Corey Hutchins

<p>On a Thursday evening last month, journalists from The Colorado Sun gathered with hundreds of supporters in a downtown Denver brewery to bask in the glow of a full year in business. A special craft beer on tap that night was named for the Sun, and the crowd of politicos, businesspeople, and the civic-minded set […]</p>

<p>Jill and Michael Fischer live seven miles outside the city of Durango, a historic mountain town of nearly 20,000 and the seat of La Plata County in southwest Colorado. When they turn on their TV for local news, however, evening broadcasts—about community events, the weather, and most notably politics—arrive via satellite from Albuquerque, New Mexico, […]</p>

<p>During a conference call with employees in the Lee Enterprises newspaper chain this summer, an editor at the Times of Northwest Indiana explained a secret behind her paper’s online traffic boom. Mugshots, she shared in a presentation, had been a “game-changer” for the paper, which includes collections of booking photos below its crime stories and […]</p>

<p>The politics desk at The Denver Post has imploded. Starting in April with voluntary exits that included Brian Eason, a Statehouse reporter, and climaxing this month with a new round of departures, four of the political writers and an editor have gone. John Frank and Jesse Paul, who also covered the Statehouse, resigned in recent […]</p>

<p>THE DENVER POST‘S editorial rebellion against its owners—Digital First Media and its hedge-fund controller, Alden Global Capital—peaked again late last week, when three high-profile editors and the paper’s chairman resigned in the course of two days. Yesterday, CJR reported on an editorial, written by ex-Post Editorial Page Editor Chuck Plunkett, that criticized the Post’s owners and was […]</p>

<p>ON THURSDAY, DENVER POST Editorial Page Editor Chuck Plunkett resigned from his position. According to Plunkett, an executive with Digital First Media—the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund—declined to approve an editorial Plunkett wrote that was critical of the Post’s owners. Since Plunkett’s resignation, two more senior editors quit, and former […]</p>

<p>AFTER 21 YEARS at The Denver Post, Jason Blevins, the paper’s one-man mountain bureau, is now pitching stories as an independent journalist without the assurances of a full-time paycheck. “In the past three weeks or a month I have been schooled in the realities of freelance, and it’s a hard gig,” says Blevins, who covered the […]</p>

<p>FOR TWO YEARS, JULIE REYNOLDS has cranked out stories about Alden Global Capital, the secretive New York hedge fund that controls Digital First Media, the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain. She has profiled the firm’s elusive leaders and closely chronicles DFM’s layoffs, which recently include two-dozen employees from the Bay Area News Group and roughly a third […]</p>

<p>Update, February 27: Journalists at The Casper Star-Tribune voted to unionize, becoming the first newsroom to do so while owned by Lee Enterprises. Furthermore, Wyoming Press Association director Darcie Hoffland said her organization doesn’t know of any newspaper union that has ever operated in Wyoming before. “As we have said from the beginning, our goal is to protect […]</p>

OVER THE PAST YEAR, as a correspondent for CJR’s United States Project, I reported how a local new outlet was fighting to gain access to public text messages of rural sheriffs in North Carolina, and how a publisher in Colorado pledged to sue a state senator for defamation when the politician call…

<p>South Carolina Circuit Court Judge William Keesley ruled this week that political blogger Will Folks will not go to jail for defying a court order to reveal unnamed sources in a libel case, a decision some see as important for reporters seeking to protect confidential sources in the state. At issue was whether Folks, a […]</p>

<p>LAST WEEK, AS THE CHARLESTON POST & COURIER covered a hostage standoff and shooting at a local restaurant, editor Mitch Pugh announced his paper would shut down comments on the developing story. FYI: We are in the process of disabling comments on the breaking shooting story. Majority either violated TOS, off topic or repugnant. — Mitch […]</p>

<p>In a recent issue of The New Yorker, staff writer Peter Hessler brought readers to the western Colorado city of Grand Junction for a piece that delves into the personalities of Trump supporters in a place that becomes a stand-in for rural America writ large. At nearly 6,500 words, Hessler’s story, headlined “How Trump is […]</p>

<p>ON FRIDAY, MELISSA BOUGHTON—a journalist for NC Policy Watch, the news arm of the nonprofit North Carolina Justice Center—was barred from a media table where she was covering a legislative hearing about redistricting. The incident, which Boughton publicized on Twitter, highlights the credentialing challenges facing contemporary news organizations that are attached to policy or lobbying […]</p>

<p>A PAIR OF NORTH CAROLINA sheriff’s offices, in Ashe and Union counties, have a couple things in common. Each is on the receiving end of open records requests from an investigative TV reporter named Nick Ochsner, who asked for copies of text messages sent by law enforcement officials. And each office is pushing back against those […]</p>

<p>JOURNALISTS IN SOUTH CAROLINA are closely watching a court hearing this morning in which a judge could send a polarizing political blogger to jail after he refused a court order to identify confidential sources. The blogger is Will Folks, a political consultant who was a controversial spokesman for former Gov. Mark Sanford before he started FITSnews.com […]</p>

<p>IN A TWIST ON THE BILLIONAIRE-OWNER business model of journalism, two Colorado news outlets—each one committed to state politics coverage and owned by a different conservative billionaire— are “joining forces.” But the move is closer to a takeover than a merger, and marks a further consolidation of the media presence of Denver industrialist Phil Anschutz in […]</p>

<p>A NEW COLORADO LAW, passed by legislators at the end of the 2017 session, will allow the state’s politically unaffiliated voters to participate in party primaries for the first time. The law, however, carries a public disclosure component that could leave many of the state’s journalists vulnerable to partisan critique. Proposition 108, a statewide ballot […]</p>

<p>LAST WEEK, JOURNALISTS AT SEVERAL local newspapers run by Berkshire Hathaway’s BH Media Group were met with news that their owner was slashing nearly 300 jobs companywide. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett was told about the cross-country layoffs, but “his opinion was not sought or offered,” according to reporter and “Warren Watch” columnist Steve Jordon at […]</p>

During a time of “press-as-enemy” rhetoric, Republican lawmakers in Colorado are redoubling efforts to ensure a friendlier relationship with journalists. While their counterparts in other states seem to be scaling back accessibility, the Colorado GOP—at least in each chamber of the state legislat…