This was a major week for the Estes Valley Voice. Our digital newsroom has been up and running for five weeks. Well, running may not be the right word. Taking baby steps after initially crawling is more like it. And we have so much to learn about what we are doing.
On Monday evening the Estes Chamber helped us to have an official launch event with a traditional ribbon cutting. We then hosted a screening of a powerful documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink” at the Reel Mountain Theater. More than 100 people joined us to celebrate and watch the film, far exceeding our wildest expectations.
From the bottom of my heart as editor—and if I can take the liberty for this one moment to speak for Suzy Blackhurst, our senior editor—thank you to our creative team and to our editorial board, and to the members of the community who have encouraged us.
The documentary film—which won the award for Best Documentary in the United Nations Association Film Festival, 2023, the Rose F. and Charles L. Klotzer First Amendment Award for Free Speech in Service of Democracy by the Gateway Journalism Review, 2023, and the Maysles Bros. Lifetime Achievement Award at the St. Louis International Film Festival, 2023—explores the threats to independent journalism as media corporations buy up small town newspapers, sell off their assets, and pare down the writing and editorial staff in what is called distressed investing.
The film also asks what can a community do to support local journalism? And it presents some new models of ownership, news gathering, and distribution in the digital age.
This week it was announced that Michael Romero, publisher of the Estes Park Trail Gazette for the past 13 years, is stepping down at the end of the month. The paper lost its lead reporter and advertising sale rep last month. The paper is now advertising for two positions. One is a blend of what had been four separate positions – publisher, editor, reporter, and ad sales. The other is a reporter and copy editor.
This is on top of the news that the printing plant in Berthoud where the paper is printed will close Aug. 12. The printing operation will be moved to Denver. Another publication in Estes Park that also was printed on the Berthoud presses is shifting their print operations out of state.
What this means for local news is hard to say. Within the past two weeks, five newspapers in Colorado have closed or announced their closing. Two of those are owned by the same parent corporation that owns the local “newspaper of record” in Estes Park, a curious and misunderstood term.1
Over the past 10 years, 57 newspapers in Colorado have closed, two dozen of those have shut down since 2019. According to a report from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, 22% of the newspapers in America have closed since 2005.
This has important implications for communities. Vince Bzdek, Executive Editor of The Denver Gazette, wrote a memorial this week to the Brush News-Tribune, a paper his parents and grandparents owned and operated for 50 of its 139 years.
“The nuts and bolts of what happens when a community loses its newspaper have been well-documented. The cost of government goes up because no one is watchdogging the spending by politicians. People participate less in municipal elections because they don’t really know what’s going on, so a smaller handful of people, often with their own interests in mind rather than the town’s, end up running the town. Folks start getting all their information from social media, which is notoriously unreliable when it comes to things like facts and the truth,” wrote Bzdek.
Bzdek shared his family’s history with the paper and connected it to the importance of the town’s history and the importance of stories:
“But what about the intangibles lost when a newspaper goes away? The stories that came across my mom’s desk were more about the weekly weaving of the ties that bind a community together. Stories about the pros and cons of the new high school redesign, the column seeking volunteers for the pancake breakfast at Library Park, news of the comings and goings of folks in the neighboring communities of Hillrose and Antelope Springs. Such stories provide the connective tissue that make a city into a community; such stories let readers walk in other people’s shoes, creating invisible bonds and cultural empathy. The better members of a community know each other, the more they listen to each other.”
Industries change with the times. Few people today use a rotary dial phone or an analogue answering machine with magnetic tape. Those technologies have given way to digital technologies. Instead of printing the news with paper and ink, news is published today in pixels because by the time you get your hands on a printed newspaper, its history.
The future, at least for the moment, is via the internet. But what that looks like will change as much if not more in the next 10 years as it has over the past 20. Artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) are not futuristic. The future is here and moving forward and faster than anyone can really imagine.
The Estes Valley Voice is working hard to step up as a trusted source of community news. We appreciated the opportunity to be recognized and included in media briefings with the Estes Park Police Department and the Estes Valley Fire Protection District in news about the Alexander Mountain Fire. And we appreciated the invitation to sit in on a briefing about community health centers with Salude and Representative Joe Neguse’s office.
This past week we also covered stories about a proposal to shift the proportion of 6E funding designated for childcare from 12% to 20% for 2025 and a cut in the federal Crime Victims Fun that will have an impact on staffing and wages at Estes Valley Crisis Advocates.
Even with the changes that have occurred in the technology of reporting the news, what has not changed is the importance of integrity, independence, accuracy, accountability, objectivity, and transparency. Click here to read our Purpose, Mission, Values, and Goals statement.
- At one time a newspaper of record, according to the “Encyclopedia of Journalism,” was popularly considered to be “the preeminent and most authoritative news source documenting current events,” a subjective assessment of newspaper not based on any qualitative or quantitative content analysis.
It then came to be understood that a newspaper of record was the publication in which local governments would pay to publish legal notices to make a public record of the notice. A paper would be selected based on the number of its subscriptions to reach the largest number of people.
The designation “paper of record” had no relationship to the accuracy or independence of the paper’s reporting and in many cases, if a paper was the only one in a town or the county, it by default was the place that a record deed or a death was published. ↩︎
Expect the empty shell of Trail Gazette – eviscerated by its Alden Global Capital hedge fund owner – to be shut down fairly soon, similar to the fate of the Brush and Lamar papers – Romero probably already knows this is going to happen and is jumping ship prior to the TG’s sinking below the waves …