Colorado Independent

This message was originally published on May 15, 2020. We told you last month that big changes are underway as the Indy joins forces with the Colorado Press Association, Colorado Media Project and newsrooms throughout the state. We told you our new alliance, Colorado News Collaborative, or COLab, is a movement to foster journalistic collaboration and excellence at a time when resources in this business are scarce — and growing scarcer. Today, as some of the last pieces of the partnership fall into place, we have details on what will change on our site and with our team starting next week.

This message was originally published on April 10, 2020. If the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us anything, it is that now is the moment for collaboration. It is the time for everyone, including journalists and news organizations, to boost each other’s strengths and have each other’s backs because doing so is not just good for each other, it is a greater good. And because the alternative leaves us weaker.

When the Neuralyzer flashes it wipes their memories clean. This week, we learned buyout offers from some friends from out of town, namely the Virginia-based Gannett newspaper chain, will mean a kind of neuralyzing for two of our state’s larger newspapers that bookend the Front Range. Longtime journalists at the Chieftain in Pueblo and a veteran journalist at the Coloradoan in Fort Collins are leaving with buyouts— and with them, a whole lot of institutional memory is getting zapped from their newsrooms.

On Thursday, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet sat in on a Zoom call with dozens of Colorado journalists and local media publishers to gather input on a bill he filed to help save the local news. Those on the call represented outlets large and small— nonprofits, for-profits, print, digital, TV,...

A new digital site that’s recruiting freelance journalists and looking to become a “national alt-weekly” is co-owned by a former Colorado journalist-turned cannabis PR guy. The News Station, whose managing editor Matt Laslo, a D.C-based journalist who put out a call for new writers this week, is a recently expanded...

Yesterday, Susan Greene was hard at work — helping a trio of our partner newspaper editors prep for a project with the Colorado News Collaborative. She helped lead a Zoom call with a number of our now nearly 100 news outlet partners, sharing plans for an upcoming statewide reporting project. And she was in COVID-19 quarantine for the third time in six weeks.

Throughout the past eight months of the pandemic, newspapers have been gushing red ink. Money woes led to layoffs, reduced circulation and printing days, closures, and journalists having to take unpaid time off in the form of furloughs. This column has chronicled the changing contours of Colorado’s media landscape since the rumbles began in March.

On this morning of the 2020 election, I’m moved to write you a letter about a conversation I had last night with my teenage son. Yesterday, Susan Greene sent you a note about the feeling of acedia during this season of pandemic, protest and election. The word describes a feeling of melancholy, born in this case of isolation and polarization. That resonated with many of you who immediately wrote back to Susan. At least two of you sent her poetry in response. The level of depth and thoughtfulness among our readers always amazes me. So I know you care deeply about the state of our democracy, our relationships with one another and the future of our country. Which brings me to the conversation with my son.

Words generally come easily for me. But I have been struggling for seven months to name how it feels to live through this time. The pit in my stomach is probably like yours. It is carved, of course, partly by fear of contracting COVID and of people I love suffering or dying from it alone and out of reach. And it is shaped by anxiety about tomorrow’s election, the potential for a long, disputed outcome and violent unrest one way or another.

We at COLab think a lot — one could say “obsessively” — about readers, listeners and viewers of local news. We think about people we know and whom we can picture in our minds: those voracious clickers, hopping from local news site to site, the inquiring minds behind the wheel, the never-miss-an-edition watchers of the nightly news.

The dramatic transformation from journalists on the job into witnesses for the police in a broad-daylight fatal shooting at a downtown Denver protest took only moments. But that’s what happened last weekend when employees for two local news outlets with the largest online audiences in Colorado found themselves at the center of a deadly news story.

Colorado’s Democratic U.S. senator, Michael Bennet, this week introduced legislation that, if passed, would examine ways in which the federal government might try to help fix our country’s bottomed-out local news business model. By now, readers of this newsletter should not need a disaster reel refresher about why some might...

This Q&A for Colorado voters will be updated weekly. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3, but registered voters in Colorado will receive mail-in ballots after Oct. 9. With national concern about the veracity of mail-in ballots, Colorado has become a focal point. Colorado began statewide vote by mail in 2013, although some counties used it before that.

The president’s tweets are creating questions about mail-in ballots and the Postal Service even in states with established systems. More than 1.6 million Coloradans turned out for the June primary two months ago. Fewer than 11,000 voted in person at polling places, where coronavirus precautions were in place. Instead, voters...

Boulder Beat has asked a judge to decide whether a Boulder City Council member’s personal email exchanges with two nonprofits are public records subject to disclosure under the Colorado Open Records Act. In a lawsuit filed last week in Boulder County District Court, the online news organization alleges that the...

Pulp newsmagazine, as we know it, could be no more. Publisher John Rodriguez, who runs the monthly print magazine that transitioned to digital-only during the pandemic, has taken a job doing communications about COVID-19 for the City of Pueblo, which he starts Monday. Now he’s trying to figure out what...

NOVI, Mich. (AP) — Dwight Hicks left New Jersey as a teenager, seeking to take a step toward his NFL dreams by playing football at the University of Michigan. Hicks was willing to do whatever it took to compete in the 1970s and says the price paid included being sexually assaulted by the late Dr. Robert Anderson during examinations.

Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired. “I think of myself some days as a critic. Some days I think of myself as a journalist. But I essentially mostly think of myself as an essayist, somebody who is trying to bridge those two traditions. My approach to writing now is kind of simple…I’m always writing about things I like and want to hear about.”

Tina and I have spent much of the last month knee-deep in documents for a difficult investigative project we’re still piecing together. So instead of a newsy newsletter, I offer a more personal one about a song I’ve been listening to lately and thoughts on where it takes me as I’m feeling restless, like many of you.

To mask or not to mask. For some Coloradans in the news business, that’s not even a question. From a recent news-behind-the-news item produced by Denver CBS4’s news director Tim Wieland:. Here at CBS4, we’ve been wearing face coverings for the last four months. As “Captain Party Pooper,” I had...