Introduction …
The Colorado Sun launched in 2018 with the mission of bringing local news back to the communities it serves — locally owned, locally directed, locally responsive. After five years of this journey, we are pleased to report on another successful year with more exciting changes to come.
Through the support of readers, The Sun continues to produce impactful, award-winning journalism, while also pioneering a collaborative organizational structure that has drawn national attention. And we will only build on this in our sixth year.
The Sun is embarking upon a nonprofit conversion that will also incorporate an innovative cooperative element. This structure epitomizes The Sun’s values — bold and creative, service-minded and collaboratively empowering. It will allow all of our employees to maintain a voice in the company’s governance even as we give the ownership of The Sun over to the very community that we serve.
Though we expect this to be the last annual report we produce as a privately-owned public benefit corporation, this report continues to reflect our commitment to transparency. The report is published every year around the anniversary of our website launch, in September 2018. So this report covers the period between Sept. 1, 2022, and Aug. 31, 2023.
About our business structure …
As we have been since 2018, The Colorado Sun is currently a 100% journalist-owned public benefit corporation. Under Colorado law, that means we are a for-profit corporation “that is intended to produce a public benefit or public benefits and to operate in a responsible and sustainable manner.” This was a choice the founders of The Sun made to show that we care about journalism and community way more than we care about profits and our own enrichment.
We receive no special tax breaks or other financial incentives as a public benefit corporation. But we do have to be accountable to the community we serve. This document is one example of how we comply with that: State law requires us to produce an annual report detailing the value we have brought to the community over the prior year.
Nonprofit conversion …
The Sun is in the process of converting from a public benefit corporation to a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation. Once completed, we expect this will open up additional revenue streams for us and provide a boost for sustainability while still maintaining our commitment to being a company guided by journalists for the purpose of providing the highest-quality journalism to our state.
Precise details on this conversion will be announced in the coming months. It is our intention to structure this entity as a “worker self-directed nonprofit,” meaning that it also borrows elements of a worker cooperative. All members of the nonprofit’s board of directors will be elected through a vote of Sun employees, and employees will make up the majority of board seats, with safeguards in place to prevent conflict-of-interest and self-dealing issues from arising.
This model is at the cutting-edge of thinking about what a nonprofit can be — how it can exist in service of its community while remaining accountable to and empowering to its employees. It is exactly what The Sun has always strived to be.
Our public benefit …
In The Colorado Sun’s fifth year of existence, our benefit to the public remained strong.
During the 2022-23 period, we are proud to report that we:
- Grew to a staff of 27, allowing us to maintain robust reporting from all corners of Colorado while also making important business investments to build for the future. Of particular note, we hired our first Director of Membership, Marketing & Audience Engagement, Lauren Whynott, whose passion and expertise are already paying dividends in our efforts to recruit new members and retain those we have.
- Published 1,774 news articles on ColoradoSun.com. This included more than 1,369 articles written by Colorado Sun full-time staffers — meaning that more than 75% of news coverage at The Colorado Sun is original to us and can’t be found anywhere else.
- Published 2,618 total posts on ColoradoSun.com. This includes 630 opinion pieces and cartoons written by Colorado leaders, everyday Coloradans and regular columnists and artists. It also includes 104 pieces from our groundbreaking SunLit series, which gives attention to Colorado authors and the work they do.
- Had more than 22.5 million pageviews, an approximately 10% increase over the same period in 2021-22.
- Saw more than 11.5 million unique visitors, a more than 20% year-over-year increase.
- Had our work published in newspapers across the state as part of partnerships with dozens of newsrooms throughout Colorado. Our work also has been distributed nationally through our membership in The Associated Press.
- Produced 258 episodes of The Daily Sun-Up, a five-days-a-week podcast providing news and insight from Colorado Sun journalists.
- Hosted more than a dozen virtual forums drawing tens of thousands of audience members to learn about topics ranging from health care to air pollution, politics to outdoor recreation.
- Maintained nearly 125,000 active newsletter subscribers, including nearly 100,000 subscribers for our flagship daily newsletter, The Sunriser, and more than 30,000 for What’s Working, reporter Tamara Chuang’s comprehensive weekly newsletter on business and employment.
- Continued reporter Erica Breunlin’s Rise and Shine Journalism Workshop, a one-of-a-kind initiative giving Colorado students the opportunity to learn about journalism and inspiring the next generation of journalists for the state.
- Won 23 awards, including 13 first-place awards, at the multi-state Top of the Rockies journalism contest. The haul was more than any other Colorado news organization in our category. The Sun competed in the “extra-large newsroom” category despite having far fewer staff members than most others in the category. The Sun’s Jennifer Brown led the way with three first-place awards, and eight other Sun reports won first-place awards. In addition, the weekly comic strip “What’d I Miss?”, written by R. Alan Brooks and drawn by Cori Redford, took first for addressing social issues through the lens of its unique characters, and opinion columnist Trish Zornio won top honors in her category.
- Took home 10 awards, including seven first-place awards, in the Colorado Press Association’s 2022 Better News Media Contest. The Sun also won eight awards, including four first-place awards, in the CPA’s 2021 contest (the prizes were announced in September 2022). The Sun’s first-place honors came in a variety of categories, including health care reporting, agriculture reporting, business reporting, feature writing and even sports.
- Maintained our support for local news, both in our own work and in our stewardship of the 24 community newspapers in the Colorado Community Media family, which The Sun jointly owns along with the National Trust for Local News.
- Continued to receive the generous support of valued community partners in the Wend Collective, the Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Trust and the Catena Foundation.
- Earned the support of nearly 14,000 members.
A note on membership: When The Colorado Sun switched membership management vendors in 2022, it required a shift in the data model we use to count our active membership. As a result of this improved and more precise process, we are now reporting fewer active members than we reported last year in this report. However, the model shows that The Sun earned the support of more than 2,000 new members during the past year.
An independent assessment …
State law for public-benefit corporations requires us to do more in this report than just celebrate ourselves. We must also evaluate ourselves against an independent, third-party standard to see how we measure up in both providing a public benefit and addressing our shortcomings.
The law allows us to do this analysis ourselves. But, as a show of our commitment to transparency and service, we have always sought to do more.
The Sun this year again partnered with the University of Colorado’s Media Enterprise Design Lab, which studies media ownership and governance, to evaluate us based on their measurements for what makes a successful, ethical news organization. There are no preconditions attached to this review. We are the only news organization in the country that we know of that invites such an intensive independent review.
We thank Libby O’Neall and the rest of the team at CU for their work on this review. A copy of the report can also be found on the Media Enterprise Design Lab’s website.
In conclusion …
The Colorado Sun started with 10 journalists who wanted to find a better model for producing high-quality, high-impact local journalism that serves the community but also allows employees a say in how the company is run. It is incredible to see what we have achieved in just five years. But we can also enthusiastically state that the best is yet to come.
As The Sun enters an exciting new phase in its evolution and growth, we want to acknowledge all the readers and supporters who have made this happen. We exist for you, and we would have achieved nothing without you.
From all of us at The Colorado Sun, a very sincere and grateful thank you. ‘Til next year.
A special thank you …
The Sun would like to extend a special thank you to our business members, who have provided extra support to help us continue our mission of serving Colorado.
For additional information about business memberships, contact: Sylvia Harmon, Director of Sales | sylvia@coloradosun.com | 720.593.1044