• File photo
• Indy senior reporter Pam Zubeck.

Today, the Independent learned senior reporter Pam Zubeck has been awarded a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her reporting on the Waldo Canyon Fire. (Click here for the winning entries.) The entered category, "Public Service Journalism (Non-Daily Publication)," was national in scope and was not limited by a publication's circulation. Other winners included writers from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

"Judges selected 84 honorees from nearly 1,700 submissions," reads the SPJ's press release. "Entries included selections from television and radio broadcasts, newspapers, online news outlets and magazines."

Zubeck's reporting was the first to reveal some of the many problems that plagued the city's response, and included gripping on-the-scene details from the firefighters' perspective, like this passage from one of the pieces, "Inside the nightmare":

"We had places where our fire guys were going in with 1-inch fire line [garden hoses], between houses that are 10 feet apart and this one's on fire and this one's not, trying to spray the houses down. Guys pulled the decks off, knocked down the fire on the outside of the windows, and the guys jumped in the house with a garden hose. If the fence was on fire, we'd knock it down. We were knocking stuff down, cutting trees out of the way, dragging them into the street."

Additionally, Zubeck has previously been called "one of the best reporters in the state" by the Colorado bureau chief of the Associated Press, a sentiment echoed today by Indy editor-in-chief Kirk Woundy.

"Pam's work on these stories was nothing short of amazing, especially since she was also responsible for writing other stories, every week, all along the way," he says. "We're thrilled that she's getting some of the recognition she deserves."

The Society of Professional Journalists has been honoring writers since 1932. The winners will be feted at an awards banquet on June 21 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Update, 5:30 p.m.: We just heard back from Gazette editor Joe Hight:

"Yes, we have hired Monica Mendoza as our city hall reporter," he writes. "We had a great pool of candidates, but thought Monica’s experience at the business journal as well as major metropolitan dailies provided a great fit for the Gazette and this important beat."

———

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Fran Zankowski, CEO of both the Independent and the Colorado Springs Business Journal, has confirmed that Journal reporter Monica Mendoza will be leaving the paper to cover city politics for the Gazette. The important position was previously filled by Daniel Chacón, whose reassignment caused several community members to question Mayor Steve Bach's influence over the daily.

As far as Mendoza, CSBJ managing editor Rob Larimer wrote in an e-mail to the staff that, "She’s been a solid part of the Journal’s staff for nearly two years, covering tourism, banking, small business, entrepreneurs and the business of aging. She worked as a military reporter at the Schreiver Sentinel before joining the CSBJ staff."

E-mails to Mendoza and Gazette editor Joe Hight have not been returned as of yet, but we'll update this post if they are. Her LinkedIn page lists time spent at the Arizona Republic and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In the mean time, it's not known to us when she'll start for the daily, but her last day at the business paper is April 19.

"She’s a great writer and reporter," wrote Larimer, "and we’re sad to see her go."

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• Clowns, indeed.

If I were at the helm of a daily newspaper recently accused by prominent community members of making staffing decisions based on the whims of Mayor Steve Bach — a newspaper that also appears to be in the throes of an apology tour for being nearly worthless for the past decade — I might be a little more careful.

If I were the Gazette, I might try to gain back a little more of the professionalism and expertise lost during years putting bylines on press-releases; reprinting Denver Post stories on the front page; and covering the community so badly that the only readers left for the few remaining advertisers to target all had false teeth — just like the reporting.

I might not continue the tradition of letting editorial-page editor Wayne Laugesen embarrass the elsewhere-respected job title (or at least not any more than he already has) by promoting his masturbatory play-thing — a mortifying "reality cartoon show" now in its third episode, and rife with bad jokes, sexist depictions and crude stereotypes. (Not to mention, worst of all, completely useless to the reader for anything other than schadenfreude.)

"Does Wayne become the singing icon of his dreams or make a clown of himself again?" reads the post, asking a clearly rhetorical question. "Why is Mayor Bach making a special voice appearance at the airport? And why does Bill Vogrin’s body keep changing?"

And, right, why is Mayor Bach using time from his busy schedule to contribute professional sentiments like, "This is Mayor Steve Bach. Welcome to Colorado Springs, home of Wayne Laugesen, winner of the Nebraska International Clowns Pageant." Nothing cozy about that — no reason to blink twice at an institution whose job it is to keep a critical eye on city government, winking along with the mayor.

But if I were trying to make friends at City Hall, I probably would write some fawning piece like the Gazette did write on March 15: "Behold, a new recipe for a wonderful life in Mountain Shadows: One part Kosher salt, one part bread, and one part Mayor Steve Bach. Savor with a glass of wine and sweeten with a pinch of Suzi Bach."

There have been positive signs of life from the paper under new editor Joe Hight: more coverage of local issues, better reporters, better design. Sure, you can't go three days without a full-length feature about the latest development at billionaire owner Philip Anschutz's other local obsession of the moment — The Broadmoor — but usually they remember the important, obligatory disclosure of joint ownership. Plus, most of the time, the news is good to know.

But considering the abuses of trust, value and years-long shirking of the institution's only calling — to inform, check and enlighten — I might not play so fast and loose with the community's attention. I might be a little more careful.

Last Wednesday, the Gazette held an evening reception at the Broadmoor, attended by 50 or so community leaders, on the health of the newspaper. We requested more details in hopes of attending and reporting on the event, but were told it was "a private, invitation-only reception, rather than a meeting," in an e-mail from editor Joe Hight.

However, one source who attended said it was basically the paper admitting something along the lines of, "For the past five or six years we have stunk. We have not supported the community; we’ve had cuts; we know that we’ve lost your trust. What we would like to do is find ways to reflect the community, to serve the community, and to enrich the life of the people here in the community."

City Councilor Val Snider says what he took away from the reception — hosted by Hight, publisher Dan Steever, and Christian Anschutz, son of billionaire Philip Anschutz, owner of both the paper and the hotel — was that the paper wanted people to know it had improved.

"I think just trying to get the word out that they know that every successful community has a successful newspaper that reflects the town, and that in years past maybe that reflection just hasn’t been all that accurate," says Snider, who says he was the only member of city government in attendance. "It was probably not something that you were expecting them to say, and you didn’t expect them to be that frank. So I was impressed enough to give them a chance."

Also said to be in attendance were people like Tom Osborne, CEO of the Colorado Springs Sports Corporation; developer Steve Schuck; and Kaiser Permanente's C.J. Moore.

“They just talked about the changes that they had made in the newspaper; that they wanted to be more community engaged," says community advocate Mary Ellen McNally. "It was not really a big presentation, per se. It was very light, I would say. Nothing new that you wouldn’t know by reading the newspaper."

If you don't tell somebody how offended you were, did it still happen? We'll never know; even before social media, the government had long solicited comment from the affected.

Just check out what resulted when one brilliant individual, in February, obtained copies of complaints made in the last couple years to the Federal Communications Commission against Saturday Night Live. (We're presenting the following exactly as they were written.)

"Last night on Saturday night live Jamie Fox called for the killing of all white people," reads one sent from a Michigan viewer on Dec. 8, 2012. " I want to make a formal complaint against NBC, Saturday Night Live and Jamie Fox. Jamie Fox needs to be removed from society until this threat is over."

Another sent Dec. 3, 2012 from a revolted Kentuckian: "I couldn't believe how this show has changed from years ago," it reads. "Two men are passiontely kissing and the one man lifts up the other's shirts and proeceeds to feel up the other man. Television has changed so much when things were meaningful and moral."

And you know who couldn't agree more? The American Family Association, a group on the "frontlines" of a "culture war" I'm not sure anybody else knows is being fought. Their dissatisfaction (this week) stems from a mid-February SNL skit riffing on Quentin Tarantino flicks, which shows a machine-gun wielding, revenge-seeking Son of God.

"Critics are calling it a less-violent Passion of the Christ," says the voiceover of the faux film Djesus Uncrossed, adding: "I never knew how much Jesus used the N-word."

Well, the AFA wasn't having that. Taking up arms against the show's advertisers, the group today announced that both Sears and JCPenney have pulled their financial support.

“I can tell you that as long as corporations support this kind of offensive material, their sales are going to suffer as shoppers abandon retailers that support blasphemy," says AFA president Tim Wildmon in the press release. "We applaud Sears and JCPenney for their wise action to stop funding damaging material such as the skit that mocked our Lord Jesus Christ."

Of course, some religious commenters think the TV show's depiction of Jesus isn't far off what some conservatives have tried to make him into.

"We have tried to arm him with our military-industrial complex, drape him with our xenophobia, outfit him with our weapons, and adorn him with our nationalism," wrote David Henson for patheos.com. "We’ve turned the cross into a flagpole for the Stars and Stripes. We have no need for Tarantino to reimagine the story of Jesus into a fantasy of violent revenge. We’ve done it for him."

Then there's this, from Yale Bible scholar John J. Collins, talking to NPR about what Jews at the time hoped for from their savior: "Most people wanted a big, strong warrior who would drive out the Romans, who would smash heads."

And, ultimately, we're talking about the same deity that's described in the Bible this way: "He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God."

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For decades, a good portion of the white and brick building at 30 S. Prospect St. has been taken up by printing presses churning out Colorado Springs' daily newspaper every 24 hours. The current machinery was put in place in 1978, but as of April 15 it will be shut down and all printing will be done in the capital by the Denver Post, the Gazette announced on Tuesday.

“The technology in Denver is state-of-the-art and will advance our printing capabilities considerably,” said publisher Dan Steever. “Top newspapers in the country are already being printed there, so it’s a proven facility.”

And of course, considering the Independent is also printed by the Post, that's true.

But nonetheless the change, implemented by a desire to increase the quality of pages and the amount of color used in the newspaper, came with some criticism from commenters. One person wrote, "I bet most of the readers would have chosen to have 'less color' to keep the jobs here in Colorado Springs." In an interview with the Indy, Steever said he could appreciate the frustration, but beyond the fact that he said roughly 80 percent of newspapers don't print their own product, he thinks it's still the better move for a few reasons.

"What they may not understand is that when all is said and done, and April 15 rolls around, we will have almost the same amount of employees here as we did the day I got here in September," he says. "And that’s because the areas we’re hiring in are different areas: newsroom and circulation and IT and finance and sales and marketing and a lot of digital.

"We’ve [also] hired a new head of marketing; we’ve just hired four more people into finance — those people in finance, by the way, are jobs that were not located in the state of Colorado when Freedom [Communications] owned the paper.”

And not only is the staff ballooning, outside of the 51 jobs lost in the press room, but the redesigned paper has added 32 pages of additional content per week; new daily sections; increased coverage of prep sports and the military; and new columns, like columnist Barry Noreen's rebirth as "The Voice of the Reader," as one mailed subscription offer reads. And all that's just going to continue, including a second, more thorough redesign of the paper and website that will happen in the third quarter of 2013.

“There’s other things we’re working on: more, what you might call, enterprise reporting," Steever says. "You’ve seen some of that lately: two-, and three-, and four-part pieces; the opening up of the Incline is an example of that. So we’re going to be doing a lot more of that real in-depth, enterprise-type reporting.

“But special content around some of the bigger topics that people are interested in — finances, health, food, those kinds of things — yeah, we’re gonna continue to try to build content in all those areas.”

The G's story also mentioned a potential move from Prospect Street; Steever declined to comment on any possible buyers of either the equipment or the building, or the financials behind the cessation of printing. "At the end of the day it was not driven by numbers, I can tell you that."

He did, however, weigh in on something the story's commenters were also clamoring for: the head of editorial-page editor Wayne Laugesen.

"Wayne does a good job — we get far more responses on what Wayne writes that are favorable," Steever says. "But on the other hand, this is not regarding Wayne, but we wanna listen to what the readers are saying, and we’re gonna try to have some balance in the op-ed area. But as far as Wayne goes, Wayne has a lot of supporters and he’s good at what he does."

• A portion of the disputed file footage, showing fully armored SWAT officers.

Update, Monday, Feb. 4, 3:12 p.m.: We heard back from Barbara Miller, CSPD's public-information officer, who said she'd call us back later with a more detailed response. In the meantime, anchor James Jarman says he understands the department's concerns about how SWAT was depicted, but wished it had been communicated differently.

"Her posting that e-mail on Facebook, I’ve never seen anything like that," he says in a phone interview. "And I didn’t know about it until — I mean, I was sitting on the desk, anchoring the 4 p.m. [newscast], and I looked on our iPad and I saw somebody had posted something on Facebook about ‘Are you gonna apologize to CSPD?’ So I went to their page, and that was the first hint I got of anything that was even a concern."

And though the two sides are set to meet soon to discuss the report, Jarman says his feeling of unfair treatment from the PIO's office has been around for a while.

"My main issue, and I feel like I’m kind of standing up for all the reporters here, is there’s not a week goes by they don’t come in complaining about having trouble getting information from the public-information office to give to the public," he says. "It’s clear to me, from talking to friends who are officers ... the public-information office is not run by CSPD anymore."

———ORIGINAL POST———

Though the wrongfully issued Florida warrant that had a local woman, 56-year-old Catherene Wilson, mistakenly arrested was most traumatizing for her, there were a few other feathers ruffled in KRDO-TV's reporting of the event: mainly, those of the Colorado Springs Police Department. It all stems from a few seconds of generic footage the ABC affiliate used showing fully armored SWAT team members approaching a residence with assault rifles drawn.

Here's what the department wrote Friday on its Facebook page: "While your coverage made it appear that our entire SWAT Team went to the arrestee’s home, the truth is, 3 members went," wrote the department. "Just so you know, it is standard for any Fugitive Apprehension detail, that 2 members execute a warrant for Officer Safety reasons. In this case, a 3rd member who is new, accompanied them for training purposes. There is clearly a distinction between SWAT officers handling routine calls and a SWAT mission. This was obviously not a SWAT mission."

And though KRDO noted in its report that Wilson held no ill will towards CSPD, and that officers called later to check on her well-being, police were not mollified: "While the reporter clearly mentioned {at the end of the story} how Ms. Wilson praised the actions of our [Tactical Enforcement Unit] officers — the damage was already done with the portrayal of an armed SWAT Team with guns drawn preparing to arrest a sweet older woman.

"In fairness to the Colorado Springs Police Department, an accurate portrayal was not done and an on-air correction would be greatly appreciated."

In Facebook comments below the story — which have since been deleted, but were captured at the time by the Indy — KRDO anchor James Jarman defended his report (not to mention made a few allegations himself, referencing his old job at KOAA-TV).

We reached out to both Jarman and Miller for comment and will update this post if we hear back. In the meantime, the station did follow up on its story, saying Friday night, "We apologize, of course, if the file video left any of you with any misconception about what happened."

Update, Monday, Jan. 28, 10:06 a.m.: Editor Joe Hight sent a follow-up e-mail saying he is specifically denying rumors that the reassignment of reporter Daniel Chacón was done due to pressure from the mayor's office.

———

The Gazette's been in the hands of Philip Anschutz's Clarity Media Group for a couple months now, and there have been a few changes, some more noticeable than others. For instance, readers saw a prettier paper as of the middle of December or so, as more white space was implemented in the print product, offering a cleaner design. Also, pages and sections have certainly been expanded as promised.

Recently, though, two of the more colorful, high-profile reporters at the paper have been reassigned to different beats: John Schroyer, now gone from covering the state Capitol, and Daniel Chacón, formerly a mainstay at Colorado Springs City Hall.

Here's how editor Joe Hight explains the changes in an e-mailed response to our questions.

"It’s perfectly reasonable for newsrooms to realign reporters and their beats, especially those who have been on ones for periods of time," Hight writes. "It is even more reasonable considering our focus on expanding our news and information products and services. We are a growing organization and need to make moves and transitions, similar to the newsroom management realignment we announced last week, as well as bring in new people to meet those needs. John and Daniel are experienced journalists who will be assets in their new positions and provide talent to important newsroom endeavors."

Schroyer will become the paper's video reporter, according to his Twitter feed, while Chacón will trade politics for public safety, according to his. The Gazette's new Capitol reporter is Megan Schrader, formerly of another Anschutz property, The Oklahoman, and she already seems off to a good start.

"Megan is an outstanding reporter, a former Gazette intern and a Colorado native who applied here before I came here as editor," Hight writes. "We needed a reporter based in Denver, and Megan was able to fill that need."

One aspect of the change has drawn concern from political circles, however, as rumors abound that Chacón was reassigned after the paper received pushback from Mayor Steve Bach about the tone of some of the reporter's coverage. Here's what former mayoral candidate Buddy Gilmore wrote on his Facebook page earlier today:

Hight didn't respond directly to our question regarding whether the Gazette was pressured to make the move, writing only: "We also will continue to cover city government and will assign an outstanding reporter like Daniel to fill that need."

Multiple media outlets are reporting that, as we've been hearing, Denver's Philip Anschutz, via his Clarity Media Group, has bought the Gazette from Freedom Communications. The move adds the 140-year-old daily to his portfolio of Colorado Springs-based assets that includes the Broadmoor.

The Denver Business Journal, which has led the coverage of this transaction, has a good story on it.

Clarity Media says it plans to increase the number of pages, beef up the newspaper’s editorial staff and coverage — especially of military issues and topics — and expand the Gazette’s website and online services.

Having new, Denver-based owners interested in investing in the newspaper will make for “a better paper, and a more responsive organization to the readers, advertisers and the community,” said Dan Steever, the Gazette’s president and publisher.

In the meantime, there are unconfirmed reports of departures from the newsroom; we'll update this post if we hear more.

Anyway, along with the news that Steever, a friend and business partner of now ex-owner Aaron Kushner, will stick around came word that Joe Hight, a 30-year veteran of another Anschutz property, the Oklahoman, will become our daily's editor, likely supplanting "content director" Carmen Boles. In June, Boles drew heat over her handling of a dispute with former employee Barrett Tryon, who had linked a story on his Facebook page about a possible re-sale of the Gazette after its parent company was bought by Kushner and his investors.

In a press release, Kushner says: “The Gazette is one of our premier properties and an incredibly important institution. We were impressed with Clarity and how they share our belief in the value of the Gazette and investing in its health and growth."

See the full release after the jump.