The Trust Press, a commercial printing facility launched by the National Trust for Local News to
address the skyrocketing costs of producing local news in Colorado, is now operational. The new
press is printing the publications of Colorado Community Media, also owned by the National
Trust, and will begin printing dozens of other local and ethnic newspapers in the new year.
Today, Giving Newsday, is the start of the 2024 #newsCOneeds Year-End Giving Campaign! By the end of December, 35 community newsrooms are engaged in a campaign to increase public awareness and grassroots support from individuals for the vital public service that journalism provides to our communities. They collectively aim to raise at least one million dollars to support local news - and they need your help!
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.
Today the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced it would invest $300 million over five years to strengthen journalism, with a particular focus on local news and information.
The Gates Family Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the University of Denver’s Project X-ITE announce new, significant commitments the Colorado Media Project. Our goal is to raise $2.5 million over three years to foster trustworthy, sustainable local journalism serving all Coloradans, and we’re more than halfway there.
In a first-ever joint appeal to readers, local newsrooms raised nearly $50,000 in a single day for local news. A $1,500 challenge grant from the Colorado Media Project to each outlet was doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled by local and national donors and foundations — filling newsroom coffers to ensure more and better local journalism in 2019.
Today you can support the rebirth of strong local journalism by joining the national #GivingNewsDay movement. The CMP is offering a matching grant of up to $1,500 for seven Colorado outlets. With your gifts , we can bring a total of $21,000 to public-supported Colorado journalism on a single day — money that will be put to good use reporting stories that matter to our community.
Is your public service news outlet planning to do a year-end giving campaign? The Colorado Media Project is offering matching gifts of up to $1,500 per organization for new memberships or individual donations made on “Giving News Day” — a new, nationwide campaign to increase philanthropic giving to media outlets on November 27, 2018 (a.k.a. Giving Tuesday). LOIs due November 1.
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.
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.
How can local journalists better connect with their audiences and serve their communities? This has emerged as a central question for the Colorado Media Project, and the focus of countless hours of interviews with journalists and news consumers throughout the state. Through more than a decade of working on precisely this problem, Molly de Aguiar -- Managing Director of the international News Integrity Initiative and former media grantmaker for New Jersey’s Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation -- has found the solutions to be simple in theory, yet difficult in application.
Media researcher and strategist Dr. Seth Geiger, president and co-founder of SmithGeiger, provided Colorado with a “reality check” on digital media consumption -- where are people across the demographic spectrum spending their valuable time? What media brands and formats are they consuming? And how does local journalism break through the static?
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