Rodriguez was suffering from the same financial distress as local newsroom leaders everywhere, compounded by the sudden crisis of the coronavirus. He started asking around for help. He applied for a Paycheck Protection Program loan and got $5,000 grants from Google and a city emergency fund, which kept the lights on for a while. Corey Hutchins—a journalism instructor at Colorado College and a contributor to CJR—sent some promising student reporters his way. By mid-April, however, Rodriguez had laid off his last full-time colleague and cut the Pulp’s print edition, publishing only online. “I feel like I’m rearranging the chairs on the Titanic,” he said.
Then a bold, if slightly desperate, idea came to him. In his brushes with the professional journalism crowd, he’d heard about an increasingly popular school of thought: if the press is a public service, it ought to be publicly funded.
Photo courtesy of John Rodriguez
