If you are getting our multiple award-winning weekly newsletter (if you’re not, you should be), you got a peek last week at what goes on in the minds of your local journalists when they bring home a handful of awards from the Colorado Press Association convention: “existential crisis.”
So why the crisis? Because, as we are all aware, the “media” is a hot mess, and since we get lumped into that category, we feel the pain. Not since the days of “yellow journalism” has it been this bad.
Yellow journalism, if you remember your history classes, emerged in the 1890s as the result of a battle royale between two leading newspaper publishers of the day, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (yes, that Pulitzer). According to pbs.org’s article, “journalism of the 1890s used melodrama, romance and hyperbole to sell millions of newspapers.”
This go-round, newspapers are not the source of most of the trouble. That prize goes to the six corporations that run 90% of the U.S. media, using all manner of tactics to get viewers, listeners, and most importantly, advertisers. If we want to scream about the “elite” running the show, maybe start with the literal show-runners telling us to scream in the first place?
Then, there are the DIYers. The self-identified YouTubers and social media pages and websites who’ve taken it upon themselves to provide the world with their version of truth, without regard for the “discipline of verification” the news media is supposed to abide by. No matter how much I want unicorns to be real, I can’t verify that as fact. I guarantee the minute I find a valid, reliable source that proves the veracity of unicorns it will be front page news. I mean, we could… but we live here, and we actually see our readers at the grocery store and the post office, and I don’t want to explain that headline unless we can back it up.
Anyway, last week’s newsletter had a link to a survey seeking your feedback on what you’d like to see more of and what you’d like to see less of in this newspaper. We’re going to take those responses and see how we can better meet the needs of our subscribers, which, in turn, will better meet the goals of our advertisers, which, in turn, will help us stay in business. That’s important to us personally, (obviously, although there are a number of other career paths that might be less stressful), but also because we strongly believe that local newspapers have tremendous value to the communities they serve, and that “news deserts” with no legitimate newspaper put communities, and their citizens, at risk of being swindled by bad actors peddling propaganda and false information.
Back to those awards… This year’s contest entries were judged by members of the New York Press Association. Here’s the winners: Kate Lockwood — First Place, Best Junior Journalist Story, “Connecting Kids With Conservation Efforts”; Kathleen Kelley — First Place, Best Feature Story, “When Wild Horses Heal,”; Niki Turner — Second Place, Best Opinion Writing; Lucas Turner — First Place, Best Politics Reporting, “BOCC bows to unproven claims about Dominion system”; Lucas Turner — First and Second Place, Excellence in Audio Digital Storytelling, “Rio Blanco County Newscast”; Caitlin Walker — First Place, Best Newsletter, “Your Weekly News Roundup”; Caitlin Walker — Second Place, Best Infographic, “Ballot Bingo”; and the sweepstakes award (meaning the most wins in a category) for Other/Mixed Media.
We couldn’t do any of this without all of you, so these awards should be shared, and I was remiss for not doing so last week. We are grateful for your continued support!
