By Vince Bzdek

There’s a memorable scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” when peasants are loading bodies onto a cart after the plague has passed through town. Trouble is, one of the people a worker is trying to throw on the cart is not quite dead yet.

“I’m not dead!” “I’m not dead!” the man cries out.

“Yes he is,” insists the worker carrying him over his shoulder. “Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.”

“I’m feeling better!” the man says. “I feel happy! I feel happy!”

After reading a new report on the state of Colorado journalism, and visiting with intrepid news people from all around the state at the Colorado Press Association annual conference last weekend, I’m thinking newspapers aren’t quite dead yet, either.

Their demise certainly has been an oft-repeated storyline in recent years. But now I’m starting to think the reports of journalism’s death are greatly exaggerated. Especially in Colorado.

“Remarkably, Colorado newsrooms are holding the line,” Laura Frank, executive director of COLab, announces in a new survey of Colorado newsrooms.

Nearly nine out of 10 outlets maintained or actually increased the percentage of their coverage devoted to local news from 2022 to 2025, the survey found.

The average media outlet produces 30 original stories a month — nearly a new story every day of the year — with original work representing 85% of its total content.

More than two out of three outlets who described their anticipated finances for 2026 said they were stable or planning expansion.

Our own publications — The Denver Gazette, Colorado Springs Gazette and Colorado Politics — garnered 64 awards at the CPA conference, the most of any media company, another acknowledgment I hope that we, too, are doing our part to keep journalism alive and well.

“Despite being stretched thin, Colorado still has a functioning local-news system: organizations, experienced journalists, audiences and community relationships remain,” the report found. “Rather than rescue it after collapse, Colorado would be much better served if we found ways to give it more capacity to adapt while those assets still exist.”

There are other bright spots:

• Receptive audience: Colorado local news still reaches substantial audiences, but those audiences are spread across websites, newsletters, print, broadcast and other platforms. The average Colorado media site reaches 120,621 annual online visitors, 4,770 newsletter subscribers and has a 3,010 average print circulation.
• Policy momentum: There’s a real push for state support. Colorado’s new state budget includes language directing agencies to prioritize advertising spending with Colorado-based news outlets serving local communities, and a coalition has been organizing “Local News Day” events at the Capitol to build support for further policy help.
• Green shoots: Nonprofit and community outlets are filling gaps — Although the Aspen Daily News was sold, Aspen Journalism keeps doing investigative environmental/community reporting and displaced journalists from shuttered papers (like Boulder Weekly staff) have launched new ventures.
• Institutional coordination — COLab, Colorado Press Association and Colorado Media Project jointly run the annual statewide newsroom survey, something few states have. The philanthropic Colorado Trust for Local News, which owns and sustains seven Colorado newspapers, also bought a printing plant in the state which now prints over 40 small newspapers.

The survey included major broadcasters, public media, community newspapers, digital outlets and solo publishers: 101 for-profit entities, 59 nonprofits, two public-benefit corporations and two employee-owned organizations. Denver alone has nearly 150 unique news outlets covering it, including two daily newspapers, six TV stations, four radio stations, three major podcasts and a host of dedicated newsletters.

Colorado is actually doing better than most states and is regularly cited as a national model. The caveat: “Better than most” still means real strain — thin margins, small staffs and increasing costs.

The bad news is that most papers are doing more with less. Among the same outlets followed across all four years in the survey, median editorial staffing fell from 3.75 full-time equivalents (FTEs) in 2022 to 3.1 in 2025; noneditorial staffing — the people doing everything else for the business — fell from 2.0 to 1.5. Among the 123 outlets reporting some editorial staff, 39% had one or fewer FTEs and half had two or fewer.

There was no single revenue storyline in 2025. Among for-profit respondents, 47% said revenue fell and 28% said it grew. Nonprofits reported the opposite pattern: 53% grew and 24% declined.

“The data show a local news system caught in a capacity bottleneck,” the report states. “Colorado newsrooms are still producing substantial amounts of original, local journalism and many have clear visions of how they want to grow and adapt: build audiences, strengthen revenue, develop new products, use new technology and deepen community engagement. But the same small teams responsible for today’s news are also being asked to build tomorrow’s operation. With too little time, staffing and business capacity, good ideas compete with essential work that already must get done.”

The report found that the same constraints surfaced again and again: unreliable revenue, too few people, rising print and distribution costs, difficulty selling advertising or sponsorships and the challenge of building audiences.

Colorado’s advantage is less about having escaped the industry’s structural problems and more about having unusually strong support from owners like ours vested in the mission of journalism at the Denver and Colorado Springs Gazettes, a great underlying infrastructure of news organizations like CPA and COLab and strong philanthropic backing from organizations like the National Trust for Local News and the Colorado Media Project.

“Funders are investing and statewide organizations are adding different kinds of capacity,” notes the report. “Together, these organizations and others expand what individual newsrooms can do by spreading expertise, technology, training and experimentation across the ecosystem.”

That strong Colorado spirit of journalistic mission was palpable at the CPA conference last weekend, which was wisely themed “Local News Solutions.” The conference was chock-full of hands-on, practical and inspirational sessions designed to make sure Colorado’s little guys survive and thrive.

But make no mistake: such conferences, as well as philanthropy and collaboration, are first aid for journalism, which only goes so far. In the long run, citizens themselves will have to reawaken to the core value of journalism in their communities and be willing to pay to sustain it. I was glad to see many of the speakers at the conference hammering home the notion that communities do not function properly without local news, that the retrenchment of local journalism is interfering with the ability of the public to have oversight and accountability for what the government does.

“We are civic infrastructure,” said Garry Pierre-Pierre, director of partnerships for URL Media and keynote speaker at the conference. He talked about how community relationships are key to long-term sustainability of local news. The most resilient local publishers intentionally build networks of relationships with civic organizations, businesses, schools, libraries, cultural institutions, faith leaders and community groups that strengthen both journalism and the community itself. And vice versa, I would argue.

In a separate talk, Amanda Mountain, president and CEO of Rocky Mountain Public Media, underlined that civic mission. “Local news is in the business of helping people belong where they live. We’re building a community that happens to contain an audience.”

The newsroom should be at the center of the public square, added Frank.

Local journalism matters most when communities are under pressure, Pierre-Pierre said in his address: when people need trusted information, when public institutions are strained, when rumors move faster than facts and when powerful interests would prefer less scrutiny. In those moments, the work is not abstract. It can help people navigate their lives, understand their neighbors, hold power to account and see their own communities with more clarity and dignity.

Drawing from his experience as founder of The Haitian Times and his work with community-centered media, he offered both encouragement and challenge as Colorado journalists gathered to celebrate their best work and recommit to the communities they serve.

As we fight the good fight, there’s nothing more fortifying for newspaper people like me than rubbing elbows and comparing war stories with comrades in arms from all across the state at such gatherings. People like the great Bob and Gerri Sweeney, who were inducted into the CPA Hall of Fame after more than 67 years of sustaining community newspapers across Colorado, which is just about as long as they have been married.  

“As important as our conversations about revenue, technology, legal issues and industry trends may be, one of the things I value most about this convention is the opportunity to reconnect with the people who understand this work better than anyone else,” said CPA Board President Lee Bachlet. “And honestly, I think we need that connection now more than ever.”