Melissa Milios Davis, CMP Director
Sam Moody, CMP Associate Director
Last September, Colorado Media Project convened a broad-based group of 130+ journalists, publishers, civic and business leaders, educators, students, funders community storytellers, communicators and engaged residents for the 2023 CMP Summit. Attendees had the rare opportunity to develop a shared vision in answer to the question: What does a healthy local news and information ecosystem look like for Colorado in five years — and how do we get there?
This diverse and passionate cross-sector group contributed to a clear vision for what they’d like to see by 2028: A local news and information ecosystem that is inclusive, trusted, relevant, accessible, adaptive, and sustainable. (You can read more here.) Colorado is recognized nationally for its innovative, collaborative local news ecosystem — and the shared vision for providing independent local news as a public good to all Coloradans far into the future was nothing short of inspiring.
But at that same meeting, we also heard another message,
loud and clear: The human capacity of Colorado newsrooms
to deliver on this bold vision is increasingly stretched thin.
Across Colorado, trusted local newsrooms are still running on fumes — and the negative impact on communities is increasingly clear, as disinformation and polarizing narratives flood our content streams, leading to disengagement, apathy and distrust.
Colorado Media Project has been investing in capacity-building for Colorado’s newsrooms at the organizational and ecosystem levels for more than five years — as a funder, catalyst, and advocate for independent local news as a public good.
Our largest investment to date has been in helping to establish the Colorado News Collaborative in 2020 as a capacity-building hub to provide a broad range of services and resources to newsrooms statewide.
We’ve also partnered directly with national groups like Hearken, the Maynard Institute, the Local Media Association, the National Trust for Local News, Public Media Company, and the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press to leverage their specialized expertise to address specific but common needs of Colorado news organizations. And at the state level, CMP supports a number of other strong coalitions — including Rocky Mountain Community Radio, the Aurora-based Ethnic Media Exchange, and El Sol del Valle in the Roaring Fork Valley — through direct grants that support shared staff, strategic planning and even revenue generation.
So with this new dose of urgent feedback from the field, we decided to commission an external evaluation of our grantmaking in this area.
Today we are releasing a sobering new report from researchers at Impact Architects, which reinforces that the topline challenges continuing to plague Colorado newsrooms are:
Sustainability: In many cases, newsrooms lack the revenue and/or operational resilience necessary to support sufficient staff to report in communities on critical issues while also conducting business side operations.
Smaller organizations simply need support to generate basic operating revenue.
Larger organizations need support to diversify revenue streams.
Capacity: The core challenge for small organizations is a lack of human resources, in that a few individuals are responsible to varying degrees for every component of the business, from editorial production to revenue generation.
In the Impact Architects report, you can see an external perspective on capacity-building approaches that are working well for Colorado newsrooms and should be emulated, others that are just beginning to show promise, and even efforts we have funded that have struggled to show clear impact. (This analysis complements a 2023 external evaluation of CMP’s impact through the lens of our three priority areas: equity and inclusion, trusted local news, and sustainability and efficiency.)
As a learning organization dedicated to transparency, CMP publishes these studies to support the continued evolution of the field — both in Colorado and nationwide, through our role as the home of Press Forward Colorado. We strongly believe that Press Forward chapters and the communities they serve across the U.S. can learn from Colorado’s bright spots, as well as our common challenges.
For an in-depth analysis of Colorado newsrooms’ challenges, distribution, diversity and finances for 2022, check out the Colorado News Collaborative’s analysis of the 2023 Colorado News Survey, which contained more than 50 questions and 5,000 data points.
Looking ahead, Impact Architects encouraged CMP to tailor its strategy to support existing and/or new initiatives that impact the following areas:
Revenue generation: Newsrooms require core operating support, shared revenue (e.g., advertising, new revenue streams to avoid volatility in the advertising market), public funding, and other creative revenue streams that CMP can help to develop.
Shared services: Small newsrooms suggest shared backend services, such as accounting, ad sales, grant writing, and technology maintenance and upgrades, could save them precious dollars and time through economies of scale.
Reporting capacity: Newsrooms need resources to support reporting for day-to-day content needs, as well as for audience development and community listening and engagement. This could include direct investment, fellowship models, shared reporters, or other innovative models. Larger organizations can benefit from editorial collaboration and beat-focused reporting, which could potentially be a shared resource.
In response, this summer CMP IS CONVENING a
working group of Colorado’s media ecosystem leaders and
a diverse, cross-sector steering committee to develop
scenarios and a roadmap that leverages these strategies
to help achieve our shared five-year vision.
With data and financial analysis, business strategy, and facilitation support from Public Media Company, our goal is to unveil a draft of this roadmap — including strategic priorities, human resources, financial needs and potential sources — at the 2024 Colorado Media Project Summit on August 22 for review, discussion and further refinement by a broad-based group of CMP grantees and other attendees.
We are also doubling down on our commitment to support Colorado newsrooms —not only with direct grants (which comprise at least 80 percent of CMP’s annual budget) but also with more direct access to capacity-building resources that fit their specific needs.
To this end, we also asked Impact Architects to compile a centralized, searchable database of resources from nearly 50 Colorado-based and national organizations — making it easier for individual news organizations and journalists across the state to find services that meet a wide range of needs.
Users can search the database by Keyword, by Organization Name, by Issue Area (eg: DEI practices, revenue development, or digital infrastructure), by Accessibility (eg: free, paid, member-only, application/awarded, etc.), by Audience (eg: newsrooms or individual journalists), and by Service Provider Focus (eg: national or in-state providers).
We hope that these tools — both the CMP Newsroom Resource Database (here) and the Colorado Roadmap for Local News (to come) — will help guide Colorado newsrooms, partners and CMP smartly into our next phase of work to build a more inclusive, trusted, relevant, accessible, adaptive and sustainable local news and civic information ecosystem for all Coloradans. And we hope that you will join us!