We Need to Talk – Truth

Dave Krieger, former editorial page editor at the Daily Camera is one of the speakers in the “We Need to Talk” panel discussion on the subject of Truth that is happening August 11th at 6pm at the DAIRY Arts Center in Boulder. Krieger was fired after her self-published a blog post criticizing the hedge fund owners of the newspaper.

“For a long time this appeared to be an internal issue for institutions like the Denver Post, like the Boulder Daily Camera, like the Longmont Times Call, we were all struggling with the same set of facts, we all had the same owner, the New York City hedge fund, but we perceived this as an internal issue, how are we going to deal with this constant diminution of our resources and our personnel? Once it become public, which the Denver Post helped facilitate with its editorial section in April and which the censorship of my editorial helped facilitate here, then I think a number of events occurred that made the situation clearer. For example, both the Post and my editorial were advocating that someone local step up and buy the Camera or in the case of the Post, the Post, from this hedge fund and save these institutions before they were diminished to the point that there was nothing left to save.  Since then, largely because of good investigative journalism on the part of two people who are not in Colorado,  we’ve learned that that’s very unlikely. The profit levels are so great for this hedge fund in destroying these assets that they really have no incentive to sell. And so the emphasis has become, can we create new institutions that will take their place, that will serve the First Amendment functions that are so necessary?”

In Denver, online news outlets like the Colorado Independent, the Denverite and the new The Colorado Sun, operate on different funding models, from grant funding to reader support.

These are all sort of small start-up concepts that have to find their way and see how much user support they can get and how robust of an operation they can produce as a result.”

We Need to Talk is a quarterly series of panel discussions concerning timely and important themes. The series topics for this season are Power, Beauty, Glory and Truth. All discussions are moderated by Paul Cure.

Listen to the full interview with Dave Krieger here:

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