Greeley Tribune/Nieman Fellowship/Swift Digital, 1995-2007
Greeley Tribune/Nieman Fellowship/Swift Digital, 1995-2007
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National Recognition, Local Commitment
From 1995 to 2005, the Greeley Tribune served as a national benchmark for excellence in community journalism across the United States. Under Cobler's leadership as editor, the newsroom championed civic engagement, local transparency, and aggressive digital experimentation during the foundational years of the internet. This highly decorated era was defined by a deep, responsive connection to the Northern Colorado community, establishing an institutional standard of excellence that ultimately culminated in his selection for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.
The definitive national recognition of this decade-long tenure, the Greeley Tribune was named the Nation's Best Community Newspaper three times by the National Newspaper Association. Panels evaluated the publication's overall journalistic integrity, news coverage depth, editorial courage, and commitment to serving as a local civic anchor. Unfortuately, ownership changes have gutted the online presentations of these impressive special reports, including "An American Homecoming," "Worlds Apart-Coming Together," "Faces of the Future," "Children of the Dust," Ethiopia: Going Home," "Access & Ability," "Three Daughters," and "On the Right Road?"
The definitive national recognition of this decade-long tenure, the Greeley Tribune was named the Nation's Best Community Newspaper three times by the National Newspaper Association. Panels evaluated the publication's overall journalistic integrity, news coverage depth, editorial courage, and commitment to serving as a local civic anchor. Unfortuately, ownership changes have gutted the online presentations of these impressive special reports, including "An American Homecoming," "Worlds Apart-Coming Together," "Faces of the Future," "Children of the Dust," Ethiopia: Going Home," "Access & Ability," "Three Daughters," and "On the Right Road?"
_________________________________________“On the Right Road?” (featured at top of page and to the right) was the Greeley Tribune’s yearlong civic-journalism project examining traffic safety in a fast-growing community. The series combined reporting, public input and community discussion to identify dangerous roads and intersections and was named a semifinalist for the 2000 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.
Building a Newsroom for a Changing Community
Cobler became editor of the Greeley Tribune in Colorado in 1995, at a time when newspapers still dominated local news but the first signs of the digital disruption ahead were beginning to appear.
During the next decade, he and his team worked to make the Tribune more representative of the rapidly changing community it served and more willing to experiment with new ways of reaching readers. The newsroom received the Robert G. McGruder Award for Diversity Leadership in 2003, and American Journalism Review later examined the Tribune’s success in building a diverse newsroom in its 2004 article “What Works?” The newspaper also received Associated Press Managing Editors International Perspective Awards in 2002 and 2006. A highlight of Cobler's long career is editing and encouraging Matt Schuman to write in 2003 his award-winning series, "Access & Ability." Matt was the most courageous journalist Cobler ever met.
At the same time, he became increasingly interested in what the Internet meant for local journalism and was among an early generation of newspaper editors who blogged and communicated directly with readers online, creating an electronic reader advisory board in 2003. The Tribune experimented with publishing breaking news first on the Web rather than holding it for the next morning’s newspaper, and the company developed publications aimed at audiences the traditional daily newspaper was not reaching. At the same time, the paper always put its community first, working with donors to create a Community Fund to help those in need that the newspaper featured.
Those questions — how local newspapers could adapt to the web and how journalism could better serve communities undergoing demographic change — ultimately took him to Harvard.
Crossing the Digital Divide
In 2005, Cobler was selected as the Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Community Journalism and joined the Nieman Foundation’s Class of 2006 at Harvard University.
His area of study was how a community newspaper could use the Web to attract younger readers while fostering constructive conversation about changing demographics. The Nieman Fellowship gave him an academic year to explore those questions across Harvard, including courses and conversations about technological disruption, innovation and the future of journalism.
The timing proved significant. The newspaper industry was approaching a historic collapse in its advertising business while digital technology was changing how people found and shared information. At Harvard Business School and elsewhere across the university, he studied many of the forces that would reshape journalism during the next two decades.
After the fellowship, he returned to Greeley in a broader digital role as interactive division publisher for the Tribune and Swift Communications. In a 2006 essay for Nieman Reports, “Risk-Adverse Newspapers Won’t Cross the Digital Divide,” he argued that newspapers needed to stop protecting their traditional print franchises and instead embrace the disruptive technologies threatening them.
The central idea was simple: the Internet could be treated either as a threat to newspapers or as an opportunity to reinvent trusted local journalism.
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