PLocal news outlets that fill coverage gaps with original reporting — and have a budget under $1 million — will be eligible to apply for national Press Forward funding.
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.
More than two dozen Colorado newsrooms have launched an unprecedented collaboration to better cover the 2024 elections.
The Colorado Health Foundation, The Colorado Trust, Gates Family Foundation, The Gill Foundation, and Rose Community Foundation have stepped forward to lead Press Forward Colorado as a local affiliate of the nationwide initiative.
Colorado’s local and statewide newsrooms and nonpartisan community and civic groups are invited to join forces with Rocky Mountain Public Media, Colorado State University’s Center for Public Deliberation, the Colorado Press Association, Colorado News Collaborative, and the Colorado Media Project in a statewide campaign to reclaim and reimagine the public square across all of Colorado’s 64 counties.
All Colorado newsrooms are invited to participate in this project to the depth of their choosing. This could range from promoting the initiative and encouraging your audiences to participate in regional events, to asking your community the common questions (to be developed in conjunction with participating newsrooms), to reporting the results and ensuring your community is represented in the statewide reporting, to joining a cohort that will receive additional training and support for community listening and engagement, and/or joining the steering committee for the project.
Today, we are delighted to join the National Trust for Local News and Colorado Community Media in announcing plans for a new community press to serve Colorado. NTLN expects to begin printing CCM's 23 weekly newspapers in May 2024, and aims to offer "mission-driven" printing services to other local papers and community-based partners in the coming months.
Today, Colorado Media Project is excited to announce $360,000 in new commitments to ecosystem partners who are dedicated to helping our state’s local newsrooms explore and pilot innovative solutions to wicked problems that they are facing right now, in communities across the state. And we invite you to join us.
The Colorado Community Media properties -- 24 in all -- were purchased by The National Trust for Local News. This is a new nonprofit organization whose mission is to support local news organizations like CCM so they can remain in local ownership and control, and make the transformations communities want from their local news organizations. This is the first deal of its kind in the nation.
News coverage can be seen below here:
New Deal: Colorado-national consortium buys community papers - Washington Post
How Colorado Sun Shone on 24 Newspapers - Denver Westword
‘Tell Stories That Matter:’ Colorado Community Media Sold to Journalism Partnership
Join CMP on Thursday, May 25, for Replanting Community News: Why a new chapter for 24 weekly newspapers matters for Colorado — and the nation, a panel discussing this transaction.
On The Colorado Sun’s first anniversary, editor and co-founder Larry Ryckman writes: “None of us set out to be small business owners, but we did it because it was important and needed to be done. As I have often said, this is not a crisis for journalists. It’s a crisis for communities and — I’m really stepping onto my soapbox here — for our very democracy.”
Today’s news that Denverite, a beloved three-year-old digital news organization, is becoming part of Colorado Public Radio — which has been acting on big plans to expand its news staff — injects a new spirit of optimism into the local news conversation in Colorado. We talked to Kevin Dale, CPR’s executive editor, and Dave Burdick, Denverite’s founder and editor, about what this change means for both organizations, their loyal listeners and readers, and Colorado’s local news ecosystem.
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.
The prototyping process is all about the end user. Cultivo conducted empathy interviews with Coloradans from across the state, to hear first-hand about their personal experiences and challenges with Colorado local news today. Then they rapidly developed and user tested four digital prototypes to address common pain points with novel solutions. Read the final reports from GeoStory, StoryHound, Inspectre News, and The Daily Snack.
On August 23, Molly de Aguiar, managing director of the News Integrity Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and former media program officer for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, offered Colorado's philanthropic leaders some key lessons for strengthening the local media landscape.
JB Holston is dean of the University of Denver school of Engineering and Computer Science, and is also leading the Colorado Media Project. Read more about his vision and his view of the process at the Colorado Independent here
Join the conversation:
