As we know, ideologically oriented newsrooms with various and murky funding models have popped up over the years offering news with perspectives to help fill gaps they see in a diminished local news landscape. In Colorado, you’ve got your Center Square (nonprofit journalism with a “taxpayer sensibility”) and you’ve got your Colorado Times Recorder (nonprofit journalism with a “progressive orientation”).

Center Square, a project of the Franklin Center, used to be Watchdog dot org, which last December, was seeking a news editor to cover Colorado “from the taxpayers’ perspective.” Following its re-branding, Center Square carried a kind of quiet presence in Colorado. That changed this week.

On Wednesday, the site revealed Conor Cahill, a spokesman for Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, asked two small Colorado newspapers, The Kiowa County Press and The Trinidad Chronicle-News, to remove a story from their websites. The story came from Center Square, headlined “Polis creates ‘Office of Future of Work,’ third new taxpayer-funded office this year.” News of the request rocketed around Colorado media and beyond.

From The Associated Press (published in The Washington Post):

Center Square editor Dan McCaleb told me his outlet is operating in 18 states and approaches small local newspapers to re-publish its work because it’s important for those communities to know what’s going on in state government. “Read our stories and you be the judge,” he said in response to criticism from the governor’s office. Center Square’s coverage, he said, isn’t partisan, but, “We cover tax and spending issues and if it’s appropriate we want to make sure the taxpayer’s perspective is in the story.”

I should note that it’s not the only publication in Colorado coming at its reporting from that perspective, either. When The Gazette recently launched an investigative unit, an announcement said the reporting would have “a strong emphasis on holding politicians and state agencies accountable for how they spend our tax dollars.” Center Square is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that seeks to follow a code of ethics and doesn’t disclose the identity of its donors on its site; The Gazette is owned by a conservative billionaire who gets involved in politics. Both publish news, and both say their reporting isn’t dictated by the business side. (“We have a very strict firewall between the news operation and the fund development team,” McCaleb says.) Both outlets have offered small-town Colorado newspapers the opportunity to publish work by their writers. Democrats might point out that more liberal counterparts to Center Square aren’t placing their work in traditional newspapers. Jason Salzman, a progressive consultant who runs Colorado Times Recorder, for instance, told me he has never tried.

The media ecosystem is a rapidly changing and increasingly confusing place— in Colorado and beyond. That’s why lawmakers here passed a new law creating a panel to study whether and how media literacy should be taught in schools. Consider this irony alert from Center Square, showing even how the governor’s own office might have been unaware it was publicizing a piece that originated from an outlet it distrusts:

In June, Polis shared on his Facebook page a Center Square story republished by the Montrose Daily Press about jobs growth, commenting on the shared post, “Great to see that jobs in our state continue to grow!”

Savvy readers realize there’s a lot of information out there that takes work to verify and often have to judge each piece of content on its own terms in the marketplace of ideas. That’s why there are efforts afoot to develop industrywide standards. That’s why some readers install browser extensions like NewsGuard.

To me this episode looks like an unforced error from the first floor of the Capitol— maybe on a busy day. No governor’s office wants this national headline, or a three-day media headache back home. (At least five Colorado news outlets have reported on it so far.) A phone call to talk to those small-town editors miles from Denver perhaps offering a sit-down or phone interview with the governor to provide his perspective on the new government offices might have been a better touch. If there were factual errors in the story the office wanted to correct, it could have engaged on that front, too, but it declined the opportunity for the publication to do so.

Before Wednesday, not many readers in Colorado might have heard about Center Square— an outlet the governor’s office calls “not an objective wire service”— but you can bet they have now.

Big pic: A Koch-funded site is planting stories on the news pages of mainstream papers.
Seems to me journalists should be more concerned about blurring the lines btw news and opinion than jerking knees about a spokesperson overstepping bounds.https://t.co/i5VIGkizQs #CoPolitics

— Andy Bosselman (@andybosselman) September 27, 2019

The last time this newsletter checked in with Casper, Wyoming, it was when journalists at the local newspaper there, The Star-Tribune, were leading a union drive in part so they could “safeguard their ability to report on themselves, in the event they have to.” (The union campaign was successful, by the way; they joined the Denver Newspaper Guild last February.)

The reason we’re hearing about this particular part of the Cowboy State now is because of a new initiative there called The Casper Project. It’s an effort by the Society of Professional Journalists that seeks to “get a deep understanding of the reasons so many people distrust news organizations and their reporting.”

From the SPJ:

As The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan reports, “For about six months, media people and 36 Casper-area citizen volunteers met on several occasions to try for some mutual understanding.” So what happened?

More from WaPo:

The document also offers a micro-history of our American local news apocalypse. By now that’s likely familiar to readers of this newsletter, so I’ll pick it up from where we are now. “The casualty is local public-interest topics, particularly for low-income communities,” Chalkbeat reports. “No longer subsidized, these subjects are covered sparsely, if at all, by a shrinking number of employees at the remaining newspapers, leaving critical decisions uninformed and unaccountable.” And so we’re in an era of local niche outlets: The Athletic for sports, Eater for food. “Chalkbeat takes this approach and applies it to our public-interest topic: a network of bureaus covering the same issue — education — in different locations,” it states. “Each bureau has between one and five local reporters and shares services with other bureaus across the network, such as HR, revenue generation, and technology.”

Of note for readers in our state is that the plan regards Chalkbeat’s Colorado bureau as one of its two most “mature” along with New York where “local philanthropy covers 85% of all local costs (member donations and sponsorships cover the rest).” Chalkbeat, by the way, “was formed by the merger of Ed News Colorado and Gotham Schools, which were both founded in 2008.”

As local news sites struggle for sustainability nationwide, here’s what jumped out at me from Chalkbeat’s charted path:

Monday will be the last time readers of this family owned Four Corners newspaper will find a copy in print— unless or until the economics of local newspaper publishing eventually turns around. Durangoans will now have to find news from the former physical broadsheet on the first day of the workweek online.

Some excerpts from an advance copy of Monday’s (print-only) editorial about it:

In June, I wrote about how a publicity idea from the new public relations boss at the Regional Transportation District sparked a debate among journalists about “propaganda” versus agencies telling “their stories.”

Well, this week, RTD announced the launch of what it’s calling “News Stop,” which it says “will act as a straight-from-the-source outlet for the latest RTD-related news. We look forward to increasing transparency by sharing our stories authentically and directly with you.”

From an e-mailed announcement:

One Colorado journalist noted to me the lengths RTD seems to be going to emphasize how committed they are to working with local media and not trying to replace it, “clearly anticipating that narrative.”

On Twitter, ColoradoPolitics reporter Ernest Luning already snarked a bit on the agency’s coverage of itself, using the hashtag #hardhitting. Click here to see for yourself how the site looks so far.

Ukraine. Doctored weather maps. A border wall land grab. “Shithole countries.”

If you’ve read a recent scoop about Donald Trump’s White House, chances are it came from The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey. Next Thursday evening he’ll talk at Colorado College about his work covering the president. One of his recent headlines even offered readers— if you think you can handle it— a “glimpse into Trump’s unorthodox mind.”

From The Colorado Springs Independent:

Just this week, Dawsey had a byline on the inside story about “How Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate the president’s rivals.” Earlier this month, he helped uncover how “it was Trump who used a black Sharpie to mark up an official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map.” It was Dawsey who broke the news of the president’s “shithole countries” comment, that Jared Kushner used private email to conduct White House business, and that former Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn “actively promoted a private-sector scheme to build dozens of nuclear reactors across the Middle East.” He reported how Trump wants to “aggressively seize private land” for his border wall, among a blizzard of other remarkable scoops.

He’ll talk and take questions from the open-to-the-public crowd at 7 p.m., Thursday Oct. 3 in Gaylord Hall on the campus in Colorado Springs.

The nearly 3-year-old ColoradoPolitics site, which offers insider journalism for politics junkies and professionals, is looking for someone to replace its managing editor, Mark Harden, who came from The Denver Business Journal a little more than a year and a half ago. The site is a product of Clarity Media, owned by Anschutz who also owns The Gazette in Colorado Springs. In 2017, Clarity bought The Colorado Statesman newspaper and turned it into a weekly subscription magazine under the ColoradoPolitics flag. Earlier this summer it expanded further into the Denver market. More recently, the site has been producing single-sourced, aggregated re-writes of news broken in other outlets in the style of The Hill.

Here’s the job description:

This week the site announced it hired as a paid biweekly columnist Eric Sondermann, one of the most-quoted political pontificators in Colorado media. His hire comes after that of former Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post reporter Lynn Bartels who now writes a column after leaving the secretary of state’s office as a spokeswoman.

As for Harden, who is leaving in a few weeks, he says he’s grateful for the opportunity. “I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved together in making CoPo bigger and better in print and online,” he says. “Now I’ve decided it’s time for me to move on to the next challenge.”

Colorado media HR report: AP’s Dan Elliott is taking ‘the rest of his career’ off

OK, funniest thing I’ve heard in the workplace in a while: Dan Elliott, who’s been an AP reporter for 20 years and a journalist for 45, worked his last shift before retirement today. He just walked into my office, shook my hand, and said, “See you later boss. I’m taking the rest of my career off.”