England: Independent journalism needs your support to survive

By Dan England

Wow, it’s been quite a month, hasn’t it?

I was talking with my dad yesterday, and I said to him, “Imagine if this happened in 1985. We’d be screwed.” 

Can you imagine going through this without the technology that’s allowed us do our jobs, or stay in touch, or even just live our life? 

Well, a kind of reversal could be true as well. Could you imagine going through this without our news media? 

We wouldn’t know what was opened or closed, or whether we should stay indoors, or what causes the virus. We wouldn’t know just how serious this is. We may not even know to stay six feet away from someone. What’s even worse, I doubt we’d really see the consequences of believing that this is nothing more than a bad flu. Let’s be honest: Isn’t that what you thought at first, until you read a lot more information about it and you realized what it would mean if we continued with our normal lives?

I did. That’s why I’m still grateful for the news media. 

Well, not to be an alarmist (which seems impossible given the current climate), but it may be gone soon.

Newspapers were already in a serious struggle to survive, even during the boom times, like, you know, February.

Given that, I fear that this virus may kill - perhaps that’s not the best word right now - newspapers.

Our free-market system has reduced a local newspaper’s ability to cover their communities. I could, accurately, call it a shell of what it once was, but I still love free-market journalism, and I don’t want to bash on our friends doing the best they can under some bad circumstances. 

But that’s why I’m writing to you today. 

Years ago, we were talking about the idea of non-profit and independent journalism, and it sounded like a good idea to me even back then, when you were called a socialist if you considered anything other than our current free market to be king. These days, I believe it’s the only way newspapers will survive. 

Oh, the news media will live on, but there’s a good chance local news, the kind newspapers cover better than anyone else, will disappear. When that happens, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find unbiased coverage of our city council, our school board and our county commissioners who make decisions that affect us far more than whatever the federal government is up to these days. When THAT happens, you’ll have leaders making decisions without our input, which is, unfortunately, not your father’s democracy, or the kind that serves as the backbone of “Hamilton.” 

I know it sounds like I’m forcing you to take your medicine, but you also won’t hear about who’s playing at the Union Colony Civic Center, or at Friday Fest, or at the Arts Picnic. You won’t hear about the play put on by the Stampede Troupe. You won’t hear about the longtime friend you fell out of touch with who won money on “Wheel of Fortune.” You won’t hear about the animal shelter overcrowding with puppies who need a home, or the fire that left a family needing help from the Salvation Army, or why a road seems to have more fatal crashes on it than most of the others that surround it. 

You won’t hear about your community at all. 

There is another way. Man, did I bury that lede, huh? Kelly Ragan is starting The NoCo Optimist, an independent news organization. It’s an idea that’s taking hold. There are independent newspapers in Boulder and Fort Collins, and one, the Colorado Sun, competes well with The Denver Post for bringing us statewide news. 

Perhaps I should explain a bit more. Newspapers are mostly owned by corporations, and one in particular owns The Denver Post and the Boulder Daily Camera and, yes, the Greeley Tribune. This business, a hedge fund mostly, has slashed employees as if they were extras in a “Friday the 13th” reboot. 

Maybe that’s the best way to survive, but it also crimps the ability of those newsrooms to cover local news. 

I believe in the Optimist. I’m giving it some of my time as a quasi-editor, and depending on how things go, I may get more involved. It’s an independent, online, local publication that won’t rely on the stock market to survive. 

But it does rely on you. The Sun pays a staff well to do good journalism, and it’s rewarded with, so far, a healthy subscription base, as well as benefactors who want to see good journalism survive. Workers, even those who believe in a good cause, still need to pay their rent, feed their families and occasionally go downtown for a beer. Ragan is doing this by herself, without pay for now, because she believes in local journalism. She believes Greeley deserves more. I admire her. I can’t afford to be her. Neither can my kids.

If you support the Optimist, you’re supporting local journalism, and maybe Ragan will be able to do this full-time and eventually hire a staff. Try it out today. Subscribe and share. It may not work, but I believe it can, and in these times, we need to believe in something.