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, 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.
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.
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.
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