On Thursday, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet sat in on a Zoom call with dozens of Colorado journalists and local media publishers to gather input on a bill he filed to help save the local news.

Those on the call represented outlets large and small— nonprofits, for-profits, print, digital, TV, radio, and more. (Endale Getahun, a multi-lingual news producer in Aurora, even talked about how he’s been offering local news via Roku during the pandemic.) The media folks offered remarks about how they’re faring, prodded Bennet about what his bill might accomplish, and urged him to examine certain aspects he might not have considered.

At issue is the Future of Local News Commission Act, which Bennet rolled out in September with Democratic U.S. Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. The bill would create a 13-member commission to examine, among other things, “potential new mechanisms for public funding for the production of local news to meet the critical information needs of the people of the United States and address systemic inequities in media coverage and representation throughout the country.”

Included in the duties of the federal panel created by The Future of Local News Commission Act is this, emphasis mine:

… recommendations, in addition to any other proposals deemed appropriate, may explore the possible creation of a new national endowment for local journalism, or the reform and expansion of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or another appropriate institution, to make public funds a part of a multi-faceted approach to sustaining local news.

Some folks on the call zeroed in on the CPB part.

Our democracy depends on local journalism, but newsrooms across the country have been pushed to the brink. Today I joined @co_mediaproject & journalists from across our state to discuss my bill to support local journalism while preserving the independence vital to the free press. pic.twitter.com/RZuOwdPyfi

— Michael Bennet (@SenatorBennet) November 19, 2020

During his unsuccessful run for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, Bennet didn’t hide his frustration about how he believed social media was impacting contemporary politics— and its affect on his own campaign.

“The Twitter base of the Democratic Party decides what’s important, not the actual base,” he told The Atlantic last fall. “The actual base of the Democratic Party are a bunch of people that have never, ever, ever engaged with a politician on Twitter. They are the people we met with today who are teaching school. Those women are invisible to cable television. The children that are in that school are invisible to cable television, and invisible to the Twitter universe.”

To the Zoom full of journalists Thursday, he said there might be a role for his potential federal commission to take at doing … something about the platforms.

“Now that we’re on the back end of the 2020 elections I’ve never been more persuaded that if this democracy is going to survive we need an answer of some kind for the existing social media,” Bennet said. “I see no reason why social media couldn’t have been a constructive force for our democracy. I see no reason it couldn’t have been a democratizing force for America or for democracy around the world. But I think it’s fair to say that instead, much of it has been a destructive force. I see no reason why it couldn’t have been a powerful tool to inform people and engage people and organize them in a way that strengthens our democracy, but we are a long, long way from that. And I don’t have any brilliant answers for those challenges but I hope this commission will think it through.”

He went on:

“I do know these platforms have become too large and too powerful and they’ve been far too cavalier about their responsibilities to anticipate and to address the damage the platforms are causing our democracy. They’re flooding users with toxic disinformation, they’re digitally gerrymandering Americans with secret algorithms, they’re radicalizing people with self-reinforcing content loops, and on top of that they’re destroying local journalism by aggregating your content and with it the lion’s share of the ad revenue. Sitting back and doing nothing, I think, is not an option for our democracy.”

Colorado in the past year has become a place where these kinds of conversations about the efficacy of increased public support for the local news industry have been taking place more than elsewhere. The ways in which government support is actually materializing in practice here, though, is something of a different story.

Despite Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis throwing cold water on the idea of increased state-government support, this year his office’s economic development agency offered for the first time ever an Advanced Industries Accelerator Grant to a local news publisher. As the revenues of local news publishers cratered during the pandemic, outlets large and small across Colorado applied for and received federal relief dollars through programs of the U.S. Small Business Administration. Meanwhile, Colorado’s tourism office has been paying for the travel arrangements of Texas journalists who vacation in Colorado and publish stories about their experience.

“In the past two years, members of Congress from both parties have introduced five bills to boost local media, via antitrust exemptions, tax credits, and other means,” Columbia Journalism Review recently reported. None of them have passed.

“There are no silver bullets to any of these problems, but I know that we can’t just wait around for the situation to resolve itself,” Bennet said on Thursday’s call. “If we do that, we’re going to wake up one day in an America without local news, and we can’t let that happen. So that’s why we wrote the bill, and my colleagues and I are going to push hard to get it passed in the next Congress.”

On that front, Bennet told the assembled media industry faithful that he plans to seek bi-partisan support for the Future of Local News Commission Act. “We’re going to have to find somebody on the Republican side who’s living in a journalistic desert,” he said — and then he added some grim commentary: “That’s not going to be that hard to find.”

The inside story of what happened to Pulp in Pueblo — and so much more

Several weeks ago I got a call from Abe Streep, who had written that  magazine piece about Pueblo and the struggling Gannett-owned Chieftain newspaper. He was planning to follow it up for a piece in Columbia Journalism Review about Pulp, the scrappy monthly news magazine run by the scrappy John Rodriguez. I learned some things on the call I didn’t know, and it was clear to me Streep was going to go deep on it.

The piece is now out, in CJR’s winter edition of the magazine, and you really should set some time aside to read the entire thing. It’s headlined “For Pueblo,” and it’s just gutting — line after line. You’ll learn a lot about Pueblo, about Rodriguez, and about a city’s relationship with its hollowed-out daily broadsheet after it was swallowed up in a newsroom-devouring monster merger in a place that once supported 20 different foreign-language newspapers.

Here’s a particularly devastating graf:

Against the backdrop of the Chieftain’s troubles (like so many daily newspaper troubles) emerges a story about Pulp and an idea that “had recently been picking up steam in Colorado” — a potential appetite for increased public support for local news. It’s a story about how that played out on the ground in Pueblo, and about place, home, and the people who leave it and why. Streep cites Kara Mason, a former Pueblo journalist who now edits Sentinel Colorado, growing up “having absorbed the idea that staying in town meant failing.” Early during the coronavirus pandemic, Pulp was failing too, and Rodriguez was scrambling to save it.

Another excerpt:

RMPBS CEO: Media ‘built on the roots of privilege’

Amanda Mountain, who runs Rocky Mountain PBS, said this week her news outlet makes up “the largest membership organization in the state.” She also reflected on her values as a public media manager.

Some excerpts from Mountain in a write-up by the Orapin PR firm:

‘Support our young people’: The loss of a KUNM journalist in New Mexico 

The suicide of 29-year-old public radio journalist Hannah Colton in New Mexico has those in the business telling each other to check in on one another.

From Marisa Demarco for KUNM where Colton led the news team:

“We in news organizations need to do more to support our young people, especially in these difficult times,” wrote Colorado journalist Sandra Fish in a tweet thread.

This breaks my heart. We in news organizations need to do more to support our young people, especially in these difficult times. https://t.co/W7kTVBGXAU

— sandra fish 🐠 (@fishnette) November 12, 2020

(KRCC’s May Ortega, who knew and worked with Colton, said of Fish’s thread: “News managers need to read this.”) In , those close to Colton wrote that friends checking in on each other isn’t enough. “She was a movement journalist,” they wrote, “someone who practices journalism that meets the needs of communities directly affected by injustice, who actively engages in unlearning transactional and extractive interactions and who does away with the myth of objectivity.”

On anxiety and depression in the newsroom

In the latest edition of Denver’s 5280 is a feature by the magazine’s editorial director ​Geoff Van Dyke, who is 46, about what it’s like living and working with anxiety and depression. In the piece, he talked about “the voice” — and lucky you if you don’t know what he’s talking about.

From 5280:

By early afternoon, my mind would clear … but that simply made head space for the depression and anxiety that can manifest when one tries to make it through even the best days. It also left room for the voice, the voice that tells me the reason my company is struggling is because I suck at my job; that the reason I’ve put on 10 pounds is because I’m lazy and drink too much; that the reason my kids are bored is because I’m a crappy dad. After listening to the voice berate me for a few hours, 5 o’clock would once again bring relief. I’d crack a beer or mix a margarita. Lather, rinse, repeat. …

Over the past half year, I’ve been pushed into profound misery for roughly 48 to 72 hours at least once a week. I don’t smile. I don’t laugh. I have difficulty feeling love. I contemplate different ways of hurting myself. I want to sleep so I don’t have to think about anything anymore. Sometimes I’ll work the better part of the day and then crawl into bed at 4:30 in the afternoon and sleep for two hours. Then, of course, I can’t fall asleep at night. My mood darkens. My mind whirs. The voice returns.

More Colorado local media odds & ends

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