Follow the funding: Commentary examines Gary Community Ventures media grants and Colorado Sun coverage

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

An example of the coverage Gary Community Ventures (GCV) supported

This post is a continuation of a series on the media grants issued by Gary Community Ventures. The first link below is to Monday’s newsletter, the previous installment. It will have a link to the first installment in it.

In today’s post, I want to look at the coverage that GCV paid for, specifically the efforts by the progressive outlet Colorado Sun.

In previous posts, I mentioned how the Colorado Sun raised their hand when GCV asked if anyone would like grant money to fund coverage on childcare in Colorado.

I also mentioned how the Colorado Media Project (CMP, and some of its consultants like journalism professor Corey Hutchins) were hired to help shape GCV’s Request For Proposals and push it out to media outlets around Colorado. CMP also had a seat on the committee which decided on grant proposals.

I asked GCV’s Will Holden and CMP’s Kimberly Spencer about this and here’s what I was told.

Holden:

“Similar to our approach with other requests for grant proposals, we established a committee of 20 individuals with expertise in the focus areas of our RFP to evaluate and review grant proposals. Given that the Colorado Media Project has expertise in journalism and did not apply for funding, we invited them to participate on the review committee.”

Spencer:

“CMP was among more than 50 community partners invited to participate in the RFP design and review process for this initiative. Our role was specific: we provided technical expertise to ensure a rigorous firewall between funding and editorial control, and we helped disseminate the RFP to a statewide list of local news outlets.”

I also reached out to Professor Hutchins, but he deferred to the answers GCV and CMP would give.

The reason for including this detail is that it not only shows the path by which such grants get out into the media ecosystem in Colorado, it also points to one of the manifold connections here. CMP is one of the Colorado Sun’s funders. Screenshot 1, from the second link below shows the on the Sun’s list of “Major Supporters.”

When I asked both CMP and the Sun about this, CMP’s Spencer and Sun editor Dana Coffield responded with the following:

Spencer:

“Regarding the specifics of the process:

–”Gary Community Ventures is not a funder of CMP, and while we were a partner in the process, we were not co-funders of this initiative. CMP received a stipend for our technical participation in the process.”

–”The Colorado Sun was selected through a competitive review process based on proposal strength. Selection recommendations were determined by the broader committee”

–”CMP’s support of The Colorado Sun is through our annual #newsCOneeds campaign, a public awareness and matching program designed to encourage reader support for local news. We provide no direct grant funding to the Colorado Sun outside of that program.”

Coffield:

“We are not ‘funded’ by the Colorado Media Project. We did receive a CMP match, as did numerous other organizations, as part of the broader News Matters fundraising campaign in the fall. We are supported by CMP, in the way that numerous other organizations are, in activities that are intended to support the broader news ecosystem. Kimberly Spencer is the primary contact.”

I followed up with Coffield to see if perhaps the listing of CMP on their site vs. her phrasing above was a matter of semantics or perhaps a misunderstanding on my part. I got no reply.

There’s one last thing to mention before looking in at the Sun’s coverage in more detail. In the email exchanges I had with both GCV’s Holden and the Sun’s Coffield, both made a point of reminding me that the Sun didn’t offer (and GCV didn’t ask for) any editorial control. This was, if you go back and look at the first installment, also explicitly mentioned in GCV’s request for proposals.

The Sun’s Coffield put it this way:

“Beyond sharing research [I’ll touch on this below], Gary has done zero directing of coverage. We promised to deliver a certain number of stories and events, and promised that we would be regionally diverse in our reporting, but did not discuss a reporting plan or share with them the stories before publication.”

The Sun’s coverage on this (two stories as of this writing with more on the way) is linked third below.

Both are about what you’d expect from a progressive outlet like the Colorado Sun. In both articles you’ll note their usual pattern of using labels to characterize some, but not others.*

See, for example, about midway down, the following quote: “…according to calculations by Mathangi Subramanian, director of early childhood policy for the nonprofit Colorado Children’s Campaign”. Contrast that with how the Common Sense Institute carries a label: “…free-market think tank Common Sense Institute.”

Still, it is the Colorado Sun.

Trump, as you might imagine, looms large here, his recent freeze of funding is noted as a concern for child care operators in both pieces. Missing from the first piece is any mention of Biden era moves that resulted in enrollment problems and waitlists for low-income parents. In the second, this gets a quick mention, but Biden’s name is absent.

Perhaps most pertinent to the overall thrust of this series is just how much detail the Sun is burying in its labels.

For example, the first article leans quite heavily on the “nonprofit” Colorado Children’s Campaign, but I didn’t see mention of the fact that they are (as noted in previous parts of this series) both a grantee of GCV and also one of the groups leading the charge to do a progressive income tax in Colorado.

Capita, characterized by the Sun as “a family policy think tank” is quoted in the second piece as recommending the following:

“’We’re seeing a pivot point potentially in how child care is approached,’ said Elliot Haspel, an early childhood education expert at Capita, a family policy think tank. ‘The government should make sure all families have access to the child care they need. We should treat child care like social infrastructure the way we treat fire departments, libraries, schools and roads.’”

Capita is, per the fourth link below, funded in part by GCV.

Lastly, and this is unique in the fact that the Sun directly acknowledges the connection to their series funder GCV, from the second piece you get the following quote:

“A recent analysis modeled by Brodsky Research & Consulting for Gary Community Ventures estimated that at current child care teacher pay levels it would cost about $1.8 billion per year, including what the state currently spends, to provide free universal child care. If child care workers were paid the same as kindergarten teachers, universal child care would cost $2.1 billion, including what the state currently spends.”

and later

“Gary Community Ventures provided funding for this story, which is part of an ongoing reporting project looking at the state of child care in Colorado.”

After reading this, I followed up with GCV’s Holden and he told me the following via email.

“As noted, The Sun and all grantees operate with full editorial independence and creative control. I can’t speak to how The Sun obtained or used that particular study as I truly don’t know. It’s true that grantees are free to reach out to us with questions as part of their independent work. We respond to those inquiries just as we are with you now — by sharing resources and information to the best of our ability. And in much the same way as you’re free to do, each grantee is free to use the resources and information we provide at their discretion and based on their own creative processes and editorial standards.”

The Sun’s Coffield had this to say:

“As noted in our second story, Gary did do some research that they shared with us. You will notice that we noted where the data came from, and that Gary was a funder, in the same way that we would have been when we quoted Common Sense Institute research in the first story if that think tank had funded part of the reporting.”

I followed up to Coffield’s quote here to ask whether or not (and if) they would be characterizing the ideological bent of organizations like GCV and/or other sources they used in this series like they did (and have repeatedly done) with Common Sense Institute. She did not respond.

The Colorado Sun was not the only outlet that received grant funding from GCV from this series, they are merely the only ones I am aware of as of this writing. Mr. Holden has promised to share the full list of grantees when it becomes public in approximately two weeks. When I have that list, I will update.

It’s hard to imagine not knowing what kind of coverage of childcare in Colorado you’d get when you engage the Sun in reporting it. This would just as well apply to the kinds of discussion and coverage I’m sure Mr. Holden imagined the second he got my email and googled my name.

I don’t doubt either Coffield or Holden when they say that GCV had no editorial control. I’m not supposing there was a rep from GCV looking over the shoulder of the Sun reporter as they wrote, giving a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Still, as journalism professor Corey Hutchins has said himself: relationships matter.

It is the relationships you see above, and what is revealed about them (or not) that stick out like a sore thumb.

In the final post of this series, I will tie all that together. I will give my thoughts on this whole thing touching on how the relationships involved necessarily influence the coverage and the reporting.

How it is that our common sense about childcare can be built, whether this is the intent or not.

*See “Related” content below.

https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/meet-gary-community-ventures-my-written?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

https://coloradosun.com/how-the-sun-is-funded/

https://coloradosun.com/colorado-child-care-out-of-reach/

https://capita.org/about/our-funding/#:~:text=Capita%20is%20a%20not%2Dfor,W.K.%20Kellogg%20Foundation

Related:

One of my op eds on how the progressive media use different rules for different ideologies when it comes to how you’re labeled.

https://completecolorado.com/2024/12/26/gaines-the-progressive-press-double-standard-on-ideological-labels/

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An update on “Freezing Cascadia”

I have written a fair bit about the effort to push back on Greeley City Council’s plan to mortgage city buildings to help finance an entertainment district.

I came across the link below recently and thought I’d share an update. By now the results will have gone from unofficial to official (as the article below has it–it was the first results article I saw so I used it): Greeley citizens pushed back on their city council’s plan and stopped it by preventing the zoning change that would have allowed it to proceed.**

As I saw in a press release from Greeley Demands Better, the group pushing back, this vote is not an ending. It’s a new beginning. It is an opportunity for the Greeley City Council to actually LISTEN to their citizens instead of ramming a sweetheart deal for the developer down their citizens’ throats.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT THE COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.