LOCAL NEWS. STRONGER COMMUNITIES.
Reveals. Informs. Connects.
Every day, local reporters uncover important information, help us make decisions and tell the stories that connect us to the places we call home.
THE STORIES
Stories don’t just happen. Behind them are journalists asking questions, finding answers and helping us understand the communities we call home.
REVEALS
A public official’s decision. A questionable expenditure. A problem affecting families that no one has adequately explained.
Local reporters ask questions, examine records and follow stories wherever the facts lead. Their work brings important information into the open and gives communities the knowledge to demand answers.
INFORMS
What’s happening at your child’s school? Why are property taxes changing? Where is the wildfire spreading? What’s on the ballot?
Local news helps us understand the decisions, events and challenges that affect our families, businesses and communities. It’s information we can use.
CONNECTS
The restaurant opening down the street. The high school team headed to state. The neighbor doing something extraordinary. The festival that brings everyone together.
Local news helps us discover businesses, events, opportunities and people we might otherwise miss.
It reminds us that we’re part of something larger than ourselves.
The reporting that informs your decisions, holds institutions accountable and connects your community is happening in newsrooms across Colorado. Find the outlets covering where you live.
THE EVIDENCE
Local journalism helps communities understand what's happening, make decisions, build connections and hold institutions accountable. Research shows what that work contributes and what communities risk losing without it.
01 / INFORMATION
From school decisions and public meetings to severe weather and emergencies, local reporting provides information people use to navigate daily life.
80%
02 / CONNECTION
Local news helps people recognize shared concerns, celebrate achievements and understand the places and people around them.
75%
03 / LOCAL ECONOMY
Newsrooms connect customers with businesses, cover local economic developments and provide advertising environments rooted in their communities.
7 in 10
04 / ACCOUNTABILITY
Journalists examine public decisions, scrutinize spending and uncover information that might otherwise remain hidden.
29%
WHEN LOCAL NEWS DISAPPEARS
01 / PUBLIC COSTS
02 / CIVIC LIFE
03 / LOCAL ECONOMY
Colorado Media Project's 2022 statewide survey found that 80% of respondents rated state and local media's emergency information good or excellent.
Corona Insights surveyed more than 1,800 Colorado residents in summer 2022. This is a rating of state and local media, not a measured emergency outcome or newspaper-only result.
Pew Research Center found that 75% of U.S. adults said they had a lot of or some trust in information from local news organizations, up 5 points from a year earlier.
The American Trends Panel survey included 5,193 U.S. adults and was conducted September 14–20, 2026. Published November 2, 2026. These are national findings, not Colorado-only results.
The Colorado Local News Market Study reports that 79% of Colorado newspaper readers felt responsible for helping shape their community's future. It also reports 93% of Colorado adults considered press and public access to public records important.
The report describes nearly 7 in 10 readers taking action after reading a print or digital newspaper advertisement. Actions were self-reported, not a measured advertising lift or sales-conversion rate. The same report found that 55% of Colorado adults said newspaper advertising helped them decide what to buy or where to shop, more than any other channel listed.
CPA commissioned the 2022 report from Coda Ventures. Its online survey included 601 Colorado adults and was fielded November 30–December 14, 2021. Reader attitudes and all-adult findings have different bases.
Pamela Campa’s 2018 study, Press and leaks: Do newspapers reduce toxic emissions?, found that consumer-goods producers reduced toxic emissions by 29% following newspaper coverage, compared with plants that were not covered.
The finding uses U.S. plant-level data from 1996–2009. It concerns the consumer-goods subgroup and an observational event-study comparison, not every factory or pollutant.
Lee Shaker’s Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement examined civic engagement in Denver and Seattle around their 2009 newspaper losses and compared the changes with other metropolitan areas.
The 2014 study found significant short-term declines in the two affected cities. It used 2008 and 2009 civic-engagement data; Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer ended print publication but continued online.
Gao, Lee and Murphy’s Financing Dies in Darkness: The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance was published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2020.
The study compared municipal borrowing around newspaper closures with other counties. Higher public borrowing costs represent a fiscal cost to communities, not a forecast of an individual household’s tax bill.
Ted Matherly and Brad N. Greenwood, “No News is Bad News: The Internet, Corruption, and the Decline of the Fourth Estate,” MIS Quarterly 48(2), 2024, pp. 699–714. DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2023/17869.
The study found 7.3% more federal corruption cases filed in districts that lost a major daily newspaper. Read the authors’ explanation ↗
68% of U.S. adults said local news media do well at covering the most important stories and issues in their area.
Pew Research Center, Views of local news, May 7, 2024. These are national findings, not Colorado-only results.
A study of regional consumer brands linked local newspaper closures to an average 7.8% decline in weekly revenue.
Georgia State University’s research summary concerns regional consumer brands. This is a study finding, not a forecast for every local business.
Zhiming Ma, Derrald Stice, Han Stice and Yue Zhang, “Local newspaper closures and bank loan contracts,” Contemporary Accounting Research 42(3), 2025, pp. 1620–1651. First published April 28, 2025.
The study found syndicated corporate loan spreads rose by 30.24 basis points after a nearby newspaper closed. For the study’s average $119 million loan over 40 months, that amounts to roughly $1.2 million in additional interest.
After the Cincinnati Post closed, researchers found lower voter turnout and fewer municipal candidates in the Kentucky communities that had relied on it most.
This source concerns the Cincinnati Post and its Kentucky communities. It is separate from the Denver and Seattle civic-engagement study.
Behind every local story are people asking questions, finding answers and helping their neighbors understand the world around them. You can help keep that work going.
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