In 2019, The Salt Lake Tribune made big news when it became the first large metro newspaper to convert to a community-supported nonprofit ownership model.
Since then, the Utah paper has laid out a playbook for others to emulate as the traditional advertising-based business model for newspapers continues to crumble.
In Colorado, one newspaper has taken a cue — though on a much smaller scale. After more than three decades in operation, The Crestone Eagle, a monthly print paper in rural Saguache County, is set to transition to a nonprofit at the beginning of September.
As the paper’s longtime leader, Kizzen Laki, was looking to retire, a group of locals banded together to form a group called Crestone Eagle Community Media (CECM), raised money, rallied the community, and wrangled support to sustain the paper as an independent news organization.
Laki was a former Crestone mayor who also sat on the town council while serving as the local newspaper’s editor and publisher. This month, the Eagle welcomed John Waters as its next editor and is preparing for a “new era” as a nonprofit newsroom.
From a recent column by CECM member Peter Anderson:
In an era when many local papers have disappeared due to dwindling audiences and revenues, sustaining the Eagle will be a formidable challenge. The Eagle, however, enjoys great community support, as indicated by the many contributors to its successful capital campaign in December of 2021. In its efforts to transition the Eagle into a nonprofit news organization CECM has had support from Saguache County Commissioners, the Colorado Media [Project], and Colorado College, whose journalism students will periodically join the Eagle staff as interns.
Nonprofit status will allow the Eagle to solicit funding from grants and donations to beef up its website, enhance its coverage, and become more financially sustainable, the paper reported in a December 2019 edition announcing its plans.
As it transitions, Jennifer Eytcheson, currently the Eagle’s advertising manager, will become the paper’s general manager where she’ll oversee operations, production, HR, intern program management, and “special projects to increase readership, news reach and revenue,” the paper reported.
In December, the Eagle was one of two dozen local news outlets in Colorado to take part in the Colorado Media Project’s #NewsCOneeds year-end matching grant challenge. That “gave us an opportunity to reach out to our small community and tell the story of this big shift in the paper’s foundation,” Eytcheson said about the fundraising campaign.
Colorado College’s Journalism Institute has been a partner along the way.
For a class called “The Future and Sustainability of Local News,” students in the fall traveled to Crestone and stayed at the college’s Baca campus nearby. While there, they met with Eagle staff along with members of the CECM group and other area journalists, read archives of older area newspapers at the local museum, interviewed residents about where they get their local news and information, and spoke with a county public official about the efficacy of a potential sales tax grant to support local journalism.
The experience also led to a new CC internship program.
Marge Hoglin, a former journalist and entrepreneur who helped lead the transition on behalf of Crestone Eagle Community Media, told this newsletter last year how the Eagle’s circulation area near the Great Sand Dunes National Park has been changing. Economic development projects are in the works, she said, and money is coming into the region that has a diverse population. Growth is going to happen, she added, but the area could use some more robust news coverage.
“There are so many new ideas to explore,” Eytcheson said in the latest Eagle column about the paper’s succession plan.
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.