Who will cover the environment if Denver papers fail?

Welcome to the inaugural blog entry for CEJournal — the weblog of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. We’re hoping to ramp up our operation with postings from our Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism, as well as students and guest bloggers. For now, it’s just me, Tom Yulsman, the co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism.

So now, on to today’s entry…

If Scripps cannot find a buyer for the Rocky Mountain News — and no one thinks it will — then the paper will go belly up,  leaving the Denver Post as the only daily in town. But there’s no guarantee that the Post will survive either, as Moody’s Investors Services reports MediaNews, owner of the Post, could default on its loans. Moreover, Dean Singleton, the Post’s publisher, said today that he must slash expenses by $20 million.  Maybe he’ll get the unions to cooperate. But will that be enough? I wouldn’t bet on it.

So we are faced with the rather alarming prospect of a major American city of some 2.1 million people lacking a daily newspaper to cover cops, crime, city council, education, zoning, politics, corruption, sports, entertainment, etc. — and the environment.

Denver  is the biggest city in the Intermountain West, which puts it at the center of growing conflicts over hundreds of millions of acres of public lands in this sprawling region. Colorado is in the midst of a huge oil and gas boom, with associated environmental impacts. All told, some 279 million acres of the West are said to have oil and gas potential, and the Bush Administration has been eager to grant as many drilling permits as possible, including adjacent to national parks (although it is backing off some of those planned leases in the face of protests).  

We’re also experiencing some dramatic fallout from climate change. An unprecedented bark beetle infestation linked in part to warmer temperatures threatens to take out almost all of the state’s lodgepole pine — many millions of acres worth, making this region, along with Alaska, a “canary in the coal mine” for global warming. 

Just as much as the region is the focal point for some of the hottest environmental issues of the day, it also hosts what is arguably the world’s single greatest concentration of researchers who study these issues. They work at the University of Colorado, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and a host of other institutions. Moreover, this region aspires to become a world leader in GT, or Green Tech.

Environmental issues and research are nowhere more salient than in the Rocky Mountain West, of which Denver is the biggest city. So it is inconceivable that there would be no major daily newspaper in Denver covering the environment. Yet that appears to be where we’re headed.

If the Post and the Rocky both fail, who will bring these issues to the attention to the public? One idea would be to start a non-profit journalistic enterprise that would cover them online — an idea that CEJournal would like help develop! But will a small group of hungry reporters aided perhaps by academics and student interns have the reach and influence currently enjoyed by the dailies? I doubt it.