A month before Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a bill that would give journalists a leg up over normal people when it comes to getting public records, the local NBC station in Colorado Springs laid off journalists, continuing a trend in local TV, as news audiences slide away or die.
The previous month, Colorado Community Media, which owns two dozen newspapers around Denver, closed two outlets, and its future looks super shaky, with layoffs and tumult, after a promising start in 2021.
In December, in a familiar story, the Flagler News on the eastern plains closed after a 112-year run, while layoffs hit Colorado Public Radio, whose recent growth had inspired hope that serious journalism may have a muscular business model.
The reality is, every platform you turn to for news — including the dear Colorado Times Recorder that’s looking at you right now — is on thin ice or in the freezing water. God hopes the Alden-Global-Capital-owned Denver Post remains in its diminished but stable condition, but you have to bet against it, unless you’re an emotional bettor like me. And who knows what happens to the conservative Gazette news outlets when aging billionaire Phil Anschutz dies — or before, for that matter.
Journalism experiments, like the Colorado Sun and collaborative reporting projects, are encouraging but far from certain to survive, and they’re not large enough to hold the state’s local government officials accountable like communities need.
In the midst of this, this very week, the Colorado Legislature is considering overriding Polis’s veto of the aforementioned proposed law that would actually reduce the ability of citizens to perform the basic function that a dwindling number of journalists have been slogging away at during our lifetimes. That is, holding government officials accountable by requesting public documents.
The bill would give public officials more time to respond to non-journalists — and it would raise costs.
The state Legislature should be doing exactly the opposite. It should pass a law that encourages and enables more people to request public documents and hold the government accountable — not discourage and disempower them.
I mean, here’s the scenario that should tank the bill in every lawmaker’s eyes: You live in one of many towns in Colorado with few or no professional journalists, and you’ve never blogged in your life. So you’re not considered a journalist by any stretch. You’re mad at your government over something that, a few years ago, the local newspaper reporters would have been pursuing like flies on fish. But there’s no newspaper, so you’re the one who has to file the Colorado Open Records Act request. You figure out how to do it, which takes a while, and you need a response within three days, like a normal journalist would get. By the time you get your documents, it’s too late. The vote happened. The debate ended. The damage is done.
The short of this is, whether we like it or not, the government accountability function of journalism needs to shift more to regular people.
That’s our future, as journalism limps, collapses, or dies, especially at the local level, and even more so in rural communities.
The intentions of lawmakers who want to override Polis’s veto are good: to help local officials deal with folks who, at worst, simply want to gum up government — or, at best, are so impassioned by their cause that they overwhelm officials with requests. And they’ve defined “journalist” quite broadly.
I wish we could rely on trained journalists to file reasonable open-records requests and represent the public. But that era is going away or is already gone.
And, lest we forget, democracy is under attack.
Now is the worst time to give government officials more ways to ignore document-requesting citizens. That’s what a vote to override Polis’s veto would do.
