Stakeholder Ownership for Sustainable News

“Not Just for Those Who Can Pay”: The Colorado Sun 2023 Public Benefit Report

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 06:00:00 +0000

“Not Just for Those Who Can Pay”: The Colorado Sun 2023 Public Benefit Report Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/29/2023 - 00:00

Libby O'Neall

We at MEDLab are proud to have had the opportunity to produce the 2023 Public Benefit Report for the Colorado Sun, a pioneering, journalist-owned news organization that is strengthening the information ecosystem statewide. This report helps fulfill the Sun's obligation as a Colorado public benefit corporation, an incorporation structure that enables companies to dedicate themselves to a public mission, not just private benefit.

The Sun has made many adjustments and additions to its newsroom in 2023, from designating an Arts & Culture section to releasing a mobile app, not to mention the recent announcement to change its legal structure to a nonprofit. Despite no longer holding a PBC status, the Sun still plans to serve Coloradans’ information needs first and foremost. Read the report to learn more about how the Sun continues to pursue its public benefit mission under a new governance structure.

Download the report

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"Corner to Corner and Wall to Wall": The Colorado Sun 2022 Public Benefit Report

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 18:16:39 +0000

"Corner to Corner and Wall to Wall": The Colorado Sun 2022 Public Benefit Report Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/06/2022 - 12:16

Libby O'Neall

We at MEDLab are proud to have had the opportunity to produce the 2022 Public Benefit Report for the Colorado Sun, a pioneering, journalist-owned news organization that is strengthening the information ecosystem statewide. This report helps fulfill the Sun's obligation as a Colorado Public Benefit Corporation, an incorporation structure that enables companies to dedicate themselves to a public mission, not just private benefit.

Over the past year, the Sun supplied ample additive coverage to the state’s media scene as well as served as a national example for news outlets. Still, the publication faces challenges when it comes to accommodating their growth, both in the newsroom and among their audience. Read here to learn more about the progress made and the staff's ongoing efforts to fulfill their obligation to the public.

Download the report

The Sun has been a longstanding partner for MEDLab. See past collaborations here.

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"Whatever Colorado Needs Us to Be": The Colorado Sun 2021 Public Benefit Report

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 06:00:00 +0000

"Whatever Colorado Needs Us to Be": The Colorado Sun 2021 Public Benefit Report Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/09/2021 - 00:00

Libby O'Neall

We at MEDLab are proud to have had the opportunity to produce the 2021 Public Benefit Report for the Colorado Sun, a pioneering, journalist-owned news organization that is strengthening the information ecosystem statewide. This report helps fulfill the Sun's obligation as a Colorado Public Benefit Corporation, an incorporation structure that enables companies to dedicate themselves to a public mission, not just private benefit. The stakes have never been higher, as the Sun has experienced significant growth and was recently part of an innovative deal to acquire two dozen newspapers in the Denver area.

Download the report

The Sun has been a longstanding partner for MEDLab. Read about "How MEDLab Evaluated the Colorado Sun's Public Benefit" for the 2019 report, and watch our event this year on "How 24 Colorado Newspapers Are Staying Locally Owned."

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How 24 Colorado Newspapers Are Staying Locally Owned

Anonymous — Tue, 18 May 2021 17:05:16 +0000

How 24 Colorado Newspapers Are Staying Locally Owned Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/18/2021 - 11:05

June 3, 2021
12-1 pm Mountain Time
Free webinar

Watch

After years of shedding reporters and newsrooms, Colorado is home to a new experiment in sustainable journalism. In early May, the National Trust for Local News announced it was acquiring Colorado Community Media, a network of 24 newspapers in the Denver Metro area, via the Colorado News Conservancy, a new public benefit corporation. The Colorado News Conservancy is to be majority owned by the journalist-owned, online-only Colorado Sun. The deal was financed through impact investment funding from FJC, the Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Trust, and the American Journalism Project, in a first-of-its kind model.

What does this mean for people who rely on Colorado Community Media? How will this relationship change the news ecosystem in Colorado, and what consequences could it have for local media nationally? We will hear from leading people behind this deal about how it works and what they hope it will produce.

Melissa Milios Davis (Gates Family Foundation)
Lillian Ruiz (National Trust for Local News)
Larry Ryckman (Colorado Sun)

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Exit to Community: Industry-Wide Accountability

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 05:38:21 +0000

Exit to Community: Industry-Wide Accountability Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/04/2020 - 23:38

Thursday, August 27, 2020 [updated]
10-11:00 a.m. Mountain Time
Webinar

Video archive, collaborative notes

We hear about corporate social responsibility a lot, and the need for accountability in practice—not just in talk—is more important than ever. This webinar explores how broad-based ownership is being used to create more accountable economies. We’ll hear about decade of research on how corporate “multi-stakeholder initiatives” fail and why we need to rethink ownership from the ground up. We will also hear about the legacy of Associated Press, the cooperatively owned nonprofit news agency that was founded in 1846 and whose content reaches half the world’s population every day.

Speakers

Amelia Evans (Executive Director, MSI Integrity)
Jim Kennedy (Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning, Associated Press)

Resources

Not Fit-for-Purpose: The Grant Experiment of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives in Corporate Accountability, Human Rights and Global Governance (MSI Integrity, 2020)
Nathan Schneider, "The Associated Press is a joint media venture. Maybe Twitter should be too." America Magazine (April 21, 2017)

Hosted by the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and Zebras Unite, with support from the Open Society Foundations, which are not responsible for the content.

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The Quiet Media Revolution in Longmont

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 07:00:00 +0000

The Quiet Media Revolution in Longmont Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/19/2019 - 00:00

Cassandra Dana

When the Longmont Observer responded to a request-for-proposals for control over the city’s public access channels, the team wasn’t sure they’d win. The contract had been held by another organization for over 30 years, and most assumed it was unlikely to change hands. But the Observer presented an unusual idea, one that sparked imaginations by proposing to reconfigure notions of media ownership.

If you walk into one of Longmont Public Media’s community organizing meetings, you’ll find 20 to 30 enthusiastic individuals happy to greet you and excited to work. Longmont Public Media is the Observer’s new public access branch. The energy of this eclectic group is palpable. Many in Longmont are excited to be pioneering their own model for public access television.

The notion of public access television was devised in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the era of the first televised war, NBC, CBS and ABC controlled broadcast coverage of the cultural, political and social conflict. They depicted the gruesome fighting overseas and the civil unrest here in the United States. The effects were extraordinary. Screen media began to have a major influence on public policy and mass upheaval. TV began to be seen as a uniquely powerful force, one that was dictated by commercial broadcast networks. Recognizing the power of the medium, counterculture movements and media scholars began to advocate for what was referred to as “Guerrilla Television.” Michael Shamberg pioneered the term in 1971, stating, “Guerrilla Television is grassroots television. It works with the people, not from above them.”

Recognizing the importance of community driven media, the FCC developed regulations authorizing state and local governments to require cable television networks to set aside channels for public access. Cable companies entered franchise agreements with municipalities in which access to infrastructure——telephone poles, sidewalks, etc.——was granted in exchange for 5 percent of companies’ gross revenue. This franchise fee was paid to the city, which often reinvested this money into public access. Initially many local municipalities adopted this model, granting community members access to production and distribution methods. However, as pressure for public access decreased and many municipalities began experiencing increased financial burdens, funding for public access became less feasible. Some communities shut down public access channels entirely, while others limited them to local legislative proceedings. Public access shifted from a place where community members could develop skills and exhibit ideas to a droning of traffic court and city council hearings.

To complicate the matter further, in August 2019 the FCC approved an amendment to their 1970s regulation. The change in legislation allows cable companies to deduct “in-kind provisions” from their franchise fees. This means cable companies can now assert that the market value of public access networks is deductible from the revenue they pay to the municipalities. In 2017 Longmont allocated 25 percent of the franchise fees collected from Comcast (or $187,924) to public access television. According to the Colorado Sun, that is enough funding to cover one full-time employee and two part-time employees. The diminishment of franchise fees will seriously impact the ability of cities and states to maintain public access television. The president of Rocky Mountain PBS told the Colorado Sun, “Going from having franchise fees to not having them, typically what happens in that case is the public access goes away.” It’s clear that new models must be developed in order to maintain public access.

Longmont Public Media has taken on the challenge of innovating public access. Its founders have suggested that public access television can truly function as it was intended, as a resource created for and by the masses. They have proposed a cooperative model of media ownership in which members pay a small fee and in exchange can produce and exhibit their work. The studio that houses Longmont Public Access will be transformed into a media makerspace, serving as a venue for community members to create, collaborate, share infrastructure and distribute work. Each member of the co-op contributes to ideas around governance, programming, events and space utilization. As Michael Shamberg explained when he was proposing public access, “The inherent potential of information technology can restore democracy in America if people become skilled with information tools.”

This is not Longmont’s first foray into municipal ownership of community media. In 2014 Longmont launched NextLight, a municipally owned broadband enterprise. NextLight has dethroned Google Fiber as the fastest fiber-optic network, and it is now a national model for publicly owned internet access. Five years later, Longmont is building on this precedent through the creation of Longmont Public Media.

When Longmont Public Media asked MEDLab to get involved——to help formulate this model of cooperative public access——I knew it was an opportunity not to be missed. Thursday nights have become one of my favorite parts of the week, when I slide past the local middle school choir and the couples quietly nestled sipping lattes to the back room of the local coffee shop, where we work to revolutionize media ownership.

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How MEDLab Evaluated the Colorado Sun's Public Benefit

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 06:00:00 +0000

How MEDLab Evaluated the Colorado Sun's Public Benefit Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/05/2019 - 00:00

Laura Daley

The Colorado Sun is a new Colorado news organization seeking a business model that allows it to break free from the outside financial interests currently dominating the state’s news scene. Founded as an employee-owned company just last year, the Sun has incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation—a categorization for companies that value social or environment impact alongside turning a profit. Maryland led the charge in PBC legislation in 2010 and since then, quite a few states have followed suit. While PBCs don’t receive specific tax benefits, their status illustrates a strong commitment to giving back to the public.

Different states require different actions on the part of a PBC to demonstrate its success in achieving the chosen benefits. In Colorado, PBCs are required to publish an annual report with a narrative description of their progress: What went well? What challenges hindered achievement of the benefit? The report is also supposed to include an evaluation by a third-party standard.

The Colorado Sun incorporated as a PBC in January. This August, then, was its first opportunity to complete the annual report. The Sun staff asked MEDLab to provide consultation on the reporting procedure. (There was no fee or other financial relationship associated with this arrangement; MEDLab has received a grant from the Brett Family Foundation to support work on Colorado journalism.)

Our process began with research about PBCs. In Colorado, annual reports are required to be published on a company’s website or available to anyone who for them; how hard could it be to find examples to draw on?

We found lots of example reports, but many were wholly irrelevant to the context of journalism or media production in the state. In-depth, beautiful reports from companies like Namasté Solar provided guidance for tone, format, and breadth, but the standards those companies used didn’t necessarily apply to the Sun. For instance, environmental impact may be easy to quantify for companies creating consumer goods (or, like Namasté, installing solar panels), but that task is harder for an online-only news platform. Standards like those used by the nonprofit certifier B-Lab can be useful, but questions about employee benefits and charitable giving don’t quite capture the community impact of a news organization.

How can one assess the impact of the news? Terms like “democracy” and “public knowledge” seemed too nebulous, too big to attach to tangible or measurable actions by the Sun. We had to improvise.

Our first step was creating a questionnaire of reflective questions for the Sun staff members. We wanted to hear from them about how they evaluate themselves, and we began with questions drawn from the Sun’s own purpose statement in its articles of incorporation. We also drew on the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics and the journalism ethics policy of Civil, the blockchain-based network of news organizations of which the Sun is a founding member.

The Sun responded with incredibly mindful, intentional responses that far exceeded our expectations. Staff members shared data sets illustrating not only audience reach and geographic coverage but also tangible examples of instances when the Sun’s reporting had clear impact. With these in hand, we undertook the next step of the process: MEDLab director Nathan Schneider interviewed Dana Coffield on our KGNU radio show Looks Like New. The conversation further illuminated the Sun’s purpose and impact, and it was broadcast across the Front Range.

Following the interview and the responses to our questionnaire, we created an evaluation, which in turn the Sun included in its first annual report.

The Sun’s achievement of its stated benefit purpose was remarkable. The shortcomings we identified are largely consequences of its early-stage limitations. Because of its small staff size, for instance, senior editors are currently involved in business and sponsorship decisions. Securing the sponsorships aspired to in the purpose statement has also been a challenge for the Sun, so grant funding and memberships have been the main sources of revenue. The Sun, like many news organizations, also struggles to reflect the diversity of the community in the diversity of its newsroom.

The standard we created to evaluate public benefit journalism was multifaceted, as it was based on “hard” numerical data as well as “soft” anecdotal evidence. The Sun’s mission is to provide accessible news for the entire state; we took a look at the kinds of coverage they provided for all parts of Colorado—including the areas that often go unacknowledged by larger, Denver-based publications. In the coming years, the Sun can analyze changes in this data to identify any gaps in both coverage and audience locations around the state. The other important aspect of our quantitative standards focused on the business model of the Sun through exploring the breakdown of funding sources and their relationship with the Sun’s purpose statement.

But numbers alone don’t give justice to the Sun’s impact. We identified standards to evaluate each clause of the Sun’s purpose statement and probed them with questions related to the tenets of journalism. These standards focus on ethics, accuracy, independence, truthfulness, and contributions to Colorado’s democracy. We asked process-oriented questions whose answers are hard to measure quantitatively: How does the Sun verify information and sources? Parse opinion and commentary from fact? Fairly represent sources and relevance of information? How does the Sun maintain independence? Avoid conflicts of interest? Interact with advertisers, donors, and sponsors?

Impact is no doubt difficult to measure, but this hybrid approach for understanding all parts of the Sun’s mission and fulfillment of it hopefully yields an accurate depiction of the publication’s first year. We also hope that what we have done will be useful to other news organizations seeking to evaluate their public benefit. In the long term, however, it is probably best that specific standards from journalism simply inform how journalism PBCs fill out a more standard, cross-industry instrument like the B Impact Assessment.

Public Benefit Corporation status is an emerging strategy for better reflecting the dual role of journalism as a public service and a business. It may help to protect local news from the profit-seeking, outside interests that have dominated newsrooms in Colorado and throughout the country. The Colorado Sun is a pioneer in this, and we have been grateful to help document its progress.

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Boulder, Meet The Colorado Sun

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Boulder, Meet The Colorado Sun Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 01/10/2019 - 00:00

February 15, 2019

Join editors and reporters for a celebration of what they have accomplished

Register here

Out of widespread consolidation and layoffs in Colorado journalism, a new publication emerged last summer, The Colorado Sun. After just a few months, it has already produced vital reporting from across the state. The Sun is also journalist-owned and affiliated with the cryptocurrency startup Civil.

Join Colorado Sun editors and reporters, together with CU Boulder students who have been collaborating with them, for a celebration of what they have accomplished. Learn about their work and their business model, and find out how you can get involved in a renaissance for news-gathering in our state.

Hosted by the Media Enterprise Design Lab at CU Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, with support from the university’s Office for Outreach and Engagement and the Brett Family Foundation.

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Stakeholder Ownership for Sustainable News

“Not Just for Those Who Can Pay”: The Colorado Sun 2023 Public Benefit Report

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"Corner to Corner and Wall to Wall": The Colorado Sun 2022 Public Benefit Report

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"Whatever Colorado Needs Us to Be": The Colorado Sun 2021 Public Benefit Report

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How 24 Colorado Newspapers Are Staying Locally Owned

Related readings

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Exit to Community: Industry-Wide Accountability

Speakers

Resources

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The Quiet Media Revolution in Longmont

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How MEDLab Evaluated the Colorado Sun's Public Benefit

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Boulder, Meet The Colorado Sun

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