By Faith Schilmoeller || May 1, 2024
Despite the name, Bucket List Community News in Denver does not serve coffee.
Instead, it is an online news publication founded by Vicky Collins in 2019 where the emphasis rests on “community” and bringing people together through stories.
It was a bucket-list endeavor for Collins to pursue, and she has been chasing the spirit of community one might find in a cafe ever since, in the form of community journalism.
Bucket List began as a blog for Collins to use her background as a television news producer to explore her neighborhood. Now, she uses all her skills to publish a community news outlet that covers a variety of Denver-centric stories and trains the next generation of journalists.
Most of Bucket List’s team are student interns studying journalism at the University of Denver, University of Colorado – Boulder and Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“With us, they are driving the train,” Collins said. “They’re not running a student publication; they’re running a community publication.”
To satiate a community’s news needs and mentor young journalists, Collins wants to ensure her reports are really “thrown into the soup.”
INGREDIENTS OF THE SOUP
Around 50 students have reported for Bucket List Community News since 2021. They earn internship credit toward degrees in journalism.
London Lyle, the engagement manager, graduated from the University of Colorado – Boulder in May 2023 and has stuck around. The management team and a few senior reporters are also graduates. Around two-thirds of the team are student reporters.
“The cool thing about Bucket List is it’s kind of a mentorship program,” Lyle said. “Pretty much everyone on our team is in their twenties. That’s where I started out, and then Bucket List has made me make all these other connections.”
She organizes fundraising, sponsorships and the monthly podcast at Bucket List, but also freelances at other community outlets with what she has learned at Bucket List.
“We’re where you want to start, you know?” Lyle said.
Bucket List students are expected to produce six articles per semester, which could be their first bylines.
“The journalism we’re putting out there, I would put it up against what anybody else is doing. I think our team is doing really, really good work for journalists who are so very young,” Collins said. “I feel like I learn as much from [the students] as [they] are learning from me.”
Hannah Kirkpatrick, research director at the Center for Community News, said strong collaborations between students, universities and news outlets are typically most successful when editors are open to putting in extra time to mentor students.
“I think it is important for there to be an understanding that it may be a little extra work to work with students, but that it’s worthwhile,” Kirkpatrick said.
At Bucket List, Collins and editor Madison Lauterbach see themselves as mentors for the next generation of journalists.
“Beyond serving the community, we’re a bridge for [students] … to get all the skills they need to take the next steps,” Collins said. “The whole point isn’t to stay with Bucket List. The whole point is to move forward in your career, to use this as a ramp.”
JUST A TASTE
Bucket List is an online publication focused on all things Denver through character-driven and often visual stories.
Coverage spans from gun laws to online dating events to quirky business highlights, among other community stories that Lyle has described as “Denver-core.” Approximately 200 original stories are published a year, or roughly three to four per week.
A recent grant allows Bucket List to dedicate at least two articles per month to covering the Spanish-speaking population of Denver and translate existing articles to Spanish.
The project began in January, spearheaded by bilingual reporters Daianee Galindo and Jackie Ramirez. Bucket List may begin translating other publications’ articles for them, too, Collins said.
“We try to make sure that everybody in the community has a voice and that they are seen in our stories,” Collins said.
This all takes place online at no cost to the reader.
The Bucket List website garnered 37,500 visitors and 50,000 views in 2023. Its Facebook page reached around 225,000 people, and Instagram account neared 30,000.
The site’s traffic has essentially doubled every year.
Bucket List also sends a weekly newsletter. Over 6,000 email newsletters were sent throughout February with an impressive 40% open rate and 1.7% click rate.
Overall, Bucket List’s target audience is between 933,400 and 1.1 million people, as of January 2024. More than half of its audience is women between ages 35 and 55.
The publication is reliant on grants, fundraising, community sponsors, and monthly contributors. Collins is glad not to deal with printing and enjoys the challenges of fundraising while publishing fully online.
“It’s really exciting to be innovating in this space,” Collins said. “There’s a lot of promise but a lot of work to do.”
DEVELOPING THE RECIPE TOGETHER
Bucket List is not the only community news outlet in Denver.
The Denver North Star, Aurora Sentinel, Boulder Reporting Lab, Front Porch and Colorado Community Media (oversees 24 papers) are some of the would-be competitors nearby.
Instead of competition, the publication steers toward collaboration.
“It’s actually funny, I think that nowadays, because news in general is — I don’t want to say dying but definitely changing, and a lot of people would say it’s dying — I think that there’s actually this sense of camaraderie between local, hyperlocal news outlets,” Lyle said.
Several team members at Bucket List, including Lyle, freelance for multiple organizations simultaneously. Galindo added that they write separate stories for separate organizations, so it does not cause conflict.
Lyle said in her experience, there’s an understanding that community news is exceedingly valuable. If organizations are fighting each other, how can it reach its full potential?
Because the Bucket List team is not interested in competition, they enjoy camaraderie, collaboration and innovation amid a rich community news scene.
DISHING OUT THE SOUP, LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
According to an ongoing impact report by the Center for Community News, 120 university-led student reporting programs supply communities with local news. Around 2,280 students produced more than 10,000 articles in the past year.
Bucket List Community News contributes to this growing movement.
Collins has big plans. She wants to see Bucket Lists across Colorado and the United States.
“I think what we’re doing is important work that could be replicated in other communities to bring community and journalism and universities together to cover the community,” she said.
Currently, the publication receives no compensation from university partners, a pain point Collins identified. Kirkpatrick confirmed that missing a strong advocate within universities could deter from successful collaboration.
“It could be a little bit of an obstacle, but clearly there’s ways to overcome it,” Kirkpatrick said, referring to the success of Bucket List so far.
With most university-outlet collaborations, Kirkpatrick said it is more common to see one school collaborating with multiple outlets, than an outlet, like Bucket List, collaborating with multiple schools. Amplify Utah is one exception she noted.
With a model like Bucket List, everybody wins: “This is something that benefits the community, it benefits the university, it benefits the students, and it benefits those of us who have been in journalism our whole career, who, now it’s our turn to give back,” Collins said.
