Political journalism is facing a breaking point.
The sensational 2016 campaign coupled with the breakneck speed of the online news cycle requires media companies to re-evaluate how to best inform and engage audiences tasked with their civic duty to vote.
Jill Abramson, the former New York Times executive editor, the current state of political reporting as “the brutality of minute-by-minute competition and coverage. There’s this wild chase for scooplets. News breaks that no one remembers two days afterwards.”
This comes as the public’s confidence in the U.S. political system is reaching all-time lows, matched only by the distrust of the media. A Pew Research Center found only members of Congress and the federal government ranked lower in the public’s mind than journalists.
Enter the . For the 2016 election, The Denver Post is experimenting with new ways to tells stories about Colorado politics that better explain the state’s “purple” status as a political battleground.
The goal is to go beyond the horse-race coverage about who’s up and who’s down and look at the underlying factors that explain the nuances of Colorado’s even partisan divide.
Much of this effort only buttresses how The Post . And the Purple State Project website will showcase our top-notch Colorado political coverage.
As a part of this project, we welcome your ideas and feedback. What makes politics in Colorado different than in other states? And what do you want to know to be an informed voter? to political reporter John Frank. And check regularly for new updates.