Colorado Voices
Bought-out, priced out, burned out: The individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado
Clip | 4m 36sVideo has Closed Captions
Local newsrooms in Colorado are shrinking at alarming rates
Hedge fund buy-outs, printing press closures and rising costs are creating some of Colorado’s first news deserts along the eastern plains
Colorado Voices
Bought-out, priced out, burned out: The individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado
Clip | 4m 36sVideo has Closed Captions
Hedge fund buy-outs, printing press closures and rising costs are creating some of Colorado’s first news deserts along the eastern plains
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I really enjoy little paper because it has names of people in here that I know.
And then the old boy that writes the poems in there.
I can kind of relate to him because in my younger years, thats was I did was worked on ranches as a cowboy.
Yep.
I get it.
Its totally old school.
Well, very good.
Printing a papers old school, paying for a building all the time on a main street is old school.
But I think it's really important.
Yeah.
Studies have shown when local news organizations go out of business in communities, bad things happen.
Fewer people vote, fewer people run for office.
Municipal bond rates can go up, pollution can get worse.
So you want to make sure that a community has access to reliable, trustworthy sources of news and information, and unfortunately, that's just becoming harder and harder.
[car passing] [sign creaking] How do we find out whats going on?
How do we find the news?
How do we find out what our government's doing?
If you don't have a paper, you lose track of all that.
I mean, they lose their voice.
And that can really tear a community apart.
Even a small community like this.
All the newspapers that are closing out here, They closed the Ledger and the closed Springfield and.
Lamar.
Burlington.
Yeah.
Burlington.
I cant figure out whats going on.
These big media companies have swooshed in and they're buying up all the newspapers.
[swooshing] Financial institutions known as hedge funds kind of got their claws into local newspapers.
They found that newspapers were on the downswing, they invested in them, They close the buildings.
They get rid of the staff.
And then when the advertising goes, Then they just close it.
No big deal.
These hedge funds, they dont necessarily have an obligation to the public, as a public service, they have an obligation to shareholders.
these local papers have to have somebody running them that knows the people.
Were located in Eads, Colorado, which is out on the Eastern Plains in southeastern Colorado.
we're in the middle of nowhere, basically.
And were basically the only town in the county.
Im independent.
So I own the Kiowa County Independent.
Our immediate domain is Kiowa County, the whole county, and Cheyenne County.
And its Prowers County, Bent County, Kiowa County and Cheyenne County.
So it's me as the publisher, and then Im also on the Board of the Kiowa County Economic Development.
And I help with the museum.
Chairman of the Crow-Luther Cultural Events Center We're trying to get that library in.
I just recently got off accountability at the school, I was the principal there.
The high school principal.
There's another pickup coming.
Sorry.
Come on in, Mont.
Hi Bets!
How are you?
Good!
How are you doing?
Good!
We're a raw milk drop-off place and pick-up place, so besides everything else.. Yeah.
What happened recently on the Eastern Plains here in Colorado Is that we saw five newspapers go out of business around the same time.
So multiple counties on the Eastern Plains will lose their local news source.
I consider a news desert a county that does not have a local newspaper that serves it anymore.
So Colorado has 64 counties.
Our Colorado News Mapping Project has identified at least one county, Cheyenne, that lost its newspaper a couple years ago and might have become Colorado's first news desert.
The only thing you're going to find on there identified as a place where locals have told us theyre getting their local news and information is a Facebook page.
It happens in a lot of small areas, almost every one of these towns has a Facebook page like that.
Cheyenne County has a population of about 1.7k people, and that Facebook page has 1.4k people in it.
That's a pretty high number for a rural area like that.
So as these traditional local news sources go away, So as these traditional local news sources go away, we're going to see more things like that pop up.
Everybody would tell me if I asked for their advice, theyd say, “You gotta go digital.
“Why are you still printing?” Everybody that tries to subscribe here, if theyre a new subscriber, I always ask them, “Do you want a hard copy, or do you just want a digital copy?” They all want a hard copy.
Thats the way they get their news still out here.
If all of these titles just close up, and theres nothing out here, its going to be bad for the people out here.
Its very scary.
Scary thought.
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