Aspen Journalism

Programs: Aspen journalism is an independent nonprofit journalism organization, founded in 2011, and based in aspen, colorado. Our mission is to produce quality journalism, as well-informed citizens make better decisions. Our approach is both investigative and collaborative. Our coverage area radiates outward from aspen to snowmass village, pitkin, eagle, garfield, and summit counties, the western slope, colorado, and the west. Since 2011, we've covered water, education, land-use, local government, housing, transportation, energy, wealth, real estate, the ski industry, and development. In 2017, most of our work focused on water reporting. Aspen journalism reporters wrote 43 stories on water and rivers and attending over 30 water meetings around colorado. As part of our ongoing collaboration, we published 30 stories in collaboration with the aspen times, 19 with the glenwood springs post independent, 11 with the vail daily, eight with the summit daily and two with the sky-high daily news. We also published nine water stories in collaboration with the aspen daily news at the beginning of the year, and published six aspen-history stories throughout the year with the daily news. All of our stories were also published on the aspen journalism website under a creative commons license, which allows any other publication or website to publish them, without charge. Additionally, 27 of our water stories were also published on coyote gulch, a digital aggregation of water stories on colorado river water issues. Also in 2017, aspen journalism reporters discussed water issues during six public affairs shows on aspen public radio and four interviews on kdnk carbondale community access radio. We can point to three areas where our work fostered significant discussion and debate among citizens close to the stories: the conditional water rights held by the city of aspen to build dams on upper castle and maroon creeks; the enforcement by the state of colorado against the practice of over-diverting water from rivers; and a regional pilot program to pay ranchers to fallow fields and leave water in the colorado river system.