 Good afternoon. Happy Sunday. Welcome to the Longmont Museum. We're a center of for culture in northern Colorado where people of all ages explore history, experience art, and discover new ideas through dynamic programs, exhibitions, and events. My name is Justin Beach. I'm the manager of the Stuart Auditorium and I curate public programs for the museum. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for spending this lovely Sunday afternoon with us. I'd like to thank a few people who make our programs possible before we get going here. The Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Stuart Family Foundation, the Friends of the Longmont Museum, our many museum donors, and of course our museum members. Any members with us this afternoon? Hey members. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thank you for your support. We simply can't do all that we do without you. Tonight's program is being offered in partnership with Longmont Public Media and the host of their back story series, City Councilman here in Longmont, Tim Waters. It's the first of a two-part series. The next one is scheduled for October 30th, and it'll be on the local scene, so you won't want to miss that. Without further ado, let me introduce to you Tim Waters, the host of the back story and our panel. Welcome everyone. Welcome to this panel, who will introduce more formally in just a moment. So this is this is an episode of the back story. So I'm just going to assume that we have, that we're going, we're live-streamed and there's a camera right up there, so I'm just going to say to you and whoever might be watching, welcome to the back story. I'm Tim Waters and a volunteer from Longmont Public Media, and as the host of the back story, I have the good fortune of interviewing people like this. Outstanding individuals in their fields and the experiences they bring in today. Our topic is the back story on journalism, news and accountability in Longmont, and I can't imagine a better panel than this one to share this story. So to my right is Dana Caulfield, former editor at the Denver Post, but more importantly right now, one of the co-founders of the Colorado Sun, Maria Karygiannis, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Boston Globe and has a whole collection of experiences she's going to share. Melissa Davis, former journalist and director of the Colorado Media Project. She's employed by the Gates Family Foundation, and this is a part of their mission, and Chuck Plunkett, who was the editorial page editor of the Denver Post. And these two have a story they're going to share about that time and how they reacted out with some decisions that were made by their owners, I guess, at that time. Chuck now is part of the University of Colorado faculty, working with journalism majors as part of their capstone experience and getting them ready to go out in the world. So I want to say for you and for me, I am mindful that there aren't very many occasions where a group like this comes together in the same place at the same time to tell the story that we're going to tell this afternoon. So I am deeply grateful to you all for making time on your calendar. I appreciate those of you who would have given up part of your Sunday afternoon to come and listen to this story. I just think it's one of the most important critical stories unfolding right now in America. And if there was ever a time in the last 30 days or three weeks before an election, if there was ever a better time to focus on the role of news media and what we can or can't do with what we're hearing and reading, this is the time. So thanks to the panelists. Thanks to our guests. We're going to get right into this. By the way, you've all, I think, been told that if you have questions, as this unfolds, there were postcards or note cards and pens. If you have questions that you'd like to address to any of these panelists, write them down. We have folks out there picking up the notes and we'll have a chance to invite you to be part of this interview, unless I'm going to start with you. You were a journalist. You've made this transition to what you're doing now. And I'd like this whole story to unfold around kind of where are we? What's the landscape? And I'm going to ask the other panelists to build on what we hear from you. And from where we are now to where we were, how we got to where we are and where we're headed in the future. Those are the kind of four chunks of this conversation. Get us started with. What's the landscape out there now? Great question. And thanks for having us, Tim. This is such an important question. And I know we're all really happy to be here. And thanks to all of you for coming. So the landscape out there is challenged. I want to kind of zero in on local media. I think we hear when we think of journalism and media. At times we're thinking about national media and cable TV and talking heads and whatnot. But I work for Gates Family Foundation. We're a place-based foundation based in Denver. And we really care about the state and the ability of people in the state to make good decisions and kind of chart a future that includes more prosperity for all of us and whatnot. So we are focused on local news and the challenges that it's had over the past decade, two decades or more. Back when I was a journalist, it was kind of the beginning of the internet in the late 90s, early 2000s. I was talking in the green room about this, but since that time, I'm sure you all have noticed that there's just, and maybe you haven't, because I think with the rise of the internet, people tend to think that there's an inundation of news. It's like we're constant barrage of, in our feed, thinking about these things. But local news has really been disappearing and it's been kind of a quiet disappearance for many people in places until recently here in Colorado. So in Colorado, the number of the newspapers have just about one in five newspapers has closed in the last 20 years or so. We've done some research through the Colorado media project to kind of quantify what's been happening. The number of journalists has about been cut in half. So if you think about journalists, local news reporters being the people that we as members of the public kind of rely on to go sit in those city council meetings and those school board meetings so that we don't have to. And we can kind of read about it in the paper and learn what happened the next day and still continue to stay up on public affairs. So just the quantity of the amount of local news has severely declined. And then meanwhile the business, and the reason behind that is that the business of local news, just the business model has just kind of cratered. They're typically, in the past, local news was subsidized really by local advertising. About 70, up to 70 to 80% of that has gone online to Facebook, Google, cars.com, Craigslist, you know, all the places that we now go online to find things. So the business model has cratered. That's why journalists have been, you know, the newsrooms have got shrunk. And now we're left with a very emaciated local news force. I don't want to, I'll pause there because we've got a lot of folks on the panel who have been a part of this arc. But I do want to say before I close this initial piece is just that there is hope. There's a lot of really, it's kind of like where maybe I hope at the bottom. There's a lot of promise and innovation, especially in Colorado. You have some really interesting innovations going on here. And Colorado is really, there's a lot of focus across the nation on what's going on in Colorado, both because of digital news like Dana and the Sun and her colleagues at the Sun. And then also just a lot of collaboration after Chuck, which you're going to hear the story in a minute, sounded the alarm with his colleagues at the Denver Post. I think a lot of people outside of the field of journalism woke up and kind of realized that this is an issue that we all should care about because journalism is a foundation piece for us to engage in democracy. So. So other panelists want to build on what Melissa's begun to lay out. Well, we just came through another cycle of really great research done by the Colorado Media Project talking about whether there's demand for local news coverage. And the good news is that people do still care about what's going on in their communities. And so if there's that appetite, we should take advantage of it. And I want to I think that that's one of the most important things that of your most recent round of research. I was encouraged by that because four years later. Yeah. And I would add to that that the number of students that I'm seeing in journalism classes, while it dropped off as all students enrollment dropped off during the pandemic years is very strong. We have a lot of students and they're very energized. So there are the ranks haven't been demoralized completely. There are still a healthy pool of people coming into the profession or wishing to come into the profession. That's good news. I started only 50 years ago. My first journalism job. So, you know, I've seen a few changes. And we moved from Boston only a year ago. So I've really seen some changes. But I'm very heartened by, you know, meeting Tim first and learning about his podcast and public media and seeing. I happen to actually know the former editor of the Denver Post, who had been the managing editor of the Boston Globe a little bit after I left, but we crossed paths and we remembered each other well. It's interesting for me to really observe all of this because, you know, I was a journalist when news was real. It's never really been real. In fact, when I was a young reporter on the night shift, the old dudes on the copy desk would go, you know, in their Boston accent, if it bleeds, it leads. And that was kind of true. And it's definitely true now. But I did have the privilege of being a young woman journalist at a time when, you know, journalism was different. You know, the Watergate papers were happening. You know, Woodward and Bernstein walked through our newsroom one night. We almost all, you know, got on the floor and bowed. It was very unusual that I was even a girl doing what I was doing. When I finally did get hired at 22, you would go to the women's page. And that was the second part of the newspaper. It literally said women on the top. I know, I didn't make this up. And you'd get to cover debutante coutillians and flower arrangements and, you know, the important things in the world. But I had gone to college. I was a rebel first in my Greek family to go to college. My father used to hit me and say I was too smart and girls didn't go to college. And it was the late 60s. A lot of demonstrations. And I was a rebel. And so it helped me because around the early 70s, I forget the exact year, a federal judge ruled in Boston that they had to integrate the public schools. And there had been massive civil rights demonstrations in the south. But it was like Boston, the cradle of democracy. Well, the worst, riots, bombings, shootings, killings in the white, mostly Irish working class neighborhoods who didn't want to put their kids on a bus and who certainly didn't want black kids on a bus coming into their towns. Anyway, the globe couldn't get enough. There was a contract for the man that said if you feared for your life, you could refuse an assignment. You couldn't get enough reporters. So a couple of us girls said, we'll skip the debutante catillion, send us in. And so for three years, it was like covering a war. But they needed the journalists to tell them what was going on. It was insane. You know, there were men, army people with machine guns on the roof of Southie High School. There were bombing shootings. And even what started happening was because people hated the globe reporting, they started shooting into our building. And we'd have to go out and bomb scares. I mean, it's hard to explain. They'd pull drivers out of the trucks that delivered the newspapers and beat them up if they went into Southie. Anyway, for three years, it was an eye-opener. And we want to pull it, sir. It wasn't just me. It was a team of 30 editors, writers, photographers. And then, and I'll tell this story a little later because I don't want to hog the panel. But the editor called me in and he said, you know, Maria, you're a pretty good reporter. I think I'd like to send you to South Africa to cover apartheid. Which was pretty weird when you were a 26-year-old Greek girl who hadn't been out of the country. And that, I will say for a little later in the presentation. But that was the biggest thwack on the head to make me realize that without real journalism and truth-telling, we're toast. So that's a good segue back to kind of the wrap-up here. I think the first term, first time I heard the term news desert, Melissa was early in one of our conversations. And we hear about food deserts and we hear about childcare deserts. But it was the first time I'd heard about news deserts. So how close are we in the state of Colorado then bring it to Longmont? And what are the implications? This is to all the panelists of the possibility that we become news deserts somewhere in Colorado. Hopefully not in Longmont. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely already news deserts in Colorado. I mean, there's, we actually two weeks from, let me see, I'll find the... Pretty soon. Pretty soon, a couple weeks from today. We're going to be doing a webinar. You can go to the coloradobediaproject.com and sign up for it. But we've actually done a map, like a news map where we partnered with Corey Hutchins at Colorado College and some researchers at University of Denver and looked at each of the 64 counties in the state of Colorado to map the traditional news sources. So newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, digital sites with journalists. And then we also, students from CU also called people in each of those 64 counties and said, where do you get your local news? And found that a lot of people say, you know, there's a Facebook page here in my county. There's a, you know, there's the county itself puts out a newsletter or something. So people are getting their local news from all sorts of places. But in the southwest corner of the state, in eastern Colorado, there are, you know, very few original sources of local news. So when we think about news deserts, you'll be able to look at this map and really see, you know, color coded where the news deserts are. And Penny Abernathy from UNC Chapel Hill and now she's at Medill in Northwestern has some news desert maps for the entire country if you want to check those out. But ours will kind of look at both traditional and non-traditional sources. Well, you, go ahead. Well, I was going to say regarding southeastern Colorado, which I think is one of the places that's most likely to go dry, people are happy to receive their information from official sources and they're getting by and large, you know, here's what's going on in the school district. But when a crisis occurs, you know, cops doing bad things to kids or people who are at risk, people will call us and be like, this thing is going on in X town. And so people are, and that's the scary thing to me because sometimes we have to say like, gosh, we're really too busy to go down there and do an investigation of your really horrible thing that's happening in your community. And this is the Colorado Sun where they're, you know. Correct. And people randomly just calling up and saying these things are going on. So again, going back to what I was saying about your data from this week, that there is immense appetite and necessity for the accountability reporting. Like it's one thing to get your school lunch menus on the local Facebook page, but it's another thing entirely when the entire police force is doing bad stuff to people. Dana has mentioned this very, very recent study from the Colorado Media Project and there's obviously something coming out. How would, if people in this audience or anybody's watching or watches the recording of this would like to learn more about the Colorado Media Project, that's the most recent study. There's a lot on the website. What's the best way for them to get access to that? So you can just go online to ColoradoMediaProject.com and there's a whole section on research. What Dana and you're referring to is just a couple of weeks ago we put out, we did a statewide survey, Corona Insights who's a, you know, a survey, did a representative sample of the entire state to try and find out what Coloradans value most about local news. Who do they trust? Who are they listening to? And one of the pieces of information that I think you're referring to is that Coloradans said the most important purposes of state and local media were number one, to inform residents about emergencies. Number two, to hold leaders accountable. And number three, to inform residents about public affairs. And three out of four residents said that they were doing a good job at the first and the third, but with holding leaders accountable, not even half, just 48% said that the media was doing a good job of that. And I think that's, you know, it's not for lack of trying. It's that going back to the first figure that I gave about just fewer journalists on the beat and really that's their foremost job. And the support for those journalists who are on the beat. The fewer of us, there are the more likely government cops or gets away with it, right? And so if you have a small news organization that doesn't have a powerful lawyer like we can call on in Metro Denver to say, like, give us those cop records, they just go away. Like, I mean, eventually you get worn down and you stop asking. So it's incredibly crucial to remember that there's this demand for the accountability, reporting and figure out ways to support people who are doing that. I'd like to just say, I mean, we were idealistic young journalists who were probably had our head in the clouds, but we really did believe that our job was to speak truth to power. And, you know, after I made it alive out of South Africa, I was in a mortar attack in Rhodesia on Christmas Eve. It's now called Zimbabwe, but oh well. But anyway, I was part, you know, then I was in the guys group. And so Tom Winship, the editor said, Maria, I'd like to send you to, you know, cover the state house. This will be interesting. I forget what year it was, but anyway, there were seven of us in the Globe State House Bureau. Hello? Seven reporters from the Boston Globe. And it was really, you know, me and the guys, of course, but it was fun. Walter Robinson, who we called Robbie, who started the spotlight team, was the editor. And, you know, it was a real masculine, interesting environment. But the part that I remember so much, it was wonderful and I learned so much about government and politics and everything. But the legislature used to do this interesting thing. Often they'd, you know, have a controversial bill and they'd just talk and talk and talk. And most of the other journalists had gone home at three o'clock in the morning because, you know, whatever. And being the junior girl on the dock, I would often get the overnight, oh Maria, you stay here and, you know, sit in the house of reps and, you know, take notes. And I remember, I forget the exact law, but it was a controversial law. And at three or four o'clock in the morning, and I looked around the press section and, you know, let's face it, there weren't too many reporters in there. But the legislature passed it. And they used to do kind of tricky things like that. And at least we could do a front page story on the Globe the next day. And I'm sorry I am blocking on what the legislation was. Let me ask you a question. So you said there are eight, seven people from the Boston Globe alone. But it wasn't just, I mean, Springfield had people in Springfield, right? Oh, there was a huge press room. But the Globe had its own press room with seven of us. But there were 100, you know, well, I don't know about hundreds. But there were journalists from the Worcester Telegram, from the Springfield Union, from the Cape Cod, blah, blah, whatever. I mean, there were lots and lots of journalists. And we used to have that in Colorado too. Chuck used to be the politics editor at the Denver Post. And when you started doing that, I mean, the Times Call had a political reporter who was there every single day. Daily Camera had someone, Greeley. Greeley Tribune. Yeah, I mean. I remember well. And we had like three reporters in City Hall, and we had, you know, I think we even had some in the federal courthouse. And there were three federal courthouses, one in Worcester, which is west of Boston and Springfield, very west. So, I mean, we were covering government. And we did feel, and, you know, there was another saying, power corrupts absolute power, corrupts absolutely. I mean, we were watching the people in power and holding them accountable. Sometimes, you know, the old guys would say, hey, Maria, that guy dropped a dime on, you know, some politician. Well, in the old days, that meant there were something called phone booths. You don't remember this, but there were phone booths, and you put a dime in and dial the rotary phone. And sometimes someone on the staff of someone or another would say, I'm not going to give you my name, but I'm going to tell you something. And what that would mean is, then you would follow up and, you know, chase the story and interview lots of other sources and try to get to the truth. So it was a very different type of environment, but we had a lot of other people on board. Well, the reason I was asking about that contraction is just to sort of quantify for people the difference. Now, like, Longmont doesn't have a State House Bureau reporter. Boulder does not. I know Greeley doesn't, I think because that probably has one or two people. Not sure. And then the Denver Post has three, we have three, and then everybody else is kind of part-time. You know, and so how are the, how are you all, as consumers of news, able to understand what your state, your elected officials in the state are doing and are they actually doing the bidding of you who have elected them? It's kind of hard to tell at this point because we're writing on a very global, you know, here's what it looks like statewide and we do that intentionally, but is that perspective missing? You know, there are a number, I've shared with the panel and I'll share with you. There were a number of things that inspired this program. We've been working on it for 10 months to try to get you all together and date in the museum. Part of it was from what I've learned from Melissa. Part of it was listening to Maria and her story and the day after I heard a presentation from Maria magically, somebody sent me Chuck's TED Talk. And it's like, you know what, this story, we need to amplify this story. And part of all of that for me, I'm doing this as a volunteer, but folks here, you know, I think Justin introduced me or commented on me or about me as a city council member. So as an elected official, part of the inspiration was concerns about the accountability and the scrutiny that I received or any of the elected officials in Loma and the public institutions. There are times where I just cringe thinking, I wish we had more attention here to what's going on. We owe it to the public for the public to be better informed. And you're a good guy and you think that... No, no, it's a different thing. Like you appreciated the scrutiny that you got when you were working as a superintendent of schools really as painful as it might have been. It was important, extremely painful. You know, I have a buddy who runs Northern Water who was like, oh, you guys, you've got to be harder on us. And I was like, wait, what? You know, because it brings out new solutions. And before what happened to us at the Denver Post happened when they announced that we were going to have to cut our newsroom by 30%, somebody heard somebody saying in the State House, great, we'll be able to get away with so much more now. Well, pick it up from there. And after that half, after the Denver rebellion... I want you to talk about the different ones. We'll do that here pretty quick. After the Denver rebellion, I remember talking to someone who was an operative in politics in Denver. And so this is like a few months after the formation of the... Well, after all that went down with the Denver rebellion. And there was excitement and enthusiasm about the fact that the Colorado Sun was starting up and all that. And there are many good stories that are happening at the local level. But still, I mean, we do have news deserts popping up all around. And we have great big blighted areas that, you know, they might not be full-on deserts, but it's pretty sparse. It's pretty bleak out there. And this operative saying the number of Freedom or Colorado Open Records Act requests that we're getting. And those are files that anybody can submit. But it's the mainstay of newsrooms. Journalists turning in requests to look at certain communications between council members or spending on a particular measure that's about to go for a vote or an analysis of a policy that if enacted what it would cause versus what it would deliver. All the kinds of like machinations behind the scenes of government that traditional journalists would... that we rely on to do good reporting. And that number had dropped way off. And when you would hear people say things in power, saying, well, good, now we don't have to worry about scrutiny so much. And you start to see that happen. And I would remember being with other journalists and a story would break through a lawsuit into the oil and gas industry, for example. And we would be like, oh, wow, how did we miss that? Why did it take a lawsuit before Colorado media discovered that this was even a thing? And it's because of the lack of journalists that we have, the blighted areas and the full-on news. Well, and then the normalization of not giving up the records. Like people are not asking for records in my town. And so I happen to live with somebody who's like a chronic open records requester. And they are our records. The city is doing the bidding of the people. You know, they are our records. And routinely the city council, or the people in charge, the custodian of the records or what it's called, are saying, though you don't have a right to those, which is wrong. Or they're charging extraordinary amounts of money for access to the records. And so that's another thing that we're working on. Another great outfit to get information from is the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. And that's one of the things that we're working on right now is to get rid of the weaponization of the fees that they're allowed to charge to keep us from access to the records that belong to the people. So two quick examples, if I might. When I first started, well, I want to go back to around 2010 era, around in there, when I was on the politics desk and a mayoral election would come rolling along, right? I guess it was the run-up to 2011. And we were doing profiles of the candidates. Denver has an off-year mayoral election that's held in the spring. So Hickenlooper was stepping down and there were a host of candidates trying to take over that position. And so we're trying to look at all of the candidates, not just the front-runners, but all of the candidates in an appreciable way. And we wouldn't just do one profile of a candidate. And we would do a few profiles. So you might have, like, the overall story of someone and the overall arc of their life. But then you would have one or two stories that looked at very specific components of politicians' rise. Whether it was something controversial about the person's past or whether it was something that was eye-opening or revealing that the person has become sort of known for, but not really well understood. The point being that if you were trying to figure out who to vote for in this pivotal election in the city and county of Denver, if you went to the Denver Post, you had a wealth of information to consult. And that was a mayoral race. We had probably 15 reporters working on all the stuff, all the profiles in the back story and then the fun before you even got to the horse race. And on that same, just a few years forward, to my second example, when I was the politics editor, I thought it was extremely important to have debates in an election season so that we didn't just go to the rallies and listen to the politicians with the balloons and the hay bales and the cotton candy and so forth. We had substance. We had debates. And we would spend a lot of time with the politics team trying to craft really piercing questions, hard-hitting questions, follow-up questions, questions that we were determined to try to get serious answers on important issues that should matter to voters and to taxpayers in the state. Because we were a big paper back then, because we had clout, because politicians knew that we were covering this kind of stuff in that kind of depth, if we called up and said, hey, we're scheduling a debate in your race and here are the dates, it wasn't, no, I'm not going to do that. It was, yeah, I can be there for anyone of those you want. I'll be there, right? Not because they wanted to come answer our pesky questions, but because they knew they had to and they didn't want to be embarrassed to say that they weren't prepared to debate. Spin that forward to where we are right now. We have a governor's race coming up, and what is it, two debates that we're going to have? Two. In the past, a public statewide debate moderated by a serious journalist, you would have multiple before it was over. And so, if you start to think about how we're only following the horse race and we're not even digging in very deep when we're doing the horse race, and you start to think about our politics and how they differ from only five or 10 years, well, for 10 years ago, with the level of substance and seriousness that's involved in the kind of ideas that are being tossed around, what the blighted news environment and what the news deserts of the world have done to our public policy and to our public debate. So, let's just pick it up from there. Talk about, you two were colleagues in the Denver Post when, I don't know if you would think of it as the good old days of the glory days. Some of the best years of my life. But talk about where we've come from in terms of, at least your experiences, in terms of journalism, news and accountability with that Denver Post experience and the rebellion. How does it impact the dimensions of the Denver Rebellion and why? Either one of you, you were both there. I'm more responsive to it, so why don't you... So, the story of the Denver Rebellion that I like to tell quickly is when I first came to Colorado, it was in the real powerhouse days of the Denver Post and just Denver journalism also had the Rocky Mountain News and fierce competitors which is also... Wouldn't it be great if we were still having that debate that we were, oh, isn't it a shame that we're only going to have a one newspaper town? Because when I first started the Denver Post, it was very much a two newspaper town and we lived and died in our careers by how well we did against one another, right? That's good for readers. It's good for the public. It's a kind of competition and I wish to God that we still had something like that. But we had 280 plus journalists in the Denver Newsroom in the middle of 2003 when I came in. I went to a lot of trouble to get to the Denver Post. I really wanted to live in Colorado for one thing but I really wanted to work for Greg Moore. I wanted to be in the newsroom where Greg Moore was doing stuff because he was such an incredible journalist and it was really hard to get into the Denver Post. You had to have five years' experience at a big paper before they would even consider you. You had to have proven yourself in some way to get in. It was tough and then when you got there it was tough. They didn't spare fools. You had to work really hard and you had just pick a subject that you might be interested in and we were on it. I mean we were all over it. We had an environmental desk with two editors and multiple reporters. Two editors and multiple reporters just to cover the environment. Well it's a big deal out in the Rocky Mountain West and that's 2003 when we talk about climate change was not quite as intense as it is now. And the Rocky Mountain News had the same size desk. Our Washington Bureau to cover the Washington delegation for the Colorado folks had five people. It's its own editor, serious reporters and an editorial assistant in the heart of D.C. in the halls close to the halls of power. The City Hall had multiple reporters same with the Rocky the legislative, same with... just keep picking desks like that and that's what we had. So too long, fast forward. Oh well just my experience with any story. If CU suddenly was in a recruiting scandal a sexual picadillo a tragedy, a travesty with its recruits we would have 25, 30 reporters just working on that one story. If something of consequence happened in a far corner of Colorado a fire or a flood or something like that we sent multiple teams a big team, multiple journalists and you could pretty much count on the fact that if something was going on that mattered we were going to be there but we also were covering committee meetings and council meetings and the kind of school board meetings and stuff like that that just bore smart average people to death that you'd never want to have to put up with but we were staffing them anyway because we knew that's where the gears are turning that's where things are happening that end up becoming policy and end up becoming things of consequence that we ought to be paying attention to. So around after the Rocky was wrapping up and we lost the Rocky ownership shifted and we inherited or we fell to a hedge fund or became owned by a hedge fund the Denver Post is a family of newspapers from coast to coast from LA to Boston by the middle of 2018 which is the time we're talking about I gotta slow down it's 80, 90 something papers that were under Alden's control and they wanted to institute a couple of strategies that at first seemed pretty reasonable we were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for example we were real print heavy in the newsroom a lot of older reporters a lot of older editors very happy with just traditional technology Twitter and Facebook and that kind of thing was uncomfortable for us so the idea was well if you're gonna be in the 21st century as a journalist first century way of doing things you need to learn these kinds of tools and they set up classes and programs and the word pretty much was in the future as we start to scale down which we will do we're gonna have to trim the budget you need to be mindful and if you're not willing to play by the 21st century expectations well it's time for you to leave that made sense to me at first and in fact the size of the newsroom did seem a little cumbersome the first series of cuts and the shift to the training the digital first mindset that we're gonna be online we're gonna be using the tools of the technology that we have and we're gonna use them expertly and better than anybody else all made sense to me and I knew that we should do that even if I wasn't always as good at it as I wished I could have been so the problem was is the cuts kept coming and they didn't make sense anymore when I became the politics editor and we had 2014 rolled around and we had a super competitive election and Colorado was rated by national political experts is not just a swing state but as the swingiest of the swings not because of our our sexual ambitions but because of which way we might go in an election you didn't know if you were gonna be red or blue and so the amount of national money and intelligence and fire power in terms of the political operatives and the political apparatus that would descend on Colorado was enormous and quite a formidable thing to try to cover and already we were starting to see losing positions fiscal year would start to come around 15 people out the door next year another 15 or 20 next year another 15 or 20 so we started to be in a situation where we went from this powerhouse that I'm describing with nearly 300 folks in our newsroom and 200 some in the Rockies all the way down to now we had less than 150 135 125 that kind of thing start the year 2018 which I left ahead too far just a second ago now we're back to 2018 we started to hear in February rumors that more cuts were coming and they were gonna be a lot bigger than we'd seen before we had 100 people at this time 100 journalists covering Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West um we didn't have an environmental desk anymore we didn't have five mountain bureaus with reporters stationed all around the state our Washington bureau had shrunk down to one reporter city hall had one reporter you had those kinds of numbers we weren't covering all those little meetings anymore why are you covering that committee subcommittee meeting on whatever why would you need to think big picture that kind of thing we were getting into the realm of clickbait how can we make sure that people are reading our stories we spent enormous amounts of time learning how to do search engine optimization SEO to make sure that we wrote our headlines in such a way that we were getting maximum number of eyes on the page so instead of caring about strong investigative projects that change state law or state policy or about something like that instead of being jazzed about that anymore we were jazzed about the ten best places to get a hot dog around Coorsfield because they would drive the clicks way up and we thought that we could monetize that so when we heard officially that we were going to pare down to 30 by 30 percent to go from 100 to 70 it was devastating it was absolutely it was the worst thing I've ever seen happen inside a newsroom about the newsroom itself people were crying people were upset and you just had this realization you just knew if we live and die by our brand if what we do that matters depends on the quality and the reputation of our brand we just got kneecapped that brand is not going to ever come back to what it used to be you had those hundred people that were there were working extra hours trying to pretend that we were still 150 how are you going to do that with 70 people all the holes are going to show through all the weaknesses are going to show through all the news that you're not doing a good job is just going to come a Russian right past you and you're going to go chasing after it so when we realized that was going to happen I was on the editorial page then I was a life long that's overstating things but a career later in my career I really wanted to be in editorial department and I really wanted to lead the opinion pages and that's what I was doing in 2018 so a dream job for me and it hadn't been in it that long and that's part of one of the reasons I got so into it is because part of my selfishly my career was disappearing as well as everything else losing a third of the newsroom was going to mean the editorial pages were going to just barely exist at all I like to think that if you have a strong state paper and you're staffing things like you should be if you think about the community and the players in it as having like maybe a dinner and people sitting around and talking when the editorial page from the Denver Post showed up that was someone you listened to and raised a point because we were so plugged in we had that kind of newsroom behind us we had that kind of institutional memory behind us we had that kind of cloud behind us and now that was going to be gutted so we thought well what if we use the cloud that we have on our way out the door and try to send some kind of message and to try to send the message what we did was we worked with several columnist that were familiar to Colorado readers and some journalist to write columns for us about various aspects of the importance of local news why local news mattered for these various reasons the kinds of things that you guys are here to listen to today and we centered those columns around an editorial that was really hard hitting that called out Alden Global Capital and no one's certain terms we called them vulture capitalists and in the lead before the jump we said either send journalism here in Denver or sell us to someone who will we did this in secret we didn't figure Alden was going to let this go through but because they weren't paying that much attention to what we were doing in the newsroom we figured we could probably get away with it and we took these columns and the editorial and we kept them out of the system as long as we could we were shooting for Sunday publication we were going to launch Friday afternoon afternoon so to be digital first we cued it all up and time came and we shot the missiles out into the world and within a very short amount of time it went viral and those stories started pinging all around the internet the editorial started pinging all around the internet and folks all over the globe cared about this story I think a lot of it had to do with journalism I think a lot of it also had to do with people who were just tired of hedge funds and angry watching professions that they had been involved in and loved had been gutted by hedge funds and it also everybody likes the idea of sticking it to the man or throwing your drink in the boss's face and getting away with it and so it had a lot of things going for it but that was that's what became called the Denver Rebellion and it meant to sound an alarm to people like you to people all across the country and across the world that you know what democracy is a great thing and the reason that we have a democracy has everything to do with local news and local journalism and doing the job that we do that we've been talking about the best that we can and that is being gutted and it's being thrown away and it's being shipped up and sold for parts and we read stories about where to get a good hot dog and it's time to do better than that Chuck you've made a couple of references to yay you've made a couple of references to Alden and Alden Capital what are the news rooms or properties that Alden Capital owns in the front range in this town Alden Global Capital is the owner of the Daily Camera the Long What Times call the Greeley Tribune it's like 13 papers it's basically anything in the aftermath you ended up at the university Dana you founded a new new source just talk about the Colorado Sun not the legacy what rose as a result of what happened that sort of whipping up that Chuck managed to do on our behalf got Melissa whipped up to do a lot of research and community coalescing across the state of Colorado and we were like hmm I was one of the chief clickbait officers and I had sort of reached my limit of how many more stories do I have to send my very talented people out on to write about somebody got stabbed in the neck that sort of stuff never happens to me I've never been stabbed in the neck nor have I stabbed anybody in the neck and so I started to be concerned about what the relevance of my work was to the people I was asking to pay tremendous amounts of money to subscribe to so as the rebellion whipped up at the same time there was an organization in New York that had people who had been victimized by an angry hedge fund manager a whole legacy of of journalism and these people had a technology that they wanted to prove as a way to archive and said hey we've got money we'll spend money in Colorado to my colleague Larry Rickman and so Larry assembled their crew 10 of us jumped off the ship and started the Colorado Sun four years ago last month so we did that with the express purpose of trying to do the kind of work that we'd love to do when we were at the Denver Post and write things that help people contextualize what was going on in the state house and not from just the point of view that we felt we had failed by only representing the corner of Colfax and Broadway and downtown Denver and explaining things from the point of view of people who lived in northwest Colorado or southeast Colorado and what was going on and why should it matter to those folks or what was going on in those communities and why should it matter to people in the front range so far so good I have three pages of questions we are still in the first page but we also said this would be about now I should have known we weren't even on TV I'd like to just add to just for if you don't mind I don't mind at all so Chuck and the rest when the Denver Rebellion happened I mean I was sitting at the Gates Family Foundation like I said we're a philanthropic family run family foundation been around for 75 years and so the call to action to the community I mean we took that seriously we looked at what was happening and previously had thought this is a commercially supported industry and they're calling on the community for help like what's going on here I mean I was a journalist but I'd been out of the field for ten years my boss Tom Gougeon as the president of the Gates Family Foundation used to work in the mayor's office Federico Peña who worked on his staff and so another colleague of mine her uncle used to be a publisher of the Denver Post and he started talking to other community members and everyone started thinking which billionaire can buy the Denver Post so everyone started talking about rallying money but then I think what interested us the most was we started thinking is this institution first of all they weren't selling right? Alden Global Capital is a hedge fund they're going to drive unfortunately these brands into the ground and they're taking the money out and investing in other risky businesses they're actually making quite a tidy profit here and they're selling off real estate taking the profit and putting it into other businesses so what is possible here in Colorado and what should we be thinking about the Colorado Sun starting up was super interesting because these digital first kind of really the amount the proportion of funding that they spent that Dana and her colleagues spend on doing journalism and doing accountability journalism is really phenomenal and there are members supported by other kind of business models that this can help us at least force the issue to say how can we just kind of think differently about what's going on so anyway I just wanted to add that that I think it's so important that people that aren't journalists care about this issue it's really a different situation when people like yourselves care because it's not just a bunch of us former journalist and other journalist talking about how great journalism is where it really matters is why is it important to you and I think a lot of people look at the old business model of advertising and eyeballs and clicks and stuff and nobody wants to go back there anymore the Sun has member supported you think of the public media business model and the quality of journalism that we want to sustain is the type that Chuck is talking about that costs money and so I think I just want to leave with the plea that it takes all of us it's not just the subscriptions it's the membership it's the major donors this work is expensive and all that's left after all the other things have been stripped away is this very important accountability journalism that we all have to step up and pay for I'd like to if we have one minute just also say I had a 18 year career at the globe and left when I had two babies because they wanted me to go into war zones and I refused an assignment to fly back to the Philippines with Benino Aquino when we had a six month old baby and he got assassinated on the runway but I had a second career and I started a 501C3 by accident called myself the accidental social entrepreneur called Discovering Justice it was an accident that happened in a new federal courthouse in Boston Steve Breyer was going to the Supreme Court the judges had this vision of justice fighting for justice and democracy and I went nuts and it still exists we raised from nothing to I think when I left around 2010 or eight or something we had a budget of 1.8 million a year and we're getting calls from all over the country to scale it so I sort of also had this idea maybe journalism should become a 501C3 I mean maybe it's a non-profit I just wanted to say one other thing before we leave this is all very exciting for me I'm new here so I didn't know the whole story myself but I just was having these flashbacks to being a young reporter in South Africa people would say Maria there are spies in the newsroom I think oh my god they're so paranoid there were spies in the newsroom and they'd be taping the conversations when you wrote something controversial which was frequently the editor would say Maria leave that down to the special branch and read it and I thought what the hell is a special branch it was like the secret police and I thought they were kidding but they weren't kidding and literally reporters would have to go and read the story in front of the special branch and the special branch would say nope can't run it and the editor Alistair Sparks of the Rand Ailey Mail was the most brave man I remember and what he'd do is he'd run a white space on the front page so it would be like you saw the New York Times of the Wall Street Journal with a big hole in the front and that was saying to people there's something we need to tell you but we can't tell you so we're gonna publish it anyway as a whole so I saw some things in South Africa that were astonishing and the paper was after I left four or five years later was shut down by the government so what you're saying to me really resonates I mean that was a long time ago this is now that was then but to me journalism is necessary a free press to the preservation of democracy and so I'm very grateful to be here actually thank you so we ran out of time a few minutes ago but we haven't finished with the conversation so I'm gonna jump to the bottom line your last two questions there's a number of questions from the audience that all kinda deal with the topic of truth motivating people to be more interested in what's truth and how do you decide what are trustworthy news sources so from the experts how do you decide what are trustworthy news sources well you wanna make sure you've got multiple sources that a story is based on when I first started that was a used to you had to have at least three really good sources before you could publish anything as if you knew it you couldn't just base it on what one person was telling you that was an absolutely forbidden and that has always stayed with me as one of the easiest ways to fact check something so if something looks too good to be true or it's sensational or what not an easy way is to start to click through just look through see who the information is coming from and then run it through your BS detector is that someone that's credible or is that someone that's paid to have that point of view or paid to be saying that I look for numbers and studies and analysis and I look for primary sources not just secondary sources so anytime someone's got a document that's verifiable that's supporting the findings of a story or the accusations that a story is basically making I look at the about pages so if I see that someone an institution or an organization or a non-profit or what have you is voiced in the story I go to the page and I click the about and I read and I go oh yeah that's a partisan operation this isn't some kind of like or okay this is a bipartisan group this is like got lots of smart folks I just try to make sure that I feel like I know where the information is coming from and a lot of the worry goes away and when I see stories that are just overly sensational it's almost always because they only have one or two folks if you think about who they are they're not very good folks and pretty quick you realize it's coming from someone that has an axe to grind anybody want to build one? yeah well that's definitely true don't believe the first source you interview I mean we were we had to prove to our editors that we had especially when they were controversial subjects and particularly with people in power right we learned to as a young reporter there's subjective reality and there's objective reality and we had to be objective now nobody's perfectly objective but we really had to stand back from things and one other thing I meant that I would love to say if we have time I had to learn how to interview people who I violently disagreed with who were not job racist crazy people Boston, Southie during busing there were a few city counselors I remember thinking oh my god but I had to interview them and of course in South Africa for sure and even in politics the guys would say hey Maria you go interview so and so I mean I was a young woman I wasn't a pushover but I would just you can't fight back you have to learn how to listen and I think this is a skill very important to teach our children and grandchildren you're not democracy means that people can have different ideas okay and you have to learn you don't have to but it would be helpful to learn to listen you may not ever agree with them but listen where are they coming from oh interesting how did you come to that conclusion tell me more and you do actually become a more mature person yourself by being able to listen being able to interview people who you just that's democracy freedom of speech as well as the importance of freedom of the press well and I think consumption of information about other people is important too that not don't always seek the confirmation of what you think you already know and it's people are trying to take advantage of that now in the election season with political operatives spinning up sort of fake news organizations so it becomes challenging but it's important for you to read the whole arc of information I hope everyone who hosts a program on public access television or posts on facebook or tiktok or any other social media platform listens to this you're articulating the kind of standards that you yourselves do and still do as journalists and today everybody with a cell phone is a journalist and we need to be very mindful of what we're consuming from them and from other news sources we all have to be real journalists now media literacy the other thing you can do if you're in that camp if you've got a cell phone and you're trying to spread the good word and do it with good standards and ethics is always be transparent when in doubt just be transparent and so if you do have a scoop and you're trying to post it on social media and help raise awareness but it's a little squishy in a certain place you hadn't completely nailed that part of it down just say so just be transparent one of the great things about journalism in my opinion is that we do our work right out in the open we show our work right at we've got nothing hidden nowhere sure we've got stuff that we haven't reported yet that we're still working on sure we've got stuff in our notebooks that isn't isn't completely nailed down so we're not talking about it out loud yet outside the newsroom but when we go public with something when we put it out there and the standard should be even when we just put it out on social media like this is a developing story we still show our work we show you who our sources are we show you how we arrived at our story and how it links up and when we do it on the opinion side we aren't just spouting off what comes to the top of our head it's reported it's a reported opinion that's been researched and considered and we show you how that research came together so that you can say credibly okay you disagree with this story you say something's wrong here's everything we know about it how am I wrong yeah yeah I want to say too that I mean I think that's really something important that journalism is doing more of and in terms of the transparency with how did we how did we come up with this story because I think people one thing that we found in our research was that people know when we asked them you know where do you get your local news that you trust you know it was mainly newspapers and television and radio you know like they didn't say tiktok they didn't say Facebook because they might be getting it through the distribution channels that way but like when it comes to like news that they actually trust it's usually traditional sources that made me feel better made me feel better the arc of people that you surveyed was white it was people in our age group yeah it was a representative sample of the state and oversampling people of color and in communities both and so I mean I really want to commend the post and the sun because you know they have in particular I'm thinking about the sun they have credibility indicators on every single story so they're no longer just assuming that we should know well it's a journalistic story you should just know that it was well reported and all these things you know they're saying like we have multiple sources we did all these you know kind of doing real-time media literacy and I think that is something that you know what my kids are here and you know I think it's now part of the curriculum of the state I think people are really recognizing that media literacy and separating good sources from bad sources or you know non-transparent sources or political sources is really important like the Colorado sun right now on the politics page it has a story about how we're covering the election season and it notes that here are the races that we're covering and we're covering these races because they're competitive and given the fact that we've got a smaller newsroom and we don't have tons and tons of reporters like we'd like to have we've decided to focus on competitive races so then that way people out there are like well how come no one's covering my race well now they know we don't take advantage of that story at any rate that's a great example of transparency just being right out in the open about this is the work that we're doing here's the rationale for how why we're doing it and here's the nuts and bolts and the gears that show you how it all came together so you can fact check it yourself so if I jump past all the other questions I was going to ask the last one would be are you optimistic about the future and why and it sounds to me like part of the reason what's happening with the Colorado Sun what are the other reasons? well and it's not just the Colorado Sun there's a lot of really interesting business models going on right now where independently owned media organizations are finding new ways to be sustainable without selling themselves to a company that's not in the community so my organization facilitated the purchase of a bunch of suburban papers last year to allow the person who had built them up to retire but to keep the newspapers in community hands and focused on their individual communities we've seen the conversion of a newspaper in Crestone into a non-profit you know it's really happening the Longmont leader is a really interesting start up and the Broomfield paper or the publication that's come up after it like things are happening for people and if they who knows if all of them are perfectly sustainable but at least people are trying to make it happen I want to say when we first moved here we needed our wills done and we found a guy in NYWAT before and who does wills I mean he's a lawyer so when he heard about my background he goes hey Marie I'm also managing editor of the left hand courier journal which is a weekly newspaper that's been around for 25 years I want to hire you you know laughed in his face and said no I haven't worked for a weekly in 50 years guess what 10 cents a word but I only yeah but I believe so I mean I'm a nut right but I believe so strongly in local journalism I caved I go to his editorial board meeting once a week and we get free pizza which is really nice and I do one left hand laurel a month which is you know focusing on an important person in the community I love it I met so many interesting people and I really really value his work he's up at Sunday nights till 12 o'clock with his law practice and then he's being the editor of the left hand courier journal so it's important yeah I'll add to I mean just you know I'm hopeful that you know these challenging times are engaging different groups of people to who see a gap to stand up and do something differently and we're seeing all sorts of really creative things next you said at the you know you're having a set part two of the series and one thing that I'm really excited about is the like the League of Women voters up in Larimer County they're gonna come and tell you I'll give you a little preview but you know they have a thing called observer core where they're like you know there aren't new you know they're partnering with the local newspaper and they're sending nonpartisan League of Women trained you know League of Women voters people you know to just go and take notes and then to share those you know with the reporters from the you know who care about democracy can play a part it's not gonna solve you know they're not gonna be the investigative reporters but it can free some of those reporters up from sitting there for four hours at a public meeting perhaps you know so there's things that it's things like that and Chuck you know Chuck is now at the university and you know there's a lot of really great talent in the faculty now because of a lot of the journalists have moved to higher ed but you know like there's a lot of really neat things going on with universities and kind of how they're stepping up to fill some local news gaps so I'm hopeful in some of those creative ways to democratize the work of journalism and to make us all think a little bit more critically about what's going on. So democracy is a great idea and we have a lot of smart people in the world and it's like I said earlier I have a lot of students and they're energized and they're excited and I'm guessing that's happening at other departments not just at CU Boulder when I first started in journalism or in my career I wanted to be a creative writer I wanted to write fiction and that kind of thing and so I knew it was a lot of application it was something that I loved and making money was going to be a struggle but I was willing to put up with that that's kind of like where I see a lot of the journalism students right now is that they do it because they love it and they care and they're very passionate about it and they're willing to put up with less opportunity and less money on the front end than you know when I was their age so democracy is a great idea in the ranks we're going to train them with the traditional standards and practices and ethics and something will happen it's always hard to tell the truth it's always hard to do good journalism instead of crappy journalism it's always hard to matter in your community there's always a lot of noise there's always a lot of people who don't want the truth to come out fighting back so we've managed to get through it before we've managed to make it all the way to here yes we're dealing with some really devastating tricky spooky situations but I like to be optimistic I still think it's worth trying I'm mindful that I'll never have the opportunity I suspect to interview this panel or a panel like this for the rest of my life this is such an honor this is such a gift to this community that you've given this afternoon so I want to thank you on behalf of the entire community the second half of this two-part series is on October 30th if anybody's interested we will have Biff Warren as part of that panel the League of Women Voters have agreed to be here and share kind of the protocols for the training and how we might get involved Macy May from the Longmont leader and I saw a question about the leader the leader is not owned by Hedge Fund it's a non-profit Serge E. Angios who is the Executive Director of Longmont Public Media I'm casting this and hopefully Sylvia Solis who is a former reporter for the Longmont leader but she's I think on sabatic right now hopefully we can... she's having a baby she's being a mom and Greg Moore had agreed to be part of this before Greg's name but he had a conflict so I'm pretty certain that the people in this audience are as grateful as I am so why don't we thank them for a remarkable job so if that's the camera up there I'm going to say Longmonters that's the first half of your back story on journalism news and accountability in Longmont so long from now we'll see you on October 30th Did you write the... Did you apologize to Chris? Wait what? I should have said to get it right