NOV 21, 2024 | NEWS | By Sydney McGarr
Anyone who’s been to the Baca campus likely knows the small quirky town of Crestone, Colo. Professors often take students there to center themselves in the remote rural area of the San Luis Valley near the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
In recent weeks, the Crestone Eagle, the monthly newspaper that serves the town and surrounding area in rural Saguache County, has been fighting for its future.
Those working to save the newspaper are scrambling to do whatever they can to “keep the Eagle soaring,” according to Anya Kaats.
Kaats is a member of the newly installed board of directors at the Crestone Eagle Community Media 501(c)(3) nonprofit that oversees the newspaper. All of the previous Crestone Eagle board members resigned in Oct. saying that the newspaper, which had been relying on grants since converting to nonprofit ownership in 2022, had run out of money.
“This comes at a time when small newspapers across the country and in Colorado are closing shop. We are extremely saddened to join their ranks,” the paper wrote in an Oct. 18 statement posted on Facebook. “The Crestone Eagle has been a loved and important asset for all of us.”
Since then, the local community has rallied around the Eagle, expressing their disappointment in the potential closure while offering individual support, according to Eagle Managing Editor Matthew Lit.
“This fight for survival is really worthy. It’s necessary,” Lit said. “We do not want to leave a news desert in this community at the hands of Facebook.”
As the fate of the paper hangs in the balance, so does a Colorado College internship opportunity for students pursuing a journalism minor.
For the past three years, journalism students have had the opportunity to stay at the Baca campus for a Block to work at the Eagle and learn virtually everything about the way a small, rural newspaper operates.
Haley Strom ‘24, a member of the second group of students to go to the Baca campus for the internship, says the flexibility within the program allowed her to write about things that mattered to her.
“We had the opportunity to find some stories in a beat that we would potentially want to go work in after college,” she said.
Strom, who was interested in the Emergency Medical Services field, said the internship gave her the unique opportunity of riding along with the Alamosa search-and-rescue team to cover their operations.
Recent trends indicate these opportunities may become fewer and farther between. As more people get their news from their phone screens, the Crestone Eagle has become just one example of a pattern of local newspaper closures across the country — and in Colorado.
Corey Hutchins, who runs the Journalism Institute at Colorado College, oversees the Colorado News Mapping Project. Hutchins says research he helped conduct has found that more than 50 newspapers have closed in Colorado since 2004, and more than 20 of them have shut down in the past five years alone.
“Unfortunately, that trend is accelerating this year,” said Hutchins, who tracks local news developments for his weekly “Inside the News in Colorado” newsletter where he recently wrote about the Eagle’s situation.
Hutchins attributed local print newspaper decline in the United States to multiple factors including large tech companies siphoning away traditional advertising, hedge funds buying newspapers and laying off staff to increase profits for shareholders, and changing habits in the ways people get their news and information in the digital age.
“A particularly sad commentary about the Eagle’s potential closure is that the CC internship program we created with the paper in 2022 came out of a class called ‘The Future and Sustainability of Local News,'” Hutchins said.
Does The Eagle have a sustainable path forward? It remains to be seen.
Back in Crestone, Lit and Kaats say they do not plan to give up the fight.
“We can’t really come up with solutions unless we understand what went wrong,” said Kaats. “We’ll really take the rest of the year to think critically about what needs to change so that this organization can survive.”