Rising to the role of local reporter
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WALSENBURG, Colo. — U.S. Army veteran T’Naus Nieto penned science fiction. Lyn Ettinger-Harwell trained under chefs like Emeril Lagasse. Ruth Stodghill taught English to schoolchildren and incarcerated adults.
None of them expected to work in a local newsroom. But they all do.
Nieto, Ettinger-Harwell and Stodghill are a few of the many small-town Colorado community members who have stepped up to fill the role of local journalist in a time when newspaper jobs are simultaneously becoming harder to fill and harder to find.
The American public still values both local news and local journalists. Respondents to a Pew Research Center study last year said that “local journalists are in touch with their communities,” and that they do well in accurately reporting the news in their areas.
Small-town staff shortages, matched with increasing operational expenses and decreasing advertising revenue, are leading to shuttered small newsrooms across the state and across the country.
Yet in some localities, passionate, community-connected citizens are putting on their press vests to meet the need.
Nieto is a reporter with The Chronicle-News in Trinidad, although he did not originally intend to write for his regional newspapers. His focus was fiction.
“I had some of my fiction published online, as well as some of my poetry,” said Nieto. “[During college], I was just thinking about being a novelist or writing short stories.”
Nieto graduated from high school in La Junta, and enlisted in the military, where he spent 10 years in and around Southern Colorado serving as a paratrooper, working on supply logistics with the U.S. Army Space Command and finishing with the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Carson.
In 2017, Nieto enrolled at Colorado State University, Pueblo to study business administration, but after receiving encouraging feedback in an elective creative writing class, he decided to pursue his love for fiction writing.
Nieto published his creative work online and in local publications. He simultaneously picked up a job as a freelance journalist for CherryRoad Media, a national newspaper publisher that owns a number of Southern Colorado publications like The Chronicle News, the Bent County Tribune and the La Junta Democrat.
“The opportunity came up, and I thought it would be a great chance to write and learn,” said Nieto.
“I love to learn, and in journalism you have to learn lots in a short amount of time to convey things as accurately as possible, which I thought would be a great learning process for my writing.”
Only about 2% of media workers are military veterans, according to US Census reports shared by Military Veterans in Journalism, a nonprofit dedicated to filling more newsrooms with veterans.
Nieto put his fiction writing career on hold to focus on local journalism. As one of only a handful of active journalists living and reporting in Southern Colorado, Nieto quickly realized the far-reaching, quick-paced demand of local newsrooms, and particularly ones located in more rural parts of the state.
In the 333 articles he has written for The Chronicle-News (according to its website), Nieto covered a range of topics, from education to homelessness and politics.
While Nieto’s favorite subjects are lighter feature stories, like this one on Trinidad’s “plant whisperer,” he recognizes the personal nuances that can make local reporting more difficult.
“While I was in La Junta, I reported on a crime from an old friend in high school… that was hard. I got a lot of negative feedback from friends and their friends, and I had to live with that,” said Nieto.
“You can disconnect from negativity on social media more easily… but it’s different when you’re face-to-face with that person.”
Conversely, Nieto said he frequently enjoys compliments and appreciation from readers, many from communities that might otherwise go unreported due to shortages of local news outlets in and around Southern and Eastern Colorado.
Nieto still writes some fiction and poetry in his spare time. Two years ago, he submitted some of his work on a whim to his dream college, Emerson in Boston. Last December, he completed Emerson’s creative writing MFA with help from a community scholarship awarded for his writing sample.
Yet accolades and MFAs aside, Nieto remains committed to his role as local journalist.
“Local journalists are a critical resource to communities of any size, especially ones like Trinidad or La Junta,” said Nieto.
“We help act as a check-and-balance for the flow of information that might be speculation or rumor. We verify those facts, provide viewpoints on both sides of issues… we help share what’s going on in these places that others around the state might not hear from without us.”
Lyn Ettinger-Harwell, the Board President and publisher of the Pikes Peak Bulletin, recognized a similar risk for the under 5,000-person town of Manitou Springs when the Bulletin closed around the beginning of 2023.
“Reading other [non-local] newspapers, you worry about the slants and what you can and can’t trust,” said Ettinger-Harwell.
“When the paper went away, there was an outcry in this community of, ‘Now that the Bulletin’s gone, how do we know what’s going on?’ and we needed to answer that.”
The Associated Press found that around 43,000 newspaper journalists lost their jobs in 2023, due to the rapid closure of newspapers nationwide.
While a number of institutions and universities offer programs aimed at cultivating future journalists, conditions like low pay, limited and difficult-to-land job opportunities and working in sometimes dangerous environments drive many potential journalists in different career paths.
This simultaneous decrease in available positions and decrease in job favorability makes finding journalists willing to take the reins more difficult, particularly in more rural and sparsely-populated areas.
Yet Ettinger-Harwell rallied a small team of impassioned local news lovers and successfully resurrected the paper only months after it closed, all of this in spite of knowing “absolutely nothing about publishing,” apart from the few years in high school when Ettinger–Harwell started his own independent print paper to rival the school’s.
Ettinger-Harwell was never a journalist. He was a chef.
Born and raised on a family farm in small Greentown, Ohio, Ettinger-Harwell developed a passion for cooking and reading. He studied at The Culinary Institute of America and Ohio State University before leaving for a decades-long career training under international chefs, managing various small restaurants and working a stint as the regional vice president of operations with Olive Garden in Chicago.
He eventually followed the Texas T-Bone restaurant chain to Colorado Springs where he eventually helped found the Seeds community kitchen and worked as the COO of the Springs Rescue Mission until retirement.
Ettinger-Harwell became a dedicated reader of the Colorado Springs Independent and, after relocating to Manitou Springs, he became an outspoken advocate for the Pikes Peak Bulletin.
After years of financial difficulty, the paper closed at the beginning of 2023. By May, Harwell had put together a new board and published the first edition of the Pikes Peak Bulletin, now operating as a nonprofit.
“It’s a love of this business, really, that has engaged me and that drives my passion,” said Ettinger-Harwell. “The Bulletin was printing about 1,800 copies a week when we took over, and today we published 6,600… and we’re going to continue to build it stronger and more responsive to the people.”
While he never trained professionally to be a journalist, Ettinger-Harwell credits his earliest days working as a table-side cook with teaching him the importance of speaking with people directly and using those interactions to dictate one’s work, whether that be setting a plate or setting type.
“Most of my life has been about relationships, and I can’t put enough emphasis on relationships,” said Ettinger-Harwell.
“It’s what I think makes a good paper, because whether you’re writing like Kerouac or the Pikes Peak Bulletin, you’re understanding what the people’s needs are and what we need to be delivering to them.”
Ruth Stodghill knows — and now teaches — about the differences between Kerouac and journalism.
Stodghill, known to most as Mrs. Stodghill, is an English teacher at the Primero Junior and Senior High School, a small school located in between Segundo and Weston in Southern Colorado.
Today, some may also know her as Ruth from “Running with Ruth,” her award-winning weekly column in Trinidad’s Chronicle-News that helped kickstart her second career as a contributing writer to The World Journal, a small regional paper based in Walsenburg.
Between her positions as a full-time english teacher at Primero RE-2, an adjunct professor at Trinidad State College and an educator with Trinidad State College’s Second Chance Pell program for incarcerated individuals, Stodghill finds time to freelance as a journalist, the one role of the four that might most surprise a college-aged Ruth.
“I did take one journalism class in college, and I did absolutely horribly,” said Stodghill, laughing.
“I felt like I could do nothing right, and I remember thinking, ‘Well, I’m glad I’m not going into journalism.’”
Regardless of Stodghill’s performance, some studies show that top newsrooms are disproportionately filled with graduates from the country’s most selective colleges and universities.
An article by the NiemanLab (which is a part of Harvard University) published last year found that The New York Times is “wildly overrepresented” with Ivy League graduates, making it “especially hard in periods of decline, when more people are exiting the newsroom than entering” to diversify news outlets.
A 2020 Pew Research Center study found that newsroom employees were more than twice as likely to have graduated college as compared to other U.S. workers, yet college-educated newsroom employees appeared to make less than college-educated workers as a whole.
Instead of journalism, Stodghill pursued a career in teaching. She worked in Trinidad and then Primero, where she met an especially gifted student writer she hoped to introduce to other local talent. After some searching, Stodghill turned to the local newspaper for guidance, which introduced her to one of their regular contributors.
Inspired by the possibility of submitting articles about her small Primero School community, Stodghill looked into becoming a contributing reporter herself, and before long, irony turned the once journalism-averse english teacher into a frequently-published, multi-award winning correspondent for The World Journal.
While she is professionally trained to be a teacher (Stodghill holds a B.A. in English from Adams State University), Stodghill underlined writing and editing tools learned as an educator that translate to her work as a reporter.
“Covering local governments and the investigative work kind of appealed to the English teacher in me,” said Stodghill. “I know how to research and pay attention to details.”
Stodghill credits The World Journal’s publisher Gretchen Orr and reporter Mark Craddock with teaching her how to be “a real reporter,” and says she still has “a ton” to learn.
However, in her few years working with The World Journal, Stodghill discovered a new connection to her town and new opportunities to introduce journalism in her classroom.
Starting with her daughter, Stodghill piloted a program at Primero that connects students with the local paper, teaching them what it means to report in their community. Today, Stodghill’s “newspaper kids” are actively contributing original work to papers like The World Journal.
“I’ve been teaching for 25 years, but I’m still getting to learn new things as a journalist that I can then pass on to my students,” said Stodghill. “So I guess teaching is kind of my work towards creating a better tomorrow where my journalism is helping to create a better today.”
“Local journalism is absolutely necessary… it has connected me to my community in a whole different way. I feel like I’m playing an active role in democracy now in a way that I wasn’t before.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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