There is a new news site starting in Denver (online only, no paper) staffed by former reporters and editors from the local daily DenverPost. Supposedly funded for two years by a cryptocurrency investor and a blockchain tech company. Somehow they are going to use blockchain tech and create a new crypto currency as part of the site. I have no idea why, except it's probably a lot easier to attract investor money to a cryptocurrency site than a newspaper haha
I assume this is in follow up to the recent dust up where the owner of the paper threatened some staff not to run stories critical of his own businesses? And then fired them when they printed it anyway?
Denver news is really dead compared to twenty years ago.
The biggest loss was both via the Post slowly letting go anyone who knew anything real about local politics and relationships between the people, and the radio stations dropping the local talk shows that had 30 year hosts who knew those relationships... or they retired.
Many of the better middle aged reporters from various papers, radio, and TV to a lesser extent, have moved on to being PR people for companies and government agencies. Better pay, better bennies, and they know how to control the kids still in the Press Corp.
One friend who was at the Denver Business Journal for a long time and wrote very well, decided after a breast cancer scare that she had better things to do in life.
Another was the PR person for the Broomfield Chamber of Commerce for a while.
Others are still at various government agencies.
But a lot of Denver journalists are hiding out in PR roles for sure. The demise of not just one but two newspapers and the syndication of most radio news left not too many places for all of them to land.
The replacements don’t know anything about locals and just create their shows and articles from Internet national web sources. They wouldn’t recognize any of the power players in Denver if they were peeing on the hood of their cars.
Most moved here from somewhere else and have no chance of ever knowing the people doing stuff in Denver for at least another twenty years.
There’s a few exceptions. Kyle Clark and his younger news crew over at 9News seem to have taken over that place a bit and forced some journalism back into their reporting.
Nowhere near the heyday of the three major networks competing and each flying their own helicopters and yadda yadda. Now they’re all so broke they share leased pool helicopter.
There was also a few years where some Libertarian / Exiled from political Party folks managed to get some air time on, of all things, a religious station, a morning drive time slot even, and they knew all the players in all the Parties and the back room deals going on. They were actually pretty tuned in with local politicians and businesses and knew their stuff. Got all of the best interviews and were essentially unknown that they were there on that station other than by locals and nobody could really explain why. Just someone knew someone and got a morning drive time slot.
But they eventually angered the station owner when they interviewed candidates for governor after he told them not to, over a particular topic, so he fired all of them and put the utterly boring milquetoast afternoon fill in guy who would kick his boots, in the prime spot.
Once in a great while CPR does panels on their Colorado show that have enough political diversity to be interesting but it’s usually the ancient politicians saying the same old stuff.
No Denver news sources seem to truly have the pulse of business or businesspeople anymore. Even DBJ doesn’t. They definitely don’t have the contacts or the footwork to find the scandals and deeper stories locally anymore.
Like most journalism these days, it’s all focused on a tiny few in DC. Boring as ****. We had a LOT of years with top notch journalists and lots of competition to keep them all motivated, but those days are long long gone.
