It was only a matter of time until this sparked national interest. The storyline is irresistible: A state bloodied by gun violence that just went full-on politically blue looks to pass a law that could lead to gun confiscation by allowing law enforcement, family, or a member of a household to petition a court to do so, riling conservative resentment while underscoring a rural-urban divide. All in the lead-up to the 20-year anniversary of the Columbine shootings. You have law enforcement officers talking about not obeying laws; one of the bill’s backers is the dad of an Aurora theater shooting victim; Republicans, including the party’s newly elected leader, are using the R-word— recalls — lighting a fuse that stretches back to a political powder keg of 2013. The CNN piece went viral, racking up about 75,000 shares on Facebook, blistering across Twitter feeds, and leading to countless followups. “I’m getting calls from all over the world,” the local sheriff told Westword. “I’ve been asked to do TV interviews from as far away as England.”

No way this story could go by without a local-media-issue angle. Colorado journalists have been all over stories about the red-flag legislation and its potential impact. Rocky Mountain PBS’s “Insight with John Ferrugia” won the broadcast equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize for a special report on the law called Imminent Danger. TV news stations have been reporting plenty on the bill and legal backlash by sheriffs and others, as have print, radio and online outlets. One of those, The Colorado Sun, earned the ire of a sheriff — before the reporter’s story even ran.

What happened? After getting a call from Sun reporter Jesse Paul, Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith penned a lengthy public Facebook post. In it he accused the reporter of “just fishing for soundbites on the subject of ‘sanctuary counties,'” and of “trying to paint me into a box,” among other things. The sheriff, who had some particular characterizations of the conversation, wrote how he was “anxious to see how he condenses 40 minutes [of] conversation into a one phrase comment or answer.”

Smith did get quoted in the Sun story. Here was the treatment:

The sheriff’s Facebook post, catnip for certain constituents, drew more than 1,000 interactions, including nearly 200 comments and nearly 400 shares. By contrast, the Sun’s story, posted on its Facebook page, drew about 120 interactions, about 50 comments, and 30 shares. I’ve written in the past about sheriffs in other states — North Carolina and West Virginia— posting items on Facebook about their correspondence with reporters and riling up their followers prior to a story coming out. In both cases the topic was about guns.

Sheriff Smith didn’t respond to an email asking his thoughts about the Sun story once it came out; his assistant said he has a busy schedule. The reporter says he was disappointed in the Facebook post and wishes the sheriff expressed his concerns while he had him on the horn. “I had no idea he was unhappy with how our conversation went,” Paul says. “For what it’s worth, I found the interview really helpful and informative and am very appreciative of his time and help on the story.”

He also said he left a pair of voicemail messages for the sheriff, including one on his cell, right after he saw the post, hoping to talk about his concerns, but he didn’t hear back. “I was most frustrated with his characterization of me falling ‘silent for almost 30 seconds,'” Paul says about a particular line in the Facebook post. “I was trying to balance my cellphone and type on my computer at the same time, which resulted in my accidentally hitting the mute button on my phone. I also was concerned with his characterization that I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying and that I came to the story trying to paint him into a box. I can assure him neither is true. I’ve written extensively on the red-flag bill policy and was hoping to tackle a political angle associated with the bill — one that since has become a national story — which I might not have made clear enough at the start of our conversation. I hope to follow up with him to hear his concerns and move forward.”

Last month, we learned here how ColoradoPolitics recently lured John C. Ensslin, an old hand from The Rocky Mountain News who had been reporting on the East Coast, back to Denver to cover city politics. And now the publication just hired Neil Westergaard, formerly an editor of The Denver Business Journal and The Denver Post.

ColoradoPolitics is the politics vertical of Clarity Media, which is owned by conservative Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz, who also owns The Gazette in Colorado Springs and The Washington Examiner as well as The Broadmoor hotel and a lot of other stuff. The site’s weekly print magazine component replaced The Colorado Statesman when Clarity bought it in 2017. In 2016, for Columbia Journalism Review, I profiled the Gazette’s editor and what he was doing with ColoradoPolitics. The lede back then:

Not bad! Here’s something else I learned, though. The New York hedge-fund-controlled newspaper is hiring a reporter. The starting pay? Less than $12 an hour.

How a college newspaper handled April Fools’ Day

The Colorado State University Department of Journalism and Media Communications announced it will offer a writing class in Fake News and Conspiracy Theories next fall. Debbie O’Hara, the professor slated to teach the class, says teaching journalistic integrity and objectivity sets students up for failure after graduation. “Telling journalism students that their job is to search for the truth and tell people’s stories is a waste of time,” O’Hara said. “What newspapers and TV stations are looking for are people who will lie to the American public.”

“At the same time, American voters and political elites are more polarized than ever,” the piece went on, and later cited its research that found counties with a newspaper closure “split their tickets about 1.9 percent less than the comparison group. This difference is more than enough to swing an election outcome.”

And while the Digital First-owned dead tree newspaper got the lede, a Denver-based cryptocurrency-backed digital startup got the kicker. “Locally-oriented journalists may need to experiment with novel business models, such as the online-only Colorado Sun, in order to survive,” the Scientific American wrote. “There is a serious effort underway to save local news, as shown by the Knight Foundation’s recent $300 million, five-year commitment, and our research shows yet another reason to prioritize these efforts. If people want to fight back against the polarization that has infected our politics, part of the answer may be on their doorstep.”

Did media learn from coverage of Columbine?

Twenty years after journalistic narratives surrounding the school shooting at Columbine collapsed, Denver magazine 5280 asks, “Why hasn’t the news media adopted significant changes in its coverage?” and finds “There is no simple answer.” From the piece by Kasey Cordell:

Journalists talk about … ethics a lot. We have courses devoted to them in undergraduate and graduate programs, along with classes in media law, copy editing, design, investigative reporting, and writing for digital mediums, but few course catalogs have a listing for “How To Cover A Mass Tragedy.” Instead, conversations about how to be sensitive to survivors, families, and when to release information (and how much) about perpetrators are typically left to colleagues and mentors in newsrooms.

Those conversations are evolving. Some well-known journalists, like Anderson Cooper and, locally, Kyle Clark, have publicly supported practices that reduce perpetrator visibility and minimize the use of shooters’ names and photos. Although none of the outlets we spoke with have a formal, written policy regarding how to cover a mass shooting (nor does 5280), they all said they talk about it—a lot. Everyone from Colorado Public Radio to the Denver Post to KDVR Fox31 to the Colorado Sun to the New York Times noted that each shooting is handled individually—and with a great deal of sensitivity. “We live in these communities, too,” Brian Gregory, news director at Fox31 and Colorado’s Own Channel 2, says, so empathy and respect are top of mind when weighing how to cover mass shootings. “You don’t just want to give reporters a handout,” Patty Calhoun, longtime editor of Westword, says. “That’s not going to help. It’s really case by case, but we’ve built up a long, long, long history on how to cover these events that seems appropriate. Our business isn’t just, Here’s what’s happened; we try to say why. And for that, you might have to go deeper.”

This week, a piece in The Washington Post by columnist Dana Milbank headlined “Bernie Sanders has emerged as the Donald Trump of the left,” carried a necessary disclosure at the end: “This columnist’s wife, Anna Greenberg, works for John Hickenlooper, a Democratic presidential candidate.” According to a December Associated Press item, the former Colorado governor hired Greenberg as his pollster.

Now, if Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet also ends up running for president this year, he’ll create an even bigger disclosure issue for the D.C. paper’s Empire State rival, The New York Times. His brother, James Bennet, runs the editorial page of the nation’s flagship newspaper overseeing all its opinion coverage. If Michael Bennet runs, a Times spokeswoman told Vanity Fair that James Bennet “will recuse himself from any work generated by the opinion desk related to the 2020 presidential election. He will not discuss, assign, or edit any editorials, op-eds, columns, or other opinion pieces that are substantially related to candidates or major issues in the campaign.” Ouch. That sounds like a lot of work to miss. Guess we’ll see whether his bro gives him a vacation. (As this newsletter was going to press, Colorado Independent columnist Mike Littwin broke the news that Bennet was diagnosed with prostate cancer, but is intending to run for president if he’s cancer free after surgery.)