peer media leaders in Aurora via the Ethnic Media Exchange, to identify additional common challenges and opportunities for collective solutions. 

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $15,000 to support networking events and dialogues between Colorado's mainstream newsroom media and African immigrants with expertise in diverse subject matters, in partnership with the Pan-African Business Association and the Urban Tikkun Centre

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: The Advancing Equity grant helped our organization to address the following specific challenges of our community:

1. Economic empowerment and community integration - This was achieved with our 'New Era of Black Entrepreneurs'. People of all races gathered together to discuss the challenges of blacks people in business and pointed ourselves to the path to the solution.

2. Community visibility, best practices to media content and coverage. This was tackled in our COLORADO ETHNIC MEDIA EXCHANGE-Strengthening connections engagement in March.

We hope to hold more engagements and networking events in 2023, within and outside of our community. The experience of this year is going to follow me into the future. It was amazing.

Bucket List Community Cafe

Bucket List Community Café is an online community journalism site for Denver. We have a unique niche at the intersection of community and journalism. Everyone has a story, and we build community by sharing our stories. We are North Denver’s home for information, inspiration, and interaction. We share news, issues, culture, events, people, pets, food, fun and more so that you can know what is happening on your street and across town. We are hyperlocal and strive to represent the diverse voices within our community.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022, 2021

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $5,000 to support Bucket List Community Cafe in working to develop and offer a paid journalism scholarship program that provides mentorship and cohort support to BIPOC students.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: This digital start-up newsroom is currently hosting eight paid interns, three of whom are receiving additional scholarships supported by their CMP grant. Their internship cohort is over 35% BIPOC. As a start-up business with only one full-time staff member, their interns have found CPA’s Workforce Pathways/Internships Working Group to be a valuable additional source of training and mentorship. Their participation has helped CMP better understand the challenges facing small newsrooms hosting internship programs, and given them access to models of good organizational and internship program structures from other participating newsrooms.

Crestone Eagle Community Media

The Crestone Eagle serves rural Saguache County, including the towns of Crestone, Saguache and Center, Moffat, Villa Grove and La Garita, extending into the northern San Luis Valley. The Crestone Eagle is the primary information resource for the Crestone community and the greater Saguache County region. The Eagle reports on local, county and state government, and on federal actions that affect our region. It provides news analysis; health, emergency and public safety notices; relevant information about schools, education and community service; and notice of committee meetings and actions.

SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022, 2021

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to increase coverage of and engagement with underrepresented demographics in the rural San Luis Valley, such as Latinx, indigenous, and youth populations. This is being achieved through partnerships with libraries, community leaders, and local community correspondents in regional communities in 2023. 

2023 Advancing Equity Update: The Crestone Eagle has hired ten new writers as a part of their regional reporting project, covering equity and inclusion, agriculture, water, and economic beats, as well as a Regional News Project Manager, who is coordinating their work and establishing local community partnerships with libraries, community centers, and schools across the San Luis Valley.

CSU Pueblo - The Today

The Today is published as an academic tool by the students and staff of the Department of Mass Communications and is the officially sanctioned newspaper of Colorado State University-Pueblo. Students working on the Today must abide by the professional ethical standards defined by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Associated Press.

The Today newspaper is published several times in the fall and spring semesters. The Today news website is updated daily during the academic year, excluding final exam periods and holidays

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $25,000 to provide Year Two support for CSU Pueblo - The Today’s Discovering Diverse Voices community engagement project, as it launches a student-led community reporting desk in collaboration with the library and Pueblo Star Journal, funds and supports a student to lead the Bureau, and engages community stakeholders in the existing DEI advisory committee.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: The Today had established their DEI Board of community liaisons just before the closure of the Pueblo Chieftain’s press was announced. Supported by these stakeholders, their adaptive response has been to shift their student-led product to a long-form feature magazine, paired with an expansion of their multi-media and digital products, and content-sharing partnerships with radio programs like The DROP from RMPBS, to create a converged media model. Equipped with this platform, CSU students are planning to expand their work beyond Pueblo, with projects from Trinidad to Las Animas telling community-focused multi-media stories, and a student journalism mentorship partnership with majority Black, Latinx, and rural school districts in Southern Colorado.

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $25,000 to support first-year implementation of Community Story Bureaus, including development of a DEI Advisory Board, recruitment of a DEI Student Leader, and development of plan for leveraging University faculty and resources to support students and citizen journalists in covering issues germane to Pueblo residents.

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: One of the most significant impacts our project has has has been on the student, learning, and education side of journalism education. Journalism education has been struggling nationally, and while other programs have been shuddering their programs, we felt a need to serve our community and region by rethinking what journalism is and how we can future proof it. The grant also allowed us to commit resources and create new student roles (we hope them to be longterm and lasting) that otherwise would not have been possible. Having this integrated into the newspaper has changed the perspective of the newspaper and our course offerings. We have embraced the tenets of the grant across several of our courses and student media (radio immediately and TV is Spring 2023). The students are now community-journalism focused with an interest in journalism beyond "traditional" news. One other impact the grant has had is on community relations. The outreach of the student coordinator has begun to open doors and conversations about what we are doing and how we are embracing Pueblo and diversity through programming. There is still much work to be done, but the journalism aspect is our foundation and I have been working with other organizations (such as Rocky Mountain Public Media) to bring more diverse and community-specific programming to radio and video.

Denver Newspaper Guild

The Denver Newspaper Guild Local 37074 is a union of Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska newspaper employees, and employees working for unions and nonprofit organizations in the state. The Guild negotiates contracts, ensures that those contracts are honored and strives to make our workplace the best it can be, just as our counterparts do in more than 100 cities in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. For more than 70 years the Guild has worked for good wages and benefits, fair working conditions, and a voice on the job. Our membership is a diverse group, but has a common bond in the belief that respect for workers’ rights builds stronger jobs and stronger communities.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to support ongoing efforts to strengthen the capacity of Denver Post reporters to connect with non-English speaking Coloradans, with an emphasis tracking improvements against quarterly source audits.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: This grant has enabled the Denver Post to provide translation services to reporters working on stories in Spanish-speaking communities, which has helped their team establish stronger relationships with both the community-based translators, and the communities involved in the stories. This has led them to engage Cynthia Lozano, recommended by another CMP grantee, as a Latinx Community Engagement consultant, to advise the Post’s distribution strategy of Latinx/focused stories via community channels, including social media and whatsapp groups. Both CPR and Denver Post have discovered the need for additional trust-building with community members to support a successful source audit, as community members have communicated concerns and uncertainty as to how the personal data collected will be used.

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to support externally-led DEI training for Denver Post journalists and local news leaders.

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: We were able to use the grant to provide fantastic DEI training that was journalism-focused. Our training was attended by our entire newsroom, including management and leadership. We now have a common language to speak as a newsroom when it comes to DEI – a starting point that provided opportunities for further discussions and development but made it so that we are on the same page and gave us a wonderful base education on topics ranging from microaggressions in the workplace to bias in our news coverage.

The training taught us about the "fault lines" that make us unique and also make us subject to bias and, potentially, discrimination. By learning about race, gender, sexual orientation, generation, geography and class as they apply to journalists and the journalism we do, we are better educated when interacting with communities different from our own.

G.E.S. Gazette / Denver North Star

The G.E.S. Gazette is a new bilingual publication for the Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea neighborhoods and RiNo Art District. Each month, the G.E.S. Gazette brings news about local politics, community happenings, arts & culture, and more to residents. The G.E.S. Gazette is supported by its sister paper, the Denver North Star.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $9,140 to expand the G.E.S. Gazette's ability to reach Spanish-speaking residents during the City's spring election cycle, through increased community engagement, a bilingual debate, and increased page counts.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: The majority of the Gazette’s grant project was focused around the Denver spring elections. Their planned bilingual debate for District 9 City Council was the best-attended across the city, and they were asked to host a second debate for the run-off, which was equally successful. Both community members and candidates were enthusiastic in their feedback on the quality of the debates. Building on the success of these events, the Gazette is working to formalize the personal relationships their editor established with community leaders into institutional relationships that will support their bilingual community engagement efforts moving forward. 

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $6,000 to support the production of North Denver Latinx Stories, written by BIPOC authors from Globeville, Elyria, Swansea and North Denver, via collaboration between the Denver North Star and its newly-established sister paper, the G. E. S. Gazette.

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: This grant helped us ensure more Latino voices in both publications, which is important to ensure we are reflective of our communities. By including more local writers, we were able to include stories on topics we knew were important to the community. We looked at the impact of the pandemic on students, police and the community, and other issues identified by the writer. By providing funds for translation, it helped us create a fully bilingual second paper, even as translation costs exceeded our initial estimates.

Ethiopian Community television - KETO FM

KETO FM is an FM radio station branded as "KETO 93.9 FM". The station is operated by ECTV, Inc broadcasting an international multicultural music format. This station is licensed to Aurora and is broadcast across the Denver metro area. There are over 130 languages spoken among Aurora’s communities. KETO-FM’s target audience are people who speak these languages including immigrants living in Aurora & the metro-Denver area.

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Support From colorado media project

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022; #newsCOneeds 2020, Informed Communities COVID-19 funding

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to support KETO FM in meeting the news and information needs of Colorado's Ethiopian and multicultural residents, and continued participation in the Ethnic Media Exchange.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: KETO FM has used its grant funding to support key investments in broadcast equipment and software upgrades, and is planning an array of summer events to promote the station’s new capacities. KETO FM has been working in partnership with the City of Denver as they establish a new sister city in Ethiopia, providing translation services. In the wake of the pandemic, they have found increased demand and competition for translation services. 

KGNU Radio

KGNU is an independent, noncommercial community radio station that has served Denver and Boulder for over 40 years. We seek to stimulate, educate and entertain our audience, to reflect the diversity of the local and world community, and to provide a channel for individuals, groups, issues and music that have been overlooked, suppressed or under-represented by other media. The station seeks to expand the listening audience through the excellence of its programming without compromising the principles stated here.

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Support From colorado media project

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $25,000 to support KGNU's paid journalism internship program that provides real-world training and mentorship to BIPOC students, and to participate in a peer-to-peer cohort that shares lessons from KGNU and other best-in-class models.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: KGNU’s summer internship program is up and running. The first two AELN-funded interns (Jinx and Por) were in the midst of onboarding in early June, joined by an RFA Reporter, two additional interns supported by Workforce Boulder County funding, and several volunteer high-school interns. Over the summer, both interns have been stand-out participants in CPA’s Workforce Pathways/Internships Working Group. By the end of the summer, they’ll be joined by two more AELN-funded interns, Ilvonne and Juanita, for the fall semester. KGNU has been a leader in exploring working with workforce development funding programs from both government agencies and public universities, documenting timing and schedule challenges that make engaging with CU Boulder’s Public Interest Internship Experience program difficult for their newsroom, and the benefits of having payroll for some interns administered through government workforce agencies.

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $25,000 to provide paid internships to support emerging storytellers and journalists of diverse backgrounds from the various journalism and communications schools across the Colorado Front Range.

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: The paid news internship program has been an absolute game changer, allowing KGNU to attract young diverse talent that would not have been available to the station in a volunteer capacity. The paid interns filled roles from on-air hosting, to reporting, to headlines production in English and in Spanish, fund drive pitching, social media posting, digital editing, voice work, and more. They gained hard and soft skills during their internships providing them with the experience needed to enter the field of media successfully.

Hosting several paid interns at once in the News & Public Affairs Department helped create a core group that served as a magnet to attract others students. This also generated an important safe space where a sense of belonging, collegiality, and collective growth was key to their success and that of the program. Their energy was fantastic and created a fun and friendly atmosphere that other students eagerly volunteered to be a part of.

A greater impact of the internship program is its function in creating a pipeline of diverse talent ready to enter the media ecosystem. KGNU was happy to provide professional references and written letters of recommendation for several of the interns as they applied to other programs, jobs, and internships with one intern taking on a new internship at the Denver Post and another awaiting a final decision from Joe Neguse’s office for an opportunity to intern with the congressman.

KOTO Community Radio

Since 1975, KOTO Radio has provided the Telluride region with high-quality, commercial-free, non-underwritten community radio. Our mission is to inform, educate, and entertain while reflecting the needs, desires, and diversity of our community.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to support KOTO's Spanish-language news program and efforts to engage Latino community members through storytelling and celebration events

2023 Advancing Equity Update: KOTO just hosted their second annual Latinx Heritage Open House event, a great success for connecting the community with upcoming events and recruiting community DJs. Their Spanish-language host Luis Tavares, who was recruited at their first Latinx Open House last year, now runs two successful programs, including the Spanish-language Noticias (a weekly local news headlines roundup), and Off the Record (a monthly public affairs show, for which Louis fields questions from the community in both Spanish and English). This summer, they are exploring additional channels for connecting Spanish-speaking communities with local news and radio programming, including a scan of existing WhatsApp groups for potential partnerships, and potentially conducting a regional audience survey with Corona Insights, following the lead of the Roaring Fork Valley’s El Sol del Valle coalition.

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $5,000 to support DEI training for staff and stipends for Spanish-language hosts, reporters and partners.

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: The DEI training helped put into place a foundation to make sustainable and meaningful change. The greatest takeaway was, "if you mean it, put it in your budget." We did that for 2022 and with this grant funding, achieved the goal of hiring a reporter to expand our Spanish news programming.

The impacts of this have been twofold. For one, KOTO is more authentically meeting its mission statement, but more importantly, we are engaging all members of our community in KOTO's activities, programming and more. By hiring Luis Tavares, we have at least 15 more people (his family and friends) who want to be involved with KOTO and are encouraging their friends to listen and participate! It's been absolutely wonderful to see the impacts of diversifying our airwaves and making this small step toward meaningful and sustainable change.

Open Media Foundation

The Open Media Foundation (OMF) is an innovative media and technology nonprofit organization dedicated to putting the power of the media in the hands of the people, enabling everyone to engage in their community and bring about the change they wish to see in the world.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $15,000 to continue strengthening Open Media Foundation's Career Engine service, which supports Colorado newsrooms in finding and hiring diverse jobseekers for journalism job opportunities, with a goal of posting and filling 52 media job openings in 2023

2023 Advancing Equity Update: OMF consistently delivers over 50 applicants per job posting hosted on their Career Engine service - but have seen a decrease in overall newsroom hiring this year. In response to changes in Colorado Workforce Development Council training program availability, OMF staff has sought training from the League of Women Voters/Colorado Press Association Earn your Press Pass training program.

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $25,000 to support a dedicated project manager to enhance services offered by Open Media's Career Engine, to offer recruitment and retention expertise to Colorado newsrooms

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: In Colorado, over 90% of media organizations surveyed reported a desire to hire more diverse candidates—yet also reported a struggle to find diverse applicants for their job openings. Early on, we learned that there was no magic bullet to receiving more diverse applicants. One of the best practices across industries is to use costly services to post jobs as widely as possible, generate greater numbers of applicants, and even though the percentage of diverse applicants may still be small, the sheer number of diverse applicants will be higher. This requires filtering through a larger number of applicants than most employers have capacity for.

At the same time, we have evaluated the diversity of applicants coming from over 40 job boards to ensure employers know which boards have the best ROI in terms of attracting qualified applicants of color.

This has paid-off by helping over 40 employers in the Colorado Media & Journalism industry hire employees averaging twice as many POC as the national averages. Similarly, employees hired through our service are also twice as often female as the male/female average reported by RTDNA and ASNE.

A majority of the organizations we surveyed stated that our data collection and organization services would be “very useful” for their hiring process. We also learned most organizations would like their staff to better reflect diversity and the demographics of Colorado and would like for their sources to better reflect the demographics of Colorado. The value of our program has been made clear by employers now beginning to pay for our service, which we hope to add some long-term sustainability for the program.

Rocky Mountain PBS

Over a million Coloradans turn to Rocky Mountain PBS to discover provocative and inspiring local, national and international programming; find diverse viewpoints; score front row center seats to world-class performances; and experience lifelong learning opportunities every month. Rocky Mountain Public Media is the parent company of Rocky Mountain PBS, KUVO Jazz, and The Drop.

Rocky Mountain PBS began in Denver in 1956 as Colorado's first public television station. It is now Colorado's only statewide television network, with stations in Denver, Pueblo/Colorado Springs, Steamboat Springs, Grand Junction and Durango. Rocky Mountain Public Media is Colorado’s largest statewide, member-supported, multimedia organization.

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2023 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to support Rocky Mountain Public Media in completing IDEA trainings for their content teams, and to explore opportunities to lead peer-to-peer learning opportunities with Colorado newsrooms

2023 Advancing Equity Update: This summer, 70% of RMPBS’ staff have completed foundation DEI training with their Chief DEI Officer. The next phase of their work includes working with external consultants to provide 1-1 coaching and management training, and decentralizing their content strategies, with a focus on digital expansion. In managing one of the largest and most sophisticated organizational approaches to addressing DEI issues in Colorado, RMPBS highlights the value of bringing in experts and advisors from outside the news industry to support their learning and work.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022

2022 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to support internally-led DEI training for RMPM news content team.

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: The long-term impact we will create through our DEI work is the systematic reform of racism within our own organization, within the media, and within communities. This year we focused on the following attributes leading our journalism work: trust, lived experience, and empathy. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure all Coloradans feel seen and heard in our work and to dismantle white supremacy in media. The metrics above demonstrate a meaningful shift toward these ends, but this is daily work that we engage in as we strive to be accountable and in partnership with communities.

This year, our DEI team completed training for 30 staff members in our organization, 7 of which are on the content team (multi-media journalists). We also increased our content team by 8 members and diversified our staff to be more reflective of the communities we serve. We currently have 18 multimedia journalists on our content team and about half have completed foundational DEI training. Overall, 40% of our content team self-identify as QTBIPOC.

Another milestone achieved this year related to this project is expanding the reach of our storytelling by shifting our Colorado Voices program to a weekly broadcast in addition to the digital daily responsive stories and creating virtual community engagement opportunities called “Community Circle”. This year we produced 606 daily responsive stories, 25 half-hour broadcast episodes of Colorado Voices, and 3 virtual Community Circle events discussing our content.