All Posts Tagged With: "savethepress.org"

SaveTheNews.org’s first big public meeting of journalists and community members (September 16) — strategically planned for the U.S. city at ground zero for the “News Crisis,” Denver — was clearly a success in sounding the alarm about the decline of serious public-interest journalism. Six months ago, the city lost one of its two major daily newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News, and other newspapers and traditional media outlets in metro Denver and around the state have suffered severe cuts. The result: important stories not told, an environment ripe for abuse by less-closely monitored public officials and business leaders, and a less-informed citizenry.

The SaveTheNews event attracted a capacity crowd of about 200 people who filled the bottom floor of the Colorado History Museum just south of the State Capitol Building. While the abundance of laid-off journalists in the room (many once employed by the Rocky) were looking for answers to the question of how to fund public-interest reporting — and thus continue making a livelihood from doing journalism — the room also included a large contingent of community members alarmed by the Rocky’s demise and wondering where (and if) they will get news about the most important things going on in their hometown in the future, if things keep getting worse.

The event included 14 small-table discussions on a variety of sub-topics, which preceded a general panel discussion featuring former Rocky Mountain News editor and publisher John Temple and other local luminaries. At the discussion tables, facilitators (including me) warmed up the attendees with intense exchanges about how to tackle the various facets of the problem. It was our job to ask questions and listen, not to lecture on what we know or believe.

I was assigned as the facilitator of the “Commercial News Models: Where will we get our news?” table, and interest in that topic outnumbered the chairs available. Our standing-room-only group was animated and opinionated, and not of one mind when it came to solutions. And even though the journalists around the table outnumbered the non-journalists, the community members, I think, gave we journalists some hope that the issue of sustainability of public-interest news reporting is beginning to resonate outside of the media cognoscenti and news-industry working stiffs.

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