This story is excerpted from a longer summary, by journalist Corey Hutchins, of changes in Colorado’s media landscape during 2021. You can read the entire article here.
If 2020 was a bruiser for the local media business with layoffs, furloughs, and deep cuts from COVID-19 thinning our news scene, 2021 ushered in a kind of “new normal.”
The local media industry tentatively bounced back along with returning ad revenue, and the year produced a bumper crop of digital news startups from Boulder and Denver, Broomfield and Franktown, to Pueblo and the San Luis Valley. Colorado once again became a groundbreaker in the battle to help save local news — this time with a unique, first-in-the-nation effort to keep a string of Denver-area newspapers locally owned and thriving. Elsewhere, ownership changes affected roughly 20 other Colorado news organizations from ski towns to Trinidad.
In Loveland, a successful union drive brought collective bargaining rights to a Colorado newspaper for the first time since the 1940s. And a collaborative spirit among formerly competing journalists that had sprouted in 2020 established firm roots in the past 12 months all over the state. The Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab, swelled to include more than 250 journalists from more than 160 newsrooms by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion in Colorado newsrooms was top of mind for media reformers and some members of the press. Journalists of color pushed news organizations to do and be better — and they had an impact.
Some things didn’t change.
The blood-sucking vampire hedge-fund owner that notoriously gutted The Denver Post sunk its fangs into more newspapers nationwide. Some local outlets trying to build trust with their audiences still couldn’t wean themselves off unseemly sponsored content. And as long as the month of April appears on a calendar, a publisher somewhere will make a fool of himself…
In December, the West Virginia company Ogden Newspapers announced it would buy the Nevada-based Swift Communications newspaper chain that runs about a dozen papers in Colorado, including Vail Daily. At the same time, Vail Resorts bought a ski area from the West Virginia businessman who runs Ogden.
Meanwhile, CherryRoad Media, “founded less than a year ago” as a subsidiary of a “New Jersey-based technology company” bought The La Junta Tribune, The Fowler Tribune, The Bent County Democrat, Ag Journal, and The Trinidad Chronicle-News. The former owners of the Trinidad paper were locals.
Colorado Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter co-sponsored a resolution “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives regarding the importance of local print and digital journalism to the continued welfare, transparency, and prosperity of government at every level and the continuation and freedom of the United States as it is known today.”
Colorado earned a pair of mentions in Harvard’s annual Nieman Lab predictions about the near-future of journalism. One of them, about fundraising campaigns for local newsrooms, noted how “regional matching campaigns and collaboratives have taken off in Colorado.” Another prediction name-checked The Colorado Sun among “the next generation of local news organizations.”
The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition rounded up what happened this year on the transparency and open-government beat.
Gazette editor Vince Bzdek wrote a column about how the pandemic is “taking a toll on journalists.”
When a wind-whipped suburban grassfire quickly transformed into a monster firestorm that torched roughly 1,000 homes in Boulder County, local journalists and meteorologists were quick to explain how climate change helped create the conditions for it to become the most destructive fire in state history. A KUSA 9news ‘Next’ fundraising campaign hauled in $1 million in a single day to help those affected.
As 2021 came to a close, Netflix said “Don’t Look Up,” a star-studded comedy co-created by Denver journalist David Sirota and Denver native Adam McKay, was the streaming service’s most-watched release over the Christmas holiday. Writing about it in The New York Times, Ben Smith said the film “nails” our “media apocalypse.”
Corey Hutchins is co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute, reports on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and is a journalist for multiple news outlets. Subscribe to his Inside the News newsletter, here.