1,616 stories later: Local journalism matters in the Estes Valley

When the first two stories of what would become the Estes Valley Voice quietly appeared in a beta format on  May 28, 2024, there was no certainty that the experiment would succeed.

There was only a belief that the Estes Valley deserved something increasingly rare in America today: a local newsroom dedicated to telling the stories of its own community.

We published six more stories in a beta format before our digital newsroom went live on June 28.

Two years later, that experiment has grown into 1,616 original, journalist-written stories documenting the people, organizations, businesses, nonprofits, schools, public lands, local governments, celebrations, tragedies, debates, elections, accomplishments, challenges, and everyday moments that define life in the Estes Valley.

Each story represents far more than words on a screen. Each story required showing up.

We’ve shown up to cover board meetings that stretched late into the evening and started early in the morning.

We’ve shown up at wildfires and festivals, at ribbon cuttings, memorial services, school bonfires, community fundraisers, government meetings, and nonprofit events.  

And we’ve shown up to ask difficult questions and hold public officials’ feet to the fire when they would have preferred silence.

Local journalism cannot be done from afar, and it can’t be done by publishing press releases. That is not journalism.

There is an old saying that all politics is local. The same can be said about journalism.

The Estes Valley Voice was founded by two women on the belief that the everyday lives of local residents deserve the same careful reporting and professional journalism afforded to much larger cities.

That means treating a hospital or school board meeting with the same seriousness as a state house or congressional hearing, because the decisions made in local boardrooms affect the children, families, taxpayers, and future of this community.

It means understanding that the closure of a neighborhood business or the opening of a new one, a wildfire mitigation project, a housing, childcare, or transportation study, or the retirement of a longtime volunteer all become part of the permanent historical record of the Estes Valley.

Those stories matter because the people who live them matter.

Communities without local journalism lose accountability. They lose shared history. They lose a common understanding of what is happening around them. Over the past two decades, 40% of America’s local newspapers have vanished. Many others have been acquired by hedge funds that sell off the real estate, shrink the staff down to bare bones, and turn the paper into a ghost of its former self.

The economic realities facing journalism are real. Traditional newspapers continue to battle rising costs for paper, printing, ink, and distribution, while advertising revenue has steadily declined. Digital journalism presents its own challenges, requiring constant adaptation to changing technology, evolving search algorithms, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and new audience expectations.

Running a newsroom today also means running a small business. It has meant learning lessons that journalism schools don’t teach, such as how to be a publisher, how to build sustainable revenue, how to earn community trust one story at a time, how to listen carefully when readers disagree, how to be transparent about editorial decisions, and how to acknowledge mistakes, correct them, and continue moving forward.

Perhaps most importantly, it has reinforced that accountability is not something journalists demand only from the government. It begins with ourselves.

Journalism asks public officials to explain their decisions. News organizations must be equally willing to explain their own. Transparency, fairness, accuracy, and independence are not slogans. They are daily disciplines honed over time between mistakes and successes. We recently faced a very difficult editorial decision about an article we published.

The Estes Valley Voice has tried to build those principles into every aspect of our work—not because journalism is perfect, but because public trust must be earned story by story.

The spreadsheet that catalogs our first 1,616 stories is, in many ways, simply a database.

But behind every row is a conversation, a photograph, an interview, a meeting, a late-night editing session, a public records request, or a phone call returned. Together, those stories form something much larger than a news archive. They form a living history of the Estes Valley.

And while 1,616 stories is a milestone worth celebrating, it is not the destination.

There are still board meetings to attend, businesses to profile, elections to cover, budgets to scrutinize, nonprofits to highlight, volunteers to recognize, difficult questions to ask, and neighbors whose stories have not yet been told.

Communities are never finished writing their history. Neither are the journalists who document those stories. And as a small newsroom, we know there are stories we will miss due to our bandwidth.

Our aspiration is both simple and ambitious: to continue building a newsroom that serves this community with independence, curiosity, fairness, and compassion; to produce journalism that informs, connects, and challenges those in positions of power and authority; and to ensure that years from now, anyone who wants to understand what happened here will find a careful, accurate, and enduring record.

Because local news is more than information. It is community memory. And that is worth showing up for every single day.

Thank you to our readers, subscribers, supporters, and advertisers — thank you for allowing us to tell the community’s stories.