Happy New Year, Bucket Listers! We want to wish you a 2025 full of health and blessings. You certainly blessed us with your generosity. Thanks to you, we raised almost $13,000 ($12,981) during our #newsCOneeds fundraiser. We are so grateful to you and our friends at Colorado News Collaborative and Colorado Gives for their help during this campaign. Also, a big shout out to Colorado Media Project, Kathy Neustadt, Tom Walsh and Jerry Bell for their matching grants. We are all working together to bring you trustworthy, solution-oriented local news.
With the new year, we welcome new members to our team. We have students and recent graduates from CU, MSU and DU working with us on internships and apprenticeships. Bucket List Community News has pioneered an apprenticeship model and we love mentoring the next generation of journalists so they can serve you with free hyperlocal neighborly news.
As we say goodbye to 2024 and hello to 2025, we would like to share our impressive growth over the last year. Our views and visitors have increased by 35% and 38%, respectively. This is in addition to the 41% and 46% increases seen last year. Compared to the industry average of 10-20% per year, we are doing extremely well. Additionally, our two annual campaigns generated more than $20,000 in revenue. Thank you for your support!
In 2024, we introduced a new website to improve your experience, and our friends at News Revenue Hub and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia helped us with audience and revenue growth. We met you at 17 events, introduced a Denver guide, and grew the audience for our podcasts. We enjoy meeting you and listening to your stories at art and music festivals, Mount Saint Vincent and the Huerta Urbana Farmers Market—you inspire our work, and we always enjoy hearing from our readers.
Our one-of-a-kind news publication, driven by students and recent graduates, has drawn local and national attention, not to mention winning 14 honors at the Colorado Press Association awards. We appreciate the Center for Community News, the Nutgraf and Corey Hutchins’ Inside the News, which have featured us in their reports on innovation in media. We are also grateful to our friends at CUNY, CMP/LMA, Knight Media Forum, LION Publishers and the Colorado Press Association who have invited us to conferences and cohorts so we can continue to learn.
Last but not least, we have worked with our ecosystem and universities to help us outperform expectations. We are grateful to the Associated Press and the Voter Voices initiative for assisting us with our election coverage. Furthermore, we enjoyed spending election night with Met Media at MSU Denver and Student News Live providing you with live election night coverage for the first time, as well as being media partners with Chuck Plunkett’s University of Colorado Boulder CMCI News Corps.
Speaking of News Corps, last week we published part one of Evanie Gamble and Norah Hively’s report on the link between exercise and addiction recovery through the transformational story of a former inmate. This week we bring you part two, which focuses on The Phoenix, a national organization that uses workout routines to help people build community while on the long, often lonely road to recovery. Through video, photos and a compelling narrative, Gamble and Hively paint a picture of the program’s rehabilitative power through activity and connection.
That’s it for our first newsletter of the new year. Our fundraiser is over and we can now return to regularly scheduled programming free of all the campaign emails and asks. But you don’t have to wait for a campaign to contribute. If you like an article, let us know with a small gift. If you enjoy one of our podcasts or guides, please consider making a contribution. We are working with you to make Denver a more informed and engaged community. Happy New Year!
Warmest Regards,
Vicky Collins and Toni Tresca
Bucket List Community News
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