La Voz Colorado

La Voz Colorado is a weekly digital and print newspaper serving the Colorado Latino market in both English and Spanish,. La Voz is the only Hispanic newspaper that distributes statewide and in a bilingual format, with a digital edition of the same hard copy newspaper hosted on their site.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023; #newsCOneeds 2023

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $5,000 to support La Voz Colorado in meeting the local news and information needs of Colorado's Spanish-speaking residents.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: La Voz is among the many newsrooms grappling with increasing print costs, and exploring transitions to more digital-focused models. Having redesigned their website after the pandemic, they’ve seen a 50% increase in digital readers across all platforms over the last year. They now face the challenge of integrating this growing audience into a sustainable set of business and revenue strategies, and have signed up for a sustainability analysis from CPA, with the expectation that they will eventually be a digital-first, or digital-only publication.

Mountain West News Bureau

Mountain West News Bureau is a collaboration of public media stations that serves the Western states of Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Our mission is to tell stories about the people, places and issues across the Mountain West. From land and water management to growth in the expanding West to our unique culture and heritage, we'll explore the issues that define us and the challenges we face.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to strengthen the ability of Colorado newsrooms to report in and with Indigenous communities, via cultural sensitivity trainings developed with Indigenous partners; participating members of the Mountain West News Bureau will also receive story reviews and coaching from a Native reporter.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: The Mountain West News Bureau hosted three virtual trainings, in partnership with the Colorado News Collaborative and their Voices Initiative team. This partnership helped MWNB expand the audience of journalists involved in the trainings beyond their member stations, with over 50 journalists attending the first training. They also plan to continue these trainings at the Rocky Mountain Community Radio conference in Fort Collins, and at the Colorado Press Association’s annual convention in Denver.

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.

Red, White and Brown Media

Red, White and Brown Media facilitates substantive conversations about culture and politics through the lens of South Asian American race and identity — via journalism, social media and events.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $3,500 to support Red, White and Brown Media with start-up mentorship, coaching and capacity building. 

2023 Advancing Equity Update: Red, White and Brown Media’s Co-Founder and Editor, Vignesh Ramachandran, has met intermittently with CMP’s team to refine his plans for his data-driven media start-up. He has identified a gap in accessible data on AAPI communities in Colorado, and plans to conduct community focus groups to identify key under-reported stories, assemble data that puts those stories into context, and explore opportunities to connect this project with projects other Colorado media organizations are already working on. RWB Media is an example of the kind of small, digital focused entrepreneurial start-up organization that CMP needs to better understand how to support and connect to the broader local news ecosystem.

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.

Sentinel Colorado

Sentinel Colorado is a print and digital paper serving Colorado's most diverse city, Aurora. The Sentinel Community Shareholder model is an innovative effort to preserve and expand critical, fact-based journalism in Aurora via community ownership.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

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

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to support Sentinel Colorado in working with peers to develop and offer a paid journalism internship program that provides mentorship and cohort support to BIPOC students.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: This year, the Sentinel is on track to host 16 interns, 12 of whom are first or second-generation immigrants, representing Aurora’s diverse communities, in their first Summer Journalism Camp. This project was inspired by their participation in CPA’s Workforce Pathways/Internships Working Group, and they have established strong recruitment partnerships with Colorado State University Fort Collins, and Metro State University Denver. The Sentinel has identified at least one, and potentially up to three Summer Journalism Camp participants who intend to participate in a year-long internship program, and is exploring the possibility of running an additional fall semester Journalism Camp. 

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Sopris Sun / El Sol del Valle

The Sopris Sun is Carbondale, Colorado’s nonprofit weekly newspaper. It was born from this community, it endeavors to reflect the diverse faces of Carbondale and the Roaring Fork Valley, and it depends on the greater community for content, advertising, and financial support.

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Colorado Media Project Support

Advancing Equity in Local News 2023, 2022; #newsCOneeds 2023

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $35,000 to support a coalition of 10 newsrooms in the Roaring Fork Valley, as they implement strategies for reaching Spanish-speaking audiences that were developed in the 2022 research and listening phase of their project, and launch El Sol del Valle, a collaborative, digital-first Spanish-language publication.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: The Sopris Sun has hired an editor for El Sol del Valle, the collaborative Spanish-language digital publication and print insert housed under the Sopris Sun and supported by a 10-newsroom regional collaboration. They hosted their first Spanish-language reporting and community engagement training for their contributors. They have received a CMS transition grant from CMP to support their development of their web platform, and implementation of Newspack as their CMS, with high hopes for the revenue-generating capacities it could unlock. As members of the collaborative have experienced some significant staff turnover, they are exploring options around shared staffing to address specific shared organizational needs.

Enterate Latino

Enterate Latino is one of the only Spanish-first original sources for local civic news and information on the Western Slope. Publisher Hector Morales Panaguia is a staff of one — working with local professors, community and civic leaders, and other volunteers to translate and publish a monthly print product. Hector then personally delivers the paper to tiendas, libraries, and other places where immigrants congregate — from Grand Junction to Parachute.

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COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT SUPPORT

Community News Network 2022-2024

Community News Network Award: $80,000 over three years to support local reporting and production of this monthly newspaper, which is a vital resource for mono-lingual Spanish speakers on the Western Slope.

Community News Network 2022 Update: During the first half of 2023, Enterate Latino has increased both their distribution and their advertising, demonstrating the impact of both team of paid collaborators and writers they are now able to employ, and their web update, which helps drive advertising and engage community response. Like many newsrooms across Colorado, they face challenges with cost and reliability of delivery and printing services.

El Comercio de Colorado

El Comercio de Colorado is an award-winning, biweekly, bilingual print and digital newspaper serving the diverse Latinx community from the Metro Denver and Northern Colorado regions.

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Community News Network Award: $135,000 over three years to support Spanish-language coverage of a newly created congressional district in Northern Colorado, and a social media manager to strengthen digital distribution of this bi-weekly newspaper serving Latino Coloradans.

Community News Network 2022 Update: El Comercio de Colorado’s regional expansion project is focused on establishing a local community forum, joined by influencers and leaders in the region, to host a community conversation with regional candidates in Aurora, Greeley, Commerce City, and Thornton. The organization itself is grappling with the fallout of the closure of the Chieftain press, and has been working closely with the CPA-led Printing Working Group to explore potential solutions, in addition to making ongoing investments in improved SEO for their burgeoning digital presence. Their publisher, Jesus Melean-Sanchez, has also been engaging with the Colorado Department of Health to streamline processes for public agencies buying ads in his paper, and has lent his experience to several collaborative projects with other outlets serving Colorado’s Spanish-speaking communities.

Rocky Mountain Community Radio

Rocky Mountain Community Radio (RMCR) is a coalition of non-commercial radio stations in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Member stations broadcast diverse news and music programming.

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COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT SUPPORT

Community News Network 2022-2024

Community News Network Award: $120,000 over three years to support Rocky Mountain Community Radio’s new managing editor position to expand thematic story collaboration, partnerships and distribution for this network of 19 mostly-rural or mountain community radio stations, who collectively reach more than 415,000 unique listeners per week

Community News Network 2022 Update: Maeve Conran was hired in July 2022 as RMCR’s first Managing Editor, where she continues to provide vital and transformative capacity to the RMCR network. She has enabled significant increases in content sharing, established standardized content formats, served as a daily editor, built capacity to track content sharing, and filled ad-hoc staffing and capacity needs across stations. Weekly RMCR staff training sessions have had robust attendance, and are generating an evergreen library of training materials; a regional “news roundup” radio program is being shared across stations and will be available weekly beginning this month (repurposing radio content into a single magazine format for additional distribution); and a “Phase I” analysis of RMCR station digital capacity conducted by Public Media Company has just been completed, with “Phase II” plans now underway to design and implement the use of a new shared digital platform for select stations and explore templates and tools that will help all stations share digital content more fully. This project is an example of the incredible impact small newsrooms can experience though the addition of highly-qualified shared staff.