Denver, October 16 - Press Forward Colorado today announced that nine local media outlets have been awarded $900,000 in grants as part of the Press Forward national foundation’s first open call for funding.
These nine Colorado newsrooms - Alamosa Citizen, Asian Avenue Magazine, Aurora Sentinel Community Media, El Comercio de Colorado, KVNF Mountain Grown Community Radio, Ouray County Plaindealer, San Miguel Basin Forum, Sopris Sun, and World Journal - will each receive $50,000 per year for the next two years to support their work serving their communities, and closing coverage gaps for communities of color, rural communities, and linguistically diverse communities.
In this pivotal time for the future of local civic news, CMP seeks candidates and nominations for its next Director. The Director will play a crucial role in advancing CMP’s mission to support sustainable, equitable, and community-centered journalism in Colorado. Reporting to CMP’s Executive Committee, and employed by CMP’s fiscal sponsor, the Rose Community Foundation, this leadership position requires a dynamic and strategic individual with a passion for public service and accessible civic information, exceptional relationship-building skills, and deep expertise in fundraising, strategic communications, coalition building, and organizational management.
Locally owned and non-profit newsrooms serving communities across Colorado are invited to apply to join the 2024 #newsCOneeds Year-End Giving Challenge, and apply for matching grant funding from CMP.
The Spotlight: Colorado Fund aims to empower local Colorado-based news organizations to produce high-quality, in-depth, nonpartisan investigative reporting focused on a single topic. The guiding purpose of this fund (and the projects it supports) is to raise public awareness about critical issues facing our state and to catalyze positive change in our institutions and communities.
Across Colorado from Greeley to Pueblo -- through partnerships with print, digital, radio, and television stations -- Rocky Mountain Public Media's Above the Noise initiative aims to set the table for civil conversations that build trust among neighbors and empower communities to cope with the rise of artificial intelligence, deep fakes and widespread misinformation.
A sobering new report from Impact Architects reinforces the topline challenges continuing to plague Colorado newsrooms: sustainability and capacity. We also unveil a new 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 and access services that meet a wide range of needs.
New white paper by Corey Hutchins of Colorado College shares findings from a 2023 CMP-supported working group — and explores solutions. In addition to sharing ideas surfaced by newsroom and higher education leaders in the working group, the report captures takeaways from newsroom-hosted student internships supported by CMP through its Advancing Equity in Local News program in 2023, and from a cohort-based program that COLab provided for students placed in Colorado newsrooms in summer 2023. It is published to contribute to ecosystem learning and continuous improvement of Colorado’s journalism workforce pipeline.
What happens when one of Colorado’s few remaining commercial printing presses stops? This new report, commissioned and published by Colorado Media Project (CMP), summarizes research, findings, and recommendations from an industry working group led by the Colorado Press Association (CPA) and the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab) throughout 2023.
Why should concerned citizens and residents, including state and local officials, care about what’s happening in Colorado’s local journalism industry? This 2023 white paper updates key data points on local news deserts and ownership from CMP’s 2019 report, “Local News is a Public Good”; spotlights what we know Colorado communities want, need, and expect from local news; and challenges all of us to rise to the occasion.
Where do Coloradans get their local news — and how? Who do they trust, what are they paying for — and why? What roles do Coloradans think local journalists should be playing in our democracy — and how well do they think they are doing? A new 2022 survey of more than 1,800 Coloradans provides 10 key takeaways that reflect current views of local news outlets and journalists — and trends that are shaping their future.
While many groups and individuals are hard at work across the sector, for the past 3.5 years Colorado Media Project has attempted to serve as a center of gravity for engaging non-journalists — especially those from underserved communities — in this pivotal time for the future of local civic news. We see our role as helping to catalyze, fund, and advocate for innovations that make Colorado's local news ecosystem more sustainable, collaborative, trustworthy and accountable to the public it serves.
In the summer of 2020, two surveys — one conducted by University of Denver (DU) with support from The Colorado Trust and the other one by Colorado Press Association (CPA) and Colorado News Collaborative (COLab) of their members and partners — assessed Colorado journalists’ views of their own news outlets and coverage, and of the state of the broader news ecosystem in Colorado. In their answers, journalists highlight strengths, identify weaknesses, and propose solutions for improving local journalism in Colorado.
“All politics is local,” so the saying goes. The same could be said for misinformation. The 2016 elections brought stories of Macedonian teens pulling quick profits and Russian agents seeding polarization across the United States. But 2020 is teaching us that whatever the origins of a rumor, misleading meme or photo, it is the local twist and organic amplification that give it power — often leading to impact offline.
Today we published our CMP Annual Report for 2019. Our work over the past year reaffirmed just how many community members care deeply about the future of local news in Colorado. We also learned that newsrooms across the state ranging from legacy newspapers to digital startups are eager to build capacity, engage with community, and increase collaboration. Join us to reflect on these and other important lessons, and help us apply them forward into further learning and growth in 2020.
“Parked” a collaborative project that developed organically thanks to the initiative of the Colorado Sun, represents a great beginning to a new spirit of cooperation among Colorado media outlets.
In just four months, the Colorado Media Project has produced thought-provoking research and insights. Read our executive summary, or take a deep dive into the various components — from our 2,000+ survey of Colorodans, to digital prototypes and business concepts, to a benchmark study of Colordado’s digital and nonprofit outlets — and more.
About 2.4 million digitally-savvy Coloradans are interested in state, local, and neighborhood news, and read more than headlines, a Colorado Media Project survey of 2,000+ residents has found. And about 1 million of these Coloradans are willing to pay for local news - the first time this market has been quantified.
The Colorado Media Project — in partnership with the Institute for Nonprofit News — set out to learn more about the state’s local news landscape, surveying 14 independent news outlets in Colorado to gain information about their mission, coverage topics, audience, staff size, business model, and more.
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