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 earned national recognition for community journalism. Under Cobler's leadership as editor, the newsroom emphasized civic engagement, local transparency and early digital experimentation during the formative years of the internet. The decade culminated in Cobler's selection for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.
The Greeley Tribune was named the nation's best community newspaper three times by the National Newspaper Association. Judges considered the newspaper's overall quality, news coverage, editorial leadership and service to its community. Ownership changes later eliminated or degraded many of the online presentations of major special projects, including An American Homecoming, Worlds Apart-Coming Together, Faces of the Future, Children of the Dust, Ethiopia: Going Home, Access & Ability, Three Daughters and, pictured above and below, On the Right Road?
During this period, Cobler also recruited El Salvadoran journalist Edwin Ruis through the H-1B visa process to help launch the Spanish-language weekly La Tribuna.
_________________________________________“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
Massachusetts began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples May 17, 2004, six days before this column appeared. Cobler tried to help readers have a constructive community conversation when explaining the newspapers' decisions.
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.
One highlight was working with Matt Schuman on his award-winning 2003 series, Access & Ability. Cobler regarded Schuman as the most courageous journalist he ever worked with. Another highlight was producing the final extra edition of his career, featuring local reaction to 9/11. After the special edition was delivered to her home, a reader called to thank Cobler for providing local context to the horrifying international news and reassuring her that normalcy eventually would return.
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.
When Cobler arrived at the Tribune, the newspaper did not yet have email — he later led a session on proper etiquette for this new form of communication. Even as it experimented digitally, the paper kept its community focus, working with donors to create the Tribune Community Crisis Fund to help people featured in its coverage.
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-Averse 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. To read Cobler's Nieman application letter, click here. In it he cites author Ray Ring's description of what it's like to work for a newspaper: "I can tell you what it's like to work for a newspaper. Imagine a combine, one of those huge threshing machines that eat up a row of wheat like nothing, bearing right down on you. You’re running in front of it, all day long, day in and day out, just inches in front of the maw, where steel blades are whirring and clacking and waiting for you to get tired or make one slip. The only way to keep the combine off you is to throw it something else to rip apart and digest. What you feed it is stories. Words and photos. Ten inches on this, fifteen inches on that, a vertical shot here and a horizontal there, scraps of news and film that go into the maw where they are processed and dumped onto some page to fill the spaces around the ads. Each story buys you a little time, barely enough to slap together the next story, and the next and the next. You never get far ahead, you never take a breather, all you do is live on the hustle. Always in a rush, always on deadline, you keep scrambling to feed the combine. That’s what it’s like. The only way to break free is with a big story, one you can ride for a while and tear off in pieces so big, the combine has to strain to choke them down. That buys you a little time. But sooner or later the combine will come chomping after you again, and you better be ready to feed it all over again."
The Greeley Tribune was at the forefront of encouraging online reader comments through its editor's regular columns and blogs, via online polls and an electronic reader advisory board years before Facebook, and through this full opinion page devoted to the subject.
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