I would actually love to have that discussion. It's one we should be having more, and I am very sympathetic to the challenges CPR and other media outlets face.
If we could keep people from being distracted by wannabe keyboard warriors, but you and I both know that was a problem in the Usenet days and it hasn't changed.
How many reporters were covering Denver 30 years ago? The Post and the Rocky probably had 100+ people in each of their newsrooms. Now the Rocky is gone and Alden has cut the Post to shreds. Maybe there were 15-20 street reporters at each of five TV newsrooms then, plus whatever KOA had.
I wish I knew, but the newspaper archive sites I subscribe to have major holes in coverage in Colorado. I do have access to some Newsbank text-only articles through the Denver Public Library, which indicate that the Post was actually in some financial distress 30-35 years ago. So this may not be a new problem. The new part is Alden's determination to squeeze the last drop of blood out of the skeleton that remains of the Post...and then what?
I'll admit to not having bought a Post since I got here. Based what I see at Safeway or King Soopers in the late afternoon, with the newspaper racks far from empty, I'm not the only one avoiding a newspaper purchase. The same cast of characters that ran the
Oakland Tribune East Bay Times into the ground have done the same here. Commercial radio coverage is confined to brief headlines at best. TV is a whole other topic but is probably in the best shape, for some value of "best", right now.
You can also see the stresses in Westword, the alternative newspaper. The website is good, but I suspect there are difficulties in getting direct support of that web presence. The print edition is supported by marijuana ads. Shades of Max Media, at least until the Pillar sale closes.
Alone among traditional media, public newsrooms have at least generally held their own or grown in size while everyone else has been shrinking, but that's never enough. Even if CPR were still KCFR and still focused only on greater Denver, it's still a painful series of daily choices to figure out what you can reasonably cover with a fraction of the reporters any newsroom used to have.
I think that's true of
any newsroom. Even in the days when I ran a small-market news department with three other full-timers plus part-time staff, we had to make choices. That operation is down to one person so you can imagine that it's a shadow of its former self.
Then you have the public radio sensibility that says you don't take some of the shortcuts commercial media takes - the stuff you or I would have spent an hour or less per story working on back in our commercial news days, grabbing two quick bites over the phone and moving on to what's breaking next? I still know how to do that pretty well, but it's not what public newsrooms are built to do. Longer stories with more audio and deeper perspectives take longer and so you get less overall productivity from any given size of newsroom, which means you can cover even less overall.
And then you get to the statewide expansion of CFR and the task starts to look impossible. If you can't begin to wrap your arms around greater Denver and all that it includes, how do you do any justice to a sprawling state with completely different audiences on the far side of the Rockies?
From what I can see from a distance, they were at least smart to try to keep KRCC in the Springs as a somewhat separate operation. It's certainly its own distinct community and politics and I'm sure it's much better served by continuing what KRCC had been doing, instead of merging Springs coverage into Denver.
It's a setup that's all but guaranteed to fully please nobody, though. I know there are far too many voids in my newsroom's coverage of the million or so people in our coverage area. I can't imagine what it must be like trying to cover a much more diverse population more than five times that size.
I've noticed several philosophies of coverage among radio stations that engage in local reporting. I'll use Bay Area examples because I'm familiar with them over 20+ years of listening.
There's the reactive, spot-news heavy approach. This is the station you tune to when the ground shakes at 3:30 in the morning, in this case KCBS. There's no equivalent in Denver (leaving the earthquake example aside). KOA is a headline service, and not much of one. Oddly, co-owned KHOW actually seems to have more complete newscasts.
There's the approach of going more in-depth, not entirely ignoring the news of the day, but either providing more context to that news, or making an effort to uncover overlooked stories. I would call this the KQED approach.
There's the approach of explicitly
not covering what others are covering, even if it's big news of the day, instead developing features that other stations are not likely to be interested in. That's the KALW approach.
There's the approach of just making stuff up to get people enervated. That's the modus operandi of most commercial talk stations.
I would place CPR between the KQED approach and the KALW approach. There is some coverage of the news of the day, particularly in the Morning Edition and ATC inserts, but there's also an emphasis on features - sometimes very long features that are of limited interest to general audiences - on programs such as "Colorado Matters" and a tendency to avoid covering more mundane topics. While I say those topics are "mundane" they often are exactly the kinds of things that are needed to get sense of one's community.
I'm interested in specific examples of where you think CPR falls short, or where the "typical public radio mindset" gets in the way of fuller coverage of a story or community. I've spent a lot of time in my 20 years in public radio with those ups and downs - for as much as my newsroom has changed to include more viewpoints and voices and community connections since I started there, there's always so much more yet to be done.
I obviously don't hear or see all of CPR's output, so I may be giving examples that aren't exactly fair to CPR. But here's one: the immigrant situation. Denver is leasing or buying hotels in order to house some of them. It so happens that most of those hotels are in the old Stapleton Airport area and are becoming a bit tattered. Problem is, this also concentrates the burden of solving the problem on one neighborhood, which, outside the actual area of Stapleton redevelopment is more of a lower-middle-class area. Wealthier areas in other parts of the city - Washington Park is an often-cited example - haven't been called upon to share the burden by having shelters or tiny houses or whatever in their neighborhoods. The potential for opposition is obvious, and has been realized in other neighborhoods. The councilwoman for the former Stapleton neighhborhood has pointed this out, repeatedly. Her message is basically: We've stepped up and done our part; now it's
your turn. Not much changes. I haven't heard much coverage - or any, really - of this aspect of the immigrant housing crisis on CPR.
There are others, quite Denver-specific, starting with the deficiencies in public transit with RTD, the Regional Transit District (a/k/a "Reason To Drive") and expenditures on a forthcoming BRT (bus rapid transit) project on Colfax that appears likely to satisfy no one. At an open meeting a couple of months ago, I asked an RTD transit planner if they saw what happened with the Central Avenue BRT project in Albuquerque, which turned out to be a big mess, and took any lessons away from it and I got an evasive answer. It seems RTD is going full-steam ahead on an expensive, disruptive project that in the end may well fail to meet its objectives. Possibly CPR has covered this, particularly before I got here, but it's going to be an ongoing issue, especially once construction starts this spring, and I haven't heard any coverage of it recently.
And then don't get me started about DIA. It's growing way beyond expectations and the administrative bureaucracy of the airport just doesn't seem to know to keep up with that grow. For example: try finding parking that isn't located halfway to Kansas.
Yes, I know CPR isn't a Denver-only operation. But Denver is the largest city in the state - Colorado Springs is second, followed by Aurora - so spending time on in-depth features on obscure topics, while sometimes of interest, may not be the best use of its limited resources.
(And we're the lucky ones - unlike CPR and so many others, we have been spared newsroom staffing cuts so far.)
To be fair to CPR, Stuart Vanderwilt, the CEO, made it very clear that a goal of the recent restructuring was to
avoid newsroom staffing cuts; the podcast operation took the brunt of the cuts. I think there is a recognition that CPR is filling some of the voids of news coverage that exist around here - but I still find myself somewhat frustrated with what I hear. I suppose you could wave it away and ask, "what did you expect, Roberts? Another KCBS? (Or, for TV, Another KTVU?)" Since it doesn't exist here, and given the current state of the radio business, I know I'm not going to get that. I just would like to get a better sense of the community I've chosen to retire to. That's actually been a great move for us, but the quality of the news media could stand considerable improvement. CPR is a part of the problem; they do help solve it somewhat, but I feel they could be doing more by altering their approach more toward the KQED mindset on news.
