This week, we learned buyout offers from some friends from out of town, namely the Virginia-based Gannett newspaper chain, will mean a kind of neuralyzing for two of our state’s larger newspapers that bookend the Front Range. Longtime journalists at the Chieftain in Pueblo and a veteran journalist at the Coloradoan in Fort Collins are leaving with buyouts— and with them, a whole lot of institutional memory is getting zapped from their newsrooms.

These voluntary Colorado retirements are part of a nationwide program. As the Poynter Institute recently reported, about 500 people throughout the Gannett chain are accepting buyout packages. “The buyouts include about 60 editors, 19 photojournalists, seven managing editors, three executive editors and 124 reporters,” Poynter reported Nov. 12.

In Pueblo, the Chieftain’s top two editors, Steve Henson and Karen Vigil, are retiring Monday. Henson has been at the paper for 40 years; Vigil has worked there since 1988. Kevin Duggan, who has covered city government for a quarter century at The Coloradoan, is also leaving as part of Gannett’s buyout plan.

“I am just so proud of the crew that we have now. We’ve dealt with the pandemic and staffing challenges as so many businesses have, and I think that it is remarkable that we are still reporting important news,” Henson said in a weekend Chieftain story about the retirements. “I admire so many people that I have worked with throughout the years, but I I love the group that I work with now. I’m going to miss them tremendously.” (Henson wrote a separate first-person Sunday swan song.) Vigil told the paper she plans to “take a deep breath and enjoy everything,” and added she wants to “thank everyone who has been supportive of the mission that we have in the free press.”

Tony Mulligan, administrative officer for the Denver Newspaper Guild who represents union employees at the Chieftain but not the Coloradoan, says Gannett did not threaten layoffs if the company doesn’t get its “bodycount” through volunteers. “It’s voluntary, but its net effect is diminishing news coverage for our communities,” he says. He added a Chieftain reporter also recently left the paper to work for a local school district without a buyout package.

For his part, Duggan told readers he doesn’t blame the newspaper company. Here’s what he wrote in a goodbye column about his retirement:

In hopes of quashing conspiracy theories before they start, let me be clear. I am leaving of my own accord. I’m not being pushed out by the Coloradoan or its corporate owner, Gannett. I have no gripes or grudges with the company or anyone who works here. My colleagues are like a second family to me, and I will deeply miss them, just as I will miss connecting with the many people I have come to know around Northern Colorado.

My coworkers, and this community, have treated me exceedingly well, especially during the last couple of years as I went through treatment for multiple myeloma. The disease is in remission and I am feeling quite well, thank you. That’s one of the motivators for calling it quits now. Experiencing cancer, covering the COVID-19 pandemic and seeing all the crazy random things that happen in life, I’ve learned one’s time on this planet is short. And I hope to enjoy the rest of mine without the stress of reporting the news of the day.

Last year, the nation’s two largest newspaper companies, GateHouse and Gannett, announced plans to merge. GateHouse owned the Chieftain, and Gannett owned the Coloroadoan. The mega-company — Gannett won the name war — owns six other publications in Colorado and is part of the USA Today network.

This week, as the buyouts rolled out across the country, local outlets from Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and elsewhere published goodbye items to and from longtime editors, publishers, writers, and photographers. One East Coast editor had “an unmatched institutional memory of Rhode Island history,” his paper reported. In Indiana, six veteran journalists at The Indianapolis Star are taking buyouts— “including the investigations editor who oversaw the newspaper’s exposé of USA Gymnastics that led to the arrest of the team doctor who molested more than 100 girls.” The Florida Times-Union is “losing at least four staff positions through voluntary buyouts.” In Illinois, this month marked “the end of an era” for state government and political reporting after the buyout retirements of two longtime journalists from the Gannett-owned State Journal-Register.

In 2018, Columbia Journalism Review reported in a piece titled “The Bought-Out” that newspaper buyouts “seemed rare and relatively novel” a decade ago. Not anymore. “Many of those who have taken buyouts point out that when newspapers lose their more experienced workers,” CJR reported, “they also lose institutional memory.”

‘An unconventional way to report the news’

In the latest elections, voters in Boulder voted in favor of a two-decade agreement with a local utility provider, Xcel Energy, temporarily putting on ice a movement to create a locally owned utility in Boulder, or, as Colorado Public Radio described it, “a city takeover of [the] electric company’s power lines and poles.”

What voters passed Nov. 3 was a settlement agreement, the result, according to Boulder Weekly, “of a year’s worth of negotiations between City officials and Xcel, instigated, last year, by Council members Bob Yates and Sam Weaver and Xcel representatives.” The talks, BW goes on, “involved settling a lawsuit the City filed to ascertain how much it would cost to assume Xcel’s assets in order to push forward on the muni. Once a settlement agreement was reached, City Council elected to put the franchise agreement to voters, and they approved it.”

But along the way, community members and advocacy groups “have reached out to Boulder Weekly with concerns about the transparency of the process,” the alt-weekly wrote in a recent GoFundMe crowd-funding appeal. The paper filed a Colorado Open Records Act request asking for emails and correspondence between Yates, Weaver, Boulder’s city attorney, and Xcel representatives.

More from Boulder Weekly:

But, as is often the case in Colorado, the price-tag associated with accessing these documents is high: $1,050 (estimate found here ). Like other small businesses, BW has had to become exceptionally frugal in order to employ the journalists, production team, delivery drivers and other staff that ensure you get quality, local, in-depth news every week.

So the paper asked its community to help raise money for the CORA records fee. The paper said if it met its goal, editors would “review the documents and publish them in full, in concert with a story that provides context for what they mean.” The community stepped up, and Boulder Weekly met its fundraising goal.

“We realize this is an unconventional way to report the news, but we also think this provides an opportunity to engage with our community of readers in a novel way, and may offer a blueprint for our news organization and others for future investigations,” Boulder Weekly said on its GoFundMe page.

Matt Cortina, the paper’s editor, says they raised the money in four hours— and people continued to send in checks after they met their goal and closed the fundraiser. “Others have stopped by to tell us how they rely on BW to cover stories like this,” Cortina says. “Their trust in us and in independent journalism is humbling, and we may use this model for future projects on issues that our community tells us matter to them.”

Appeals Court: No libel for Denver Post and 9News for reporting on 2016 case

Colorado’s two largest news organizations could rely on the fair report privilege and therefore did not defame a man who sued The Denver Post and 9News after they reported inaccuracies when covering his 2016 trial, the state appeals court ruled this week.

The case involved a man named Eric St. George whom jurors found guilty for, as one Denver Post headline put it: “groping stripper, shooting at Lakewood police officers.”

Michael Karlik at Colorado Politics this week scooped the rundown of the ruling:

Following his 2018 conviction, The Post, 9News and the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office wrote about the outcome. St. George told the organizations that what they published was false and libelous. He filed suit in January 2019. The Court of Appeals on Wednesday dismissed St. George’s defamation claim against the news outlets because the statute of limitations expired. The three-member panel also agreed with a Denver District Court judge’s ruling that the fair report privilege provided a defense to the outlets when they reported inaccurate details from a government document — in this case, a press release from the district attorney’s office.

The fair report privilege can protect journalists in libel and defamation lawsuits if they “report on or republish defamatory statements made during the official affairs of the government or governmental meetings,” wrote David L. Hudson Jr. in the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.

In this case, Colorado First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg, who represents the news outlets, told Colorado Politics “the court’s finding that the two news organizations’ reports are absolutely privileged, as ‘fair reports’ of the District Attorney’s press release, is consistent with numerous precedents (outside of Colorado) that have applied that common law privilege to official public statements of government agencies.”

9News investigative journalist back from COVID quarantine

Nicole Vap, who directs investigations for KUSA 9News, learned she tested positive for the coronavirus just after Election Day, and is back to work this week.

I am back to work after finding out I had covid 19 right after Election Day. So many have asked, “Where’d you get it.” My answer—it could have been anywhere because right now covid is EVERYWHERE! Be careful and protect your neighbors. You might need them like I needed mine.

— Nicole Vap (@nicolevap) November 25, 2020

Around Nov. 7, she said she learned she and others in her household had the virus. “Our symptoms so far are flu like, not anything too serious,” she said at the time.

Vap is the second Colorado TV journalist this newsletter has reported publicly saying they had the coronavirus so far. Recall how a TV journalist in the Springs said a couple weeks ago that having COVID-19 felt like “standing atop a 14er.”

Bennet bill critique: ‘Imagine the worst’

Last week, Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet sat for a roundtable Zoom discussion with journalists and publishers about his Future of Local News Commission Act. He was there to get input from some in the local media business and answer questions they might have.

This week, Complete Colorado columnist Ari Armstrong raised his own questions about any potential federal legislation. From the outlet of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, which also produces original reporting:

Who is to decide what is “critical information” and what is not? Who is to decide which “inequities” merit correction? Does this mean publications will be tax-funded only if they hire more conservatives, who are woefully underrepresented in Colorado’s news media landscape? Of course we know that is not what Senator Bennet means. In practice, this probably means tax-promoted affirmative action for “critical studies” graduates who happen to be members of racial or gender minorities.

Who is to decide which media outlets shall receive tax subsidies? The local equivalent of Fox News? Breitbart? InfoWars? Every day I get an email from the anonymous producers of the red-meat conservative “Citizen Press”—will they be eligible for tax financing if they jump through the right hoops? What about this overtly conservative-libertarian publication, Complete Colorado (which, I hope, wouldn’t accept the funds anyway)? What about the hard-left Colorado Times Recorder?

The federal legislation, which groups in Colorado like the Colorado Media Project and national groups like the Society of Professional Journalists support, seeks to create a 13-member commission to examine a host of issues facing the local news industry and offer recommendations.

“When we imagine politicians (indirectly) handing tax dollars to journalists, we should imagine not only our favored politicians and our favored journalists in ideal times; we should imagine the worst possible politicians and the sort of ‘journalists’ who excel at gaming the political system,” Armstrong warned.

Dozens of groups and individuals have signed onto a recent letter urging Facebook to drop its cease-and-desist, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Institute for Nonprofit News, Online News Association, SPJ, and others. Lynn Schofield Clark, the chair and director of the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media at the University of Denver’s Department of Media, Film & Journalism Studies, also appears as a signatory.

“The Ad Observatory project’s data has fueled stories and research showing how political campaigns use Facebook’s ad-targeting systems in manipulative ways to reach voters,” Watzman says in her column. “It has provided information on ways foreign governments have reached U.S. voters with questionable content. It’s been the basis for showing how dark money groups of different political stripes use Facebook to spread misleading messages. It’s fueled analyses on how Facebook still sells discriminatory ads — despite promising to stop after a lawsuit from civil rights groups.”

More and more, Watzman says, she hopes news organizations or individual reporters will pay more attention to the way information is being mediated in our disrupted digital age.

“I think you’ve got to be looking at exploring ways to use new techniques of reporting — tech-supported reporting, various tools like this Ad Observatory tool — to help you in kind of watchdogging and holding the platforms accountable and looking at what they’re doing as opposed to just what they say they’re doing,” she told me over the phone recently.

Facebook has been giving financial grants to local news outlets across the country including here in Colorado — and including to The Colorado Sun. So it was especially nice to see Watzman’s column appear there.

A Colorado journalism professor on Substack

No, that headline isn’t about your humble newsletter printer— yet, anyway.

Columbia Journalism Review quoted Nathan Schneider, a journalist and professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in the magazine’s big recent piece about the role of Substack in our evolving national media landscape. Here’s an excerpt of the story by Brooklyn freelancer Clio Chang:

The founders don’t claim that Substack will “save” media—a promise that’s bound to disappoint—but they argue that their model is a core part of a better, more worker-centric and reader-friendly future for journalism.

And here’s what Schneider, who focuses on “models for democratic ownership and governance for online platforms and protocols” as the founder of CU’s Media Center and Design Lab, said for the story:

“Substack is not the sort of thing that is going to create a sustainable next phase, but it can open the door to things that we don’t have doors for yet.”

If you’re in the business of understanding publishing and the changing relationships between journalists and audiences, you should be following Substack’s rise. The CJR story comes after big profiles of the platform in The New York Times and The Washington Post. High-profile journalists like Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald turned heads when they left their perches at institutional media outlets to go it alone on Substack where they’ll write their own direct-to-subscriber newsletters (and maybe even make more money). Last week, Matt Yglesias left Vox for Substack.

When Colorado College colleagues, students, and I launched The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project this summer, we used Substack and found it incredibly easy to use and an all-around great experience for us and our readers.

Substack, where, full disclosure, this newsletter might one day end up, reminds me in a way of what was happening in U.S. media nearly 100 years ago when some of the big-name newspaper columnists like Walter Lippman, Ernie Pyle, and Dorothy Thompson joined syndication services. When writing about the rise of syndication in the years between 1929 and 1941 in his book Covering America, Christopher Daly explained that “aside from their talents, what these journalists shared was access to methods of distributing their work that amplified their voices and thus opened new possibilities for individual journalists.” What was different then, though, was that syndication “made it possible for a newspaper writer to become wealthy without becoming a business owner.”

These days, if Substack is the new third-party syndicate connecting journalists to new audiences, these new journalists aren’t remaining untethered to the business side even if they don’t own the business.