GILPIN COUNTY — Laura Frank, our Keynote speaker at the Colorado Press Association, Local News Solutions, opened the conference by addressing the issue of why local news matters with a litany of praise. 

Local news, she believes, “means more than inclusion…It means how we understand ourselves...It tells us who we are, tells us how we encounter each other.... It’s more than a consumer product...it helps us really know ourselves.”

Frank sees those of us struggling in local news stuck in a “bottleneck,” unable to move forward because of time or other constraints. Even at The Mountain-Ear, which has one thing many don't have—funding—we are all working too many hours a week and can’t see a way past it because we are all exhausted. 

Even with these terrible time constraints, our TEAM at The Mountain-Ear has continued to excel at the task of presenting local news.

A key takeaway from Saturday was telling our stories, both individually and as a publication. Why does this job mean so much to me that I have sacrificed so much, to be able to do it? You’ll start seeing our stories over the next several weeks, each of us individually at the paper will write one.

AI was a pretty frequently visited topic at this year’s CPA conference, as it’s become such a popular tool in business. Although The Mountain-Ear strictly prohibits AI content in our writing or creative design, there was a particular seminar that focused on using AI for marketing and sales pitches. It was suggested to use AI to learn about your potential client and use that information to form a sales pitch. 

Other roundtable discussions and Keynote speakers talked with us about election finance, and gave us resources to “Follow the Money.” And we talked about what our pain points are, as a publication. We learned about CoLab and how we can collaborate with other organizations, to not spread ourselves so thin. 

A favorite was also data benchmarking and how to use those numbers to understand what is working and what is not, for our online platforms. This also helps us understand how we need to change the way we get our news out to the public, to reach all audiences. 

Overall, the conference was once again a huge opportunity to learn, network, and pivot with the ever changing world of news, so our publications stay relevant in the media world.