Melissa Milios Davis, Vice President, Gates Family Foundation; Director & Chair, CMP
Sarah Kurz, Vice President, Rose Community Foundation; Vice Chair, CMP
Last month while on a panel at the Lenfest Institute’s News Philanthropy Summit, a kind audience member lobbed Melissa a question that we are answering here now in hopes that it piques interest among some of our peers — especially the funders and local news innovators descending on Miami next week for the Knight Media Forum.
After sharing five years of stories and data on Colorado’s #newsCOneeds campaign — and giving a glimpse into our state’s robust civic news ecosystem and Colorado Media Project’s role as a funder, catalyst and advocate for it — the question came:
“What recommendations do you have for national or place-based funders who might want to learn about or get involved in Colorado’s media ecosystem?”
The answer is simple: Join us.
When we say “us” we’re talking about the Colorado Media Project funder table — a unique peer-to-peer group that we convene regularly to learn from media leaders and innovators across Colorado and the U.S., to strategize together, and to leverage resources via pooled funds and co-funding to address big issues that extend beyond any single newsroom, organization, topic, sector or community.
You won’t get a pitch from CMP — we’re here help each other navigate a complex and rapidly changing local media landscape, in hopes that together we can make the biggest impact from corner to corner of our state, both through smarter independent grantmaking and by coordinating together to make some big bets. In January, we hosted a full-day convening with Media Impact Funders and Philanthropy Colorado to hear new audience and landscape research, review CMP’s 2023 EOY report, and share individual foundation strategies and investments. If you’d like to join us sometime or chat to learn more, please email us.
Our colleague Sarah Gustavus Lim, who is setting a similar table in New Mexico, has just released a three-part series on launching a local news Ecosystem Hub, spotlighting other hubs across the country (including CMP) and how to move from collaboration to ecosystem building. Our colleagues in North Carolina, New Jersey, Chicago, Oklahoma, New Hampshire and beyond are doing amazing work that stems from these same values, and you can read about it here.
When we say “join” it’s an invitation to learn about and engage with Colorado — and take away your own lessons and models. You don’t need to start from scratch. At CMP, we’ve always been dedicated to an open-source, research-based, ecosystem-affirming, ground-up approach to supporting civic media innovation, continuous learning, and scalable solutions.
Since 2018, six CMP funders — Bohemian Foundation, The Colorado Health Foundation, The Colorado Trust, Democracy Fund, Gates Family Foundation, and Rose Community Foundation, CMP’s fiscal sponsor — together have committed more than $6.2 million and rallied millions more in impact investments and independent grants toward CMP’s mission — not to salvage legacy systems of media, or to create a new single entity or outlet-to-eclipse-them-all. Our north star is to build a healthier, more equitable, solutions-focused local civic news and information ecosystem that reaches, serves and engages all Coloradans in a participatory democracy.
WHY JOIN or start A STATEWIDE NEWS FUND?
Why would other funders and innovative partners want to join our efforts here in flyover country (aside from the mountains and rivers)? Well, we’d argue that, dollar-for-dollar, by taking this approach Colorado has been quietly standing up some of the most ambitious initiatives, civic news organizations, and ecosystem supports in the nation. That makes fertile ground for continued learning and investment.
So far, through CMP’s statewide civic news fund hosted at Rose Community Foundation, we have made more than 150 grants to projects and organizations that are hard at work serving Colorado communities each day — providing many of the state’s too-long overlooked ethnic media and small, independently owned rural newspapers with their first philanthropic dollars ever.
Just last month, we announced more than $350,000 to 27 newsrooms through our Advancing Equity in Local News fund, to address calls to action from community members and journalists of color through the multi-year Voices Initiative led by the Colorado News Collaborative with support from CMP.
In 2022 six grantees in CMP’s Community News Network that serve Colorado’s communities of color and rural residents received three-year funding commitments with added capacity-building and sustainability support.
And since 2018, #newsCOneeds — a state-level version of the national NewsMatch program — has helped dozens of Colorado’s nonprofit and small, locally owned for-profit community newsrooms raise more than $2.3 million in total from small-dollar individual contributors.
In addition, Colorado funders are making big bets — together and independently, through grant dollars and impact investments — that have helped launch and grow new media models that are creating a more resilient and responsive local news ecosystem in Colorado, including:
The Colorado News Conservancy, the first state affiliate established by the National Trust for Local News, which kept 24 Colorado Community Media titles in local hands and is now investing in community listening, digital transformation, streamlining business services, and boosting editorial capacity; nearby the Aurora Sentinel — serving the state’s most diverse city — is on a similar path under separate but mission-aligned ownership;
The Colorado News Collaborative, a hub for accountability reporting, community engagement and capacity-building that brings together journalists from newsrooms statewide to share and learn best-practices, take on big projects, and share content freely and efficiently via AP StoryShare;
The Colorado Sun, which as of EOY 2021 had more paying members than The Texas Tribune (in a state with one-fifth the population, just sayin’) and whose founding journalists are co-owners of the public benefit corporation;
Colorado Public Radio, now one of the largest newsrooms in the state, added digital capacity and a younger, more diverse metro audience through its acquisition of Denverite, one in the first wave of public radio-digital site mergers in the nation;
Rocky Mountain PBS, including its launch of The DROP, one of the country’s first public media urban alternative FM-radio stations, expansion of its inclusive Colorado Voices digital-first strategy, and 2021 opening of the shared COLab Newsroom in downtown Denver; and
The Colorado Press Association, one of the most forward-thinking industry coalitions in the nation, which just launched a new podcast spotlighting member innovations, convenes cross-sector working groups to tackle “wicked problems” facing the industry, and leads advocacy for press freedom and open government.
Each one of these efforts by itself would be one to watch — and all are worthy of our philanthropic investment — but to have all of these experiments in local news going on in a single state? With so much going on, there’s so much to learn.
Luckily, we also have Corey Hutchins of Colorado College here with Inside the News in Colorado, a weekly Substack newsletter tracking the industry and how it’s being reimagined, and the new Colorado News Mapping Project — a model that others can replicate for tracking news deserts and local news partners.
so How does it work?
None of what’s happened in Colorado has been accidental, but it has been organic. While the news industry in Colorado has experienced ups and downs for decades, nearly five years ago CMP was started with a kernel of an idea — that the future of local news was not a problem for journalists alone to solve, but one for the community itself had to own.
Since then we have kept our finger on the pulse of what Colorado residents want from local news — and who they trust — via three statewide surveys (in 2018, 2019 and 2022), convened a blue-ribbon panel to identify local and state-level policy solutions to the crisis facing local civic news, worked with COLab and the Colorado Press Association to understand the realities and needs of modern journalists and newsrooms, and worked with Colorado College, University of Denver, COLab, Hearken to map and track where Coloradans get local news — and who’s behind it.
Members of CMP’s Executive Committee have made multi-year commitments to CMP, and have developed a theory of change that guides our collective grantmaking and investments. This year, we’ve allocated more than $1.3 million to provide direct grants to newsrooms and initiatives across the state, via funding pools dedicated to each of our three-year priorities: Advancing Equity in Local News, the Watchdog Fund for Accountability Journalism, and the Community News Innovation and Sustainability Fund.
We also understand that each funder has unique priorities and strategies — currently, each CMP funder is also making their own additional media grants independently. We see CMP’s Funder Table as a place for learning and sharing, with each other and with civic news leaders, and we strongly encourage funders to keep making their own direct investments in the individual newsrooms, ecosystem builders, and civic news and information projects they find most compelling.
In the end, the primary goal of the CMP Funder Table is not just to increase the overall amount and impact of philanthropic giving and public support for civic news and local media innovators across Colorado. It is also to ensure that all Coloradans — especially those historically marginalized and excluded from civic conversations and decision making — have access to high-quality local news and information that they trust and use to learn about important issues facing their families, local communities, and the state, engage with their community, and participate in democracy.
In doing so, CMP hopes to provide a new model ourselves, so that other place-based and national funders can learn both from us, and alongside us.
Interested in joining an upcoming CMP funder roundtable? Reach out to Melissa Milios Davis at mdavis@gatesfamilyfoundation.org or Sarah Kurz at skurz@rcfdenver.org.