At a time when local journalism and fact-based news has never been more important across this region, state and nation, news organizations in Colorado are shuttering. That this includes both their print distribution, and their news reporting organizations is concerning.
As reported by Corey Hutchins, who chronicles the goings-on across Colorado for the Colorado Press organizations, the collapse of local news organizations is continuing. Near the end of July, three print newspapers on the Eastern Plains — located in Baca County, Kit Carson County, and Prowers County — called it quits. The three newspapers with two different owners were all on Colorado’s Eastern Plains — the Plainsman Herald, the Burlington Record, and the Lamar Ledger. They announced within days of each other that they would go out of business.
By early August, two more announced they are ceasing print runs: the Fort Morgan Times and the Brush News-Tribune, both located in Morgan County.
Both of them are financially controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund, which according to Hutchins, “is known for buying and gutting local newspapers”. Morgan County has a population of about 13,000 just northeast of Adams County, about an hour and a half from Denver.
These developments leave a swath of Colorado’s eastern plains without a news source, creating what could be the state’s first real news desert. The development highlights this fact: print newspapers are a distribution method, and an old technology at that.
Throughout history, the distribution of news and information has moved with the times. After the monestsry scribes, and the town crier, and the printing press, and the broad sheets, came the telegraph, then AM radio, than FM radio, network television, cable and satellite TV, and then the Internet. Now digital streaming services and podcasting are shaking things up again.
Yes, print newspapers until recently, have often been the most cost efficient way to share local news and information, especially in rural areas. But printing presses, as honorable as this profession is, are in decline across the state. When the Pueblo Chieftain announced that it was shuttering its printing operations in August, 2023, it threw dozens of Colorado and Nebraska print news organizations into crisis.
The fact is, the rise of digital technology has changed the news cycle, speeding it up so that publishing real time and daily as Ark Valley Voice has always done, can often not seem fast enough. Spotting this distribution trend years ago, AVV launched as a news gathering organization distributing digitally. As a digital news organization we know that more than 60 percent of our readers read us on their mobile phones and that number continues to grow.
The fact that not just the print publications but the news-gathering operations themselves are being shuttered across these entities is something else, perhaps indicating a tipping point of more than one reality.
People need information to make decisions about their lives, to understand what their local governments are doing and to decide when, or if, to make their own voices heard.
Making local news freely available in a community of hard-working residents (many holding multiple jobs to make ends meet) would seem to be a public benefit. An informed community is a (“small d”) democratic population. Stripping a community of its local news-gathering operation is a curious way to serve the public benefit, which raises the question — why do it?
Over the past couple of years, Hutchins and the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab) of which Ark Valley Voice is a part, developed the Colorado News Mapping Project. It shows where people say they get their news and information in all 64 counties of the state. When you follow the link above and click on Chaffee County, you’ll see something interesting.
It lists a total of 10 news sources for Chaffee County (six radio stations, two print newspapers, one magazine which appears now to be owned by a publisher in Custer County, and one online/digital news source — AVV). When you scroll down the page, to check the county reach of these news-producing medias – Ark Valley Voice is at the top of the list. The reach number is frankly lower than our recent stats and in all honesty, the local radio stations don’t report their reach at all.
What we’re explaining to readers is that over time, distribution methods change — and they will continue to change. But the journalistic process of gathering news, demanding transparency from our government, getting to the bottom of strange or threatening situations, asking tough questions, reporting the facts — seeking truth and reporting it — this does not change, nor do professional journalistic standards of ethics.
But here is where citizens need to become careful consumers of information. Talking head pod-casters and blogasphere pundits, social media rumors and purposefully-placed disinformation is not real news. It is opinion, innuendo and purposeful marketing of a point of view, not the truth. The highest and primary obligation of journalism is to serve the public, giving truth — a voice.
Editor’s note: In order for this digital distribution transformation to continue – rural areas need basic, reliable broadband — which frankly – – we do not yet have in section of Chaffee County, let alone the eastern plains. We’re not talking 5G upgrades to neighborhoods that already have broadband — we’re talking basic broadband. Not to focus on connecting the entire county to broadband is to deny information to a segment of the population that desperately needs good information and 21st century technology.
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Publish date : 2024-08-13 10:30:00
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