This story appeared on Corey Hutchins’ Substack site on February 14, 2025.
Multimedia reporter Chase McCleary at Rocky Mountain PBS has fashioned something of a niche beat for himself over the past year or so.
“Much of Chase’s reporting focuses on small-town Colorado and the communities that make them special, including sports, arts and culture, and local media,” reads his bio at the RMPBS site.
Indeed, he has trained his video lens on local media with deep dives into how the local news landscape is changing in parts of Colorado.
In March, McCleary reported how a Palmer High School teacher in Colorado Springs is teaching media fluency in his social studies classes through “lateral reading” and other techniques.
Over the summer, he produced an in-depth story titled “Bought-out, priced out, burned out: the individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado.”
He followed that up in January with a story headlined “Reposting vs. reporting: How Facebook groups are replacing shuttered rural newsrooms.”
This week, McCleary trained his focus on three Coloradans who might not have a background in journalism but run or work for local newspapers.
Titled “Rising to the role of local reporter,” the story profiles Lyn Ettinger-Harwell, publisher of the nonprofit Pikes Peak Bulletin, U.S. Army veteran T’Naus Nieto, who is a reporter with The Chronicle-News in Trinidad, and Ruth Stodghill, an English teacher at the Primero Junior and Senior High School in Southern Colorado who writes for Trinidad’s Chronicle-News and the regional World Journal based in Walsenburg.
From the story:
Nieto, Ettinger-Harwell and Stodghill are a few of the many small-town Colorado community members who have stepped up to fill the role of local journalist in a time when newspaper jobs are simultaneously becoming harder to fill and harder to find. …
Small-town staff shortages, matched with increasing operational expenses and decreasing advertising revenue, are leading to shuttered small newsrooms across the state and across the country.
Yet in some localities, passionate, community-connected citizens are putting on their press vests to meet the need.
Some nuggets from the piece:
“While a number of institutions and universities offer programs aimed at cultivating future journalists, conditions like low pay, limited and difficult-to-land job opportunities and working in sometimes dangerous environments drive many potential journalists in different career paths. This simultaneous decrease in available positions and decrease in job favorability makes finding journalists willing to take the reins more difficult, particularly in more rural and sparsely-populated areas.”
“While Nieto’s favorite subjects are lighter feature stories, like this one on Trinidad’s ‘plant whisperer,’ he recognizes the personal nuances that can make local reporting more difficult. ‘While I was in La Junta, I reported on a crime from an old friend in high school… that was hard. I got a lot of negative feedback from friends and their friends, and I had to live with that,’ said Nieto.”
“Starting with her daughter, Stodghill piloted a program at Primero that connects students with the local paper, teaching them what it means to report in their community. Today, Stodghill’s ‘newspaper kids’ are actively contributing original work to papers like The World Journal.”
Find the whole in-depth story here.
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.