Engines for Democracy, Running on Fumes: Topline Challenges — and Resources —for Colorado Newsrooms
Across Colorado, trusted local newsrooms are running on fumes — and the negative impact on communities is increasingly clear. This sobering report from Impact Architects highlights sustainability, revenue, and human capacity across every aspect of the business as key challenges facing local newsrooms across the state - and points to opportunities to connect newsrooms with the resources they need.
REIMAGINING COLORADO’S PUBLIC SQUARE
Why should concerned citizens and residents, including state and local officials, care about what’s happening in Colorado’s local journalism industry? This September 2023 report updates key data on news deserts, newspaper ownership from CMP’s 2019 white paper, “Local News is a Public Good,” and shares four actions that foundation leaders, elected officials, and the public should can take to build a healthier local news and information ecosystem in Colorado.
workforce pathways for local journalism in colorado
This April 2024 white paper by Corey Hutchins of Colorado College explores ideas surfaced by newsroom and higher education leaders in a CPA-led working group, captures takeaways from newsroom-hosted student internships supported by CMP through its Advancing Equity in Local News program, and analyzes a cohort-based program that COLab provided for students placed in Colorado newsrooms in summer 2023.
THE FUTURE OF PRINTING IN COLORADO
What happens if — and when — Colorado’s few remaining commercial printing presses stop? Set against the backdrop of this summer’s sudden closure of a vital Front Range business resource impacting more than 80 community news publications, this new September 2023 white paper presents a clear-eyed view of challenges and a range of potential solutions facing the industry.
COMMUNITIES OF COLOR CALL FOR ACTION
What will it take to ensure that local news coverage reflects, respects, and meets the information needs of the state’s communities of color? What actions must newsrooms, community members and funders take to create a future in which communities of color share and shape the power of local news media? CMP initiated and funded The Voices Project, led by COLab and community liaisons, and the calls to action from community members and journalists of color continue to guide our grantmaking strategy.
WHO’S DOING LOCAL NEWS?
Where are Colorado's journalism producers and news deserts? What new sources and forms of local civic news and information are popping up, to fill news gaps? And who owns all of these media outlets? Gain insight on your local news diet from this continuously updated map from Colorado College’s Corey Hutchins and his students, developed in partnership from University of Denver, CMP, COLab and Hearken.
2022 Statewide Survey of Attitudes Toward State & Local Media
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 2022 Colorado Media Project/Corona Insights 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.
The News About Local News:
10 Takeaways from Colorado Journalists
In the summer of 2020, two surveys 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.
This report presents 10 takeaways from these surveys and discusses the implications of the findings.
GUIDE: HOW TO DESIGN AND LAUNCH A COLLABORATIVE MEMBERSHIP OFFERING
This guide is based on an experiment led by Colorado Media Project — with support from Membership Puzzle Project and consulting from Hearken — tests how news organizations can identify organizations and institutions with shared target audiences to work together to develop a shared service or product that benefits both organizations’ bottom lines, as well as the public they collectively seek to serve. The guide focuses your efforts on a new service or offering that builds opportunities for community connection, collaboration and contribution.
CASE STUDY: COLLABORATIVE MEMBERSHIPS TO BUILD COMMUNITY
With support from Membership Puzzle Project, Colorado Media Project selected five newsrooms — The Durango Herald, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, KDNK Community Radio, Chalkbeat and The Colorado Sun — to join its five-month experiment of testing a collaborative membership program. The goal was to broaden support for newsrooms and explore a membership model driven by community support.
Misinformation in Your Backyard
The latest First Draft News research report collects analysis from Local News Fellows in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. In five states that will be key in the upcoming U.S. election — Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin — First Draft has collected dozens of examples of information disorder playing out via private Facebook Groups, text messages and other platforms.
CMP Annual Report 2019
Our work in 2019 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.
CASE STUDY: How uncovering a small Colorado town’s hushed secret led to redemption and reconciliation in Rangely
Niki Turner, editor and owner of the the Rio Blanco Herald Times, had been stymied by local officials when she tried to learn about a fatal police shooting of a mentally ill man. So she reached out to Susan Greene, editor of the Colorado Independent. Turner had never come across a story of this magnitude, and was seeking help reporting the complex and nuanced issues surrounding the shooting and its aftermath that town officials were trying to keep hushed. Their collaboration provides an excellent example of how newsrooms working together can produce stories that neither would have been able to produce by going it alone.
KUVO - Five Points Jazz Festival
COLORADANS CRAVE CONNECTIONS WITH ARTS & CULTURE
In 2019, with support from the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation and Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Media Project worked with Colorado Public Radio/Denverite and Rocky Mountain Public Media to explore these questions:
How do Coloradans want to know about and engage with arts and culture in our state and how can media outlets and art organizations serve those needs? How do underrepresented communities in particular feel they are being served by arts and culture organizations and media coverage of arts and culture?
Public Pathways for Supporting Coloradans’ Civic News and Information Needs in the 21st Century
New ideas, new approaches, and new products and services are desperately needed to ensure the reimagining and very survival of high-quality journalism in Colorado, especially in underserved communities. Indeed, Colorado already has promising entrepreneurial efforts by existing news organizations and digital native upstarts that are injecting a spirit of innovation that can serve as an example to the nation. We hope that the ideas contained in this paper inspire more Coloradans to envision what’s possible for local news and civic engagement in the 21st century.
Case Study: 'Parked' project highlights promise of collaboration
“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. Over the course of three days in September 2019, more than a dozen newsrooms across the state worked together to report on the state’s mobile home industry. Colorado Media Project applauds this collaboration and makes recommendations on how to support and deepen such collaborations in the future.
CMP COMMUNITY REPORT
In the summer of 2018, during the initial research and development phase of the Colorado Media Project, we led a broad collaboration to study the changing media landscape across our state. 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.
Colorado News consumer survey
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.
COLORADO’S DIGITAL AND NONPROFIT MEDIA LANDSCAPE: 2018 BENCHMARK REPORT
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 Cultivo Media Prototypes
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.