A new initiative led by Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Public Media is helping newsrooms across the state foster civil discussions about topics that matter to the communities they serve.
RMPM partnered with Colorado State University, the Colorado Press Association and the Colorado Media Project to start Above the Noise, which is connecting 40 newsrooms with community members in listening sessions focused on local issues.
The project is headed by Kim Salvaggio, RMPM’s chief community, equity and access officer, and Amber Coté, senior director of community relations. The Denver broadcaster operates Rocky Mountain PBS and jazz radio station KUVO.
The project has three parts: providing training, facilitating dialogue and creating an ambassador program — one for each of Colorado’s 64 counties — to sustain relationships with participating newsrooms. Since the initiative’s launch in March, they’re midway through the second part, Salvaggio and Coté told Current.
“Some of these newsrooms are one- or two-person newsrooms that absolutely see the value of community engagement and the value of community listening,” Salvaggio said. “They’re great community listeners but might just lack the time to be able to do it.”
That’s where Above the Noise comes in. RMPM’s team began by interviewing the 40 participating newsrooms to evaluate their resources and needs. Then they started training participants on diversity, equity and inclusion in coverage and in the workplace. Topics include implicit bias, listening skills and polarization. Such training can help prevent spreading harmful narratives in content and in the office, Salvaggio said.
“You can’t do [community engagement] work … without doing really deep listening inside your organization and understanding how equity works internally,” she said.
The community engagement staff started co-hosting “listening sessions” with newsrooms in May. During the sessions, members of the public speak to each other and to the host newsrooms’ journalists about what’s happening in their communities. RMPM aims to host two such events every month through November.
“We’re not trying to change people’s minds or create peace or Kumbaya, but really just have people understand the humanity in their communities and still centering the newsrooms around that,” Coté said.
The hourlong sessions start with a screening of Undivide Us, a 2023 documentary that examines how to repair American public discourse. Then, Coté and Martin Carcasson, director of the Center for Public Deliberation at CSU, facilitate a discussion connecting the film to local issues that the attendees want to address.
Engaging communities to bridge divides
The 64 ambassadors, volunteers recruited from each Colorado county, will help connect RMPM with the participating newsrooms and their communities. The station is starting with 35 volunteers by November and hopes to reach every county in 2025.
Salvaggio said the ambassadors will help the RMPM team understand the needs of their counties, which “helps drive relevancy for newsrooms in their content and the delivery of that content.”
The ambassador program is based on work Salvaggio and Coté had seen in other communities, “from promotoras to cultural brokers to even documenters … where you engage people that have really deep ties to their communities and are willing to volunteer their time,” she said.
Salvaggio said she’s been thinking about the Above the Noise initiative for the past decade. When Coté joined RMPM two years ago, they started planning its launch.
It’s especially important in Colorado, the two said, because of the state’s wide range of political views. But according to The Other Divide, a book Coté and Salvaggio cited, only 20% of Americans are overtly political. With this project, they hope to reach the 80% who are less likely to engage with politics.
“One thing we’ve learned about Coloradans specifically, and I would make an assumption that this is a lot of folks in the rest of the country, they do not want this level of division,” Salvaggio said. “People do want to get along with their neighbors. They do want to see each other as human. They do want to be able to listen and understand. “
While the presidential election is fueling more acrimony in political discourse, it’s also the perfect time for this initiative, Coté and Salvaggio said.
“You’re either scared, you’re excited, or a combination of those things,” Salvaggio said. “But more than anything, you don’t want to live in a space that has this much division and polarization.”
She said she’s hopeful about the future because “there are more people that are looking to have civility than they are division.”
The project received funding from individuals and organizations including the Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Media Project and the American Press Institute. It has a budget of $3 million over three years.
Through November, the initiative will continue to host listening sessions and screenings of Undivide Us. Through 2026, the project will host biannual ambassador meetings and mini-conferences throughout the state. It will also continue training and support for community newsrooms.
Success at stations big and small
Hattie Rensberry, news director at KDNK Community Radio in Carbondale, is the only full-time staff member in her newsroom. With only one part-time reporter and some contributing freelancers, the station lacks resources to plan and schedule its own events.
KDNK met with RMPM’s team in May and June. For the most part, RMPM “took our suggestions and ran with them.”
“In the very few times where we’ve had to reach out and give any sort of corrective guidance, then they’ve been very gracious and very thoughtful and have taken that guidance very seriously,” Rensberry said. “And in the end, I think it made the events even better for everybody involved.”
She said the response from community members after the sessions was very positive.
“I think giving people the opportunity to have conversations is something that, if they want it, then they show up with a good attitude, right?” she said.
Robert Leja, director of community engagement and public relations at KUNC in Greeley, said his station was inspired by the theme of Undivide Us, which he said was “getting people together who disagree.”
“It reduces polarization when you start to think of people as human beings instead of playing for the other team,” Leja said.
Through the program, KUNC is reaching new audiences by collaborating with smaller papers that “are more plugged into the local communities.”
“The fact that it’s a statewide project is really cool, and we’ve always struggled with community engagement in some of the further-out areas of our listening area,” he said.
It helps in a time when local journalism is struggling under corporate owners, Leja said.
The organizers “have really done a really good job of getting behind both commercial and noncommercial media to strengthen journalism because, like many other places, the main publications [in Colorado] are hedge-fund driven, not as focused on local news as they used to be, and newsrooms are getting slashed, so it’s a way of collaborating to expand our resources,” Leja said.
Rensberry said she wants to have more of the sessions to reach communities, such as Spanish-speakers, whom KDNK “didn’t get a chance to involve as much in these events.”
“The response that I got the most overwhelmingly was, ‘Wow, I wish we had more of these.’ ‘Wow, I wish we could talk like this more often,’” she said.