Small newsrooms or coalitions that provide original reporting in underserved communities — and have budgets under $1 million — are eligible to apply. At least 100 newsrooms nationwide will receive around $100,000 each over two years in unrestricted funds.
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.
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.”
M3: Machine Learning, Migration, Mountains Journalism Unconference. drew dozens of journalists, students, and developers from Colorado and beyond to talk about collaboration, including upcoming Migrahack September 27 & 28.
Colorado Media Project, OpenNews, and University of Denver, drew journalists from states as far flung as Vermont and Florida. Many of them were data specialists, who attended the ‘unconference’ to share ideas and gain inspiration from one another. Colorado outlets represented at the unconference included the Colorado Independent, Longmont Observer, Chalkbeat, 5280, Vail Daily, and the Colorado Sun, and Colorado Public Radio.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
By Melissa Milios Davis, Gates Family Foundation
As Colorado's media landscape has continued to evolve, the Gates Family Foundation has invested in a wide variety of high-quality local news outlets. Local news is a key component of healthy, thriving communities – and its absence is harbinger of diminished communities.
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