TEDxMileHigh 2019

Read The Script:

I’ve been a journalist for over 23 years at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and most recently, The Denver Post.

Being a journalist has shaped every aspect of my identity. We’re trained to evaluate the evidence from all relevant angles. Seek credible, reliable sources. Double-check and triple-check our information and then check it again. When we do make mistakes, we correct them.

It’s made me disciplined, careful, and thorough. I distrust ideological purity and vote for both Republicans & Democrats. I’ve breathed pepper spray covering protests, but I’d never participated in one. Perhaps the most radical thing I’ve ever done was getting my ear pierced.

But, being a journalist also ingrained in me that when something goes terribly wrong, you speak up. That’s why I’m on this stage today. Because when it comes to the state of local news, something has gone terribly wrong.

So consider this talk a protest.

When I joined The Denver Post in 2003, it was among the nation’s 10 largest newspapers, with an impressive subscriber base & nearly 300 journalists.

Before my wife & I could even unpack from the move, they sent me to Eagle, Colorado. A young hotel desk clerk accused basketball superstar Kobe Bryant of rape. The Denver Post showed up in force, with a big team that covered the story and its aftermath from seemingly every conceivable angle.

At the time, I was in my 30s. Any ambitious journalist my age would’ve aspired to work at a big national paper like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. But I was simply blown away by my first few weeks at The Denver Post and I thought, “This is gonna be my paper. I can make a career here.”

7 years passed and we were sold to a hedge fund, Alden Global Capital. They let go half the newsroom staff, but it made sense to me. It used to be that 80% of a paper’s revenue came from pricey print ads & classifieds. With emerging giants like Google, Facebook, and Craigslist, that ad revenue all but disappeared. The entire industry was undergoing a massive shift from print to digital, so Alden’s marching orders were to “put digital first” and take advantage of blogs, video, and social media. They said that one day the money we’d make online would make up for the money we lost in print. But that day never came.

In 2013, we won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Aurora theater shooting. Alden ordered that more journalists be cut. Again and again, we were forced to say goodbye to talented, hardworking journalists we often considered not just friends, but family. Those of us that remained were stretched impossibly thin, covering multiple beats and writing rushed articles.

In 2016, I was promoted to my dream job, the editorial page editor. On any given day, I talked to senators, the mayor, the chief of police, billionaires, and the leaders of grassroots organizations and nonprofits. People of influence across the state started their day reading our editorial page. I’ve never loved a job more.

I turned 50 that January. At any other time in the history of journalism, I would’ve had every right to feel I had it made. But that dream job wouldn’t even last two years.

Inside a windowless meeting room in March 2018, we learned that 30 more would have to go. This paper that once had 300 journalists, would now have 70. It didn’t make sense. Here we’d won multiple Pultizer Prizes, we shifted focus from paper to digital, we met ambitious online targets, and emails from the brass talked up The Post’s double-digit profit margins. If we were so successful & so profitable, why was our newsroom getting smaller and smaller and smaller?

I knew that what was happening here, to The Denver Post, was happening around the country. Since 2004, more than 1,800 newsrooms have closed. You’ve heard of food deserts? These are news deserts – communities, and often whole counties, with little to zero news coverage whatsoever. Adding to the problem, many newspapers have become ghost ships pretending to sail with newsrooms, but really just wrapping ads around filler copy.

Many more local newspapers have been sold off to companies like Alden. In that meeting, their intentions couldn’t be clearer: harvest what you can and throw away what’s left. A reporter cried out and I thought, “They just killed The Denver Post.”

I fell into major depression. A lot of us did. In a journal entry, I wrote that I wished I’d died in my sleep. My entire career, this institution that I believed in, was vanishing. I no longer thought I had anything to live for.

That’s when I decided to go rogue.

I realized I could use the paper to call out our owners in front of the city & the world. Working in secret with a team of eight writers, we prepared a special Sunday Perspective section about the importance of local news with a bare-knuckle editorial aimed directly at the paper’s owners: either invest in a quality newsroom, we argued, or sell us to owners who would.

I knew that publishing meant the end of my career at The Denver Post. Surely, I’d be fired or forced to resign. But when the now-or-never moment arrived, I rapped the wall left of my standing desk, the signal that we’d published the package. Post it on Twitter. Post it on Facebook. Post it everywhere. Be digital first!

The Denver Rebellion launched like a missile and went off like a hydrogen bomb.

Clearly, we weren’t alone in our outrage.

But, as expected, I was forced to resign. And a year later, nothing’s changed. The Denver Post is just a lone few journalists trying their hardest in this hollow husk of a once great paper.

Now, you might be thinking, “Who cares? Let this dying industry die.” And I get it – the local news has been declining for so long that many of you don’t even remember what it was like to have a great local paper. Perhaps you’ve seen All The Presidents Men or The Post, movies that romanticize what journalism once was. But I’m not here to be romantic or nostalgic. I’m here to warn you that when local news dies, so does our democracy. And that should concern you regardless of whether you subscribe.

Here’s why:

A democracy is a government of the people. People are the ultimate source of authority & power. A newsroom functions like a mirror: journalists see the community and reflect it back to us. That information is empowering – seeing, knowing, and understanding is how we make decisions.

When you have a great local newsroom, you have journalists listening in on every city council meeting, sitting through State House and Senate hearings, and the many important yet devastatingly boring committee hearings. They expose flaws within ill-conceived ordinances and those bills fail because the public is well-informed. They understand the pros and cons behind each ballot measure because journalists did the heavy lifting for them. Better yet, researchers found that reading a newspaper can mobilize as many as 13 percent of non-voters to vote. 13 percent! That could change the outcome of almost any election.

When you don’t have a great local newsroom, voters are left standing at the ballot box, confused, trying to make their best guess based on a paragraph of legalese. Flawed measures get passed. Well-conceived but highly technical measures don’t. Across the ballot, voters get more partisan.

Recently in Colorado, our Governor’s race had more candidates than anyone can remember. In years past, journalists would’ve thoroughly vetted, fact-checked, scrutinized, profiled, and debated each contender in the local paper.

Now, in place of rigorous research & fact checking, the public is left to interpret dog-and-pony-show stump speeches & clever campaign ads for themselves. And with campaign ads costing what they do, electability comes down to money. So by the time the primaries concluded, only the wealthiest and best-funded candidates emerged. Many experienced and praiseworthy public servants never got oxygen. Because when local news coverage disappears, major political races are pay-to-play. Is it any surprise that Colorado’s new governor was the candidate worth over 300 million dollars? Or that billionaire businessmen like Donald Trump & Howard Shultz can take the political scene by storm? I’m not sure this is what the founding fathers had in mind when they said “free & fair elections.”

It’s worth noting here too, that this is exactly why we can’t just rely on national newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post. We need them, my God, now more than ever before. But there’s no world in which they could cover every election in every county across the country. The only newsroom truly capable of covering your local election is your local newsroom. If you’re lucky & you still have one.

When the election is over, a great local newspaper is still there, waiting, like a watchdog. When there’s someone watching over them, politicians aren’t so powerful. Police do right by the public. Even massive corporations are on their best behavior.

It’s no wonder that Thomas Jefferson once said, “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Newspapers without a government. What Jefferson knew and what we’ve forgotten is that the press is the check & balance for our democracy.

If you feel like politicians and corporations and special interests are “getting away with it,” this is why. This mechanism that for generations helped inform and guide us no longer functions like it used to. You know intimately what the poisoned national discourse feels like. What a mockery of reasoned debate it has become. This is what happens when local papers shutter, when communities across the nation go unwatched & unseen.

But is that what we want?

Because until we, as a society, recognize that the decline of local news has real consequences for our democracy, this problem isn’t going to improve. The funding model is broken – newspapers aren’t profitable and especially in the era of Facebook & Google, they won’t be.

If newspapers are vital to our democracy, then we should fund them like they’re vital to our democracy. We can’t stand by and let our watchdogs be put down. We can’t let more communities vanish into darkness. It’s time to debate a public funding option before the Fourth Estate disappears, and with it, our democracy.

Because.. we need much more than a rebellion. It’s time for a revolution.

Thank you.

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