Music Narrator: Isaac N. Bunting, a salesman from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and partner Harold T. Lee, former proprietor of the Salida News and the Glenwood Springs Republican, founded the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

The first edition rolled off the presses on November 20th, 1893.

See this newspaper, that was I. N. Bunting and his partner started, it struggled for a bit, but Bunting served as mayor of Grand Junction at the same time, he was writing stories about the city of Grand Junction or editorials, anyways.

Those early years and I think the last years in the 19th century to World War II, newspapers throughout the country, and it was true here, had a very definite partisan focus.

Narrator: The Sentinel served as the second prominent paper in western Colorado, competing with the Grand Junction News.

Silbernagel: For a while, you had the Grand Junction News, which was started by the town founders, basically as the company newspaper.

And then The Sentinel came a decade later and offered a different voice.

Narrator: Walter Walker purchased the paper from Bunting in 1911 after serving as editor for many years.

As the paper continued to grow in the following years, Walker decided to move The Daily Sentinel Office to 634 on Main Street, where it remained until a new building was constructed in 1970.

This building is still home to The Sentinel today.

The Sentinel remained a Walker family owned business for one more generation.

Walter's son, Preston, inherited ownership and publishing duties of the Sentinel after his father's death in 1956.

Silbernagel: The Sentinel was in the early years Walter Walker, Prescott Walker, Ken Johnson, time.

Just so much into boosterism of the community and not trying to be real critical, it was just the way it was.

He supported the Chamber of Commerce.

He supported any business activity.

This is the greatest place in the world, which it is.

Narrator: Ken Johnson assumed ownership and publishing duties upon Preston Walker's untimely death in 1970.

There was a recession in the seventies and the Sentinel was going through some, you know, difficult economic times.

But some papers, some papers die.

You know, this one hasn't.

I think back then The Daily Sentinel, we thought of ourselves as kind of a regional newspaper.

We covered a huge, huge geographic area and we were a newspaper with the circulation at the time of, I don't know, between 30 and 35,000.

Our primary competitors were the Denver newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post.

In Colorado, you had, you know, Denver trying to cover the entire state and that's a big reason why we felt we had to cover as much of Western Colorado as we could.

We kind of were the driving force and driving community discussions about, you know, any number of issues.

I think people looked at us for civic leadership.

I think they looked at us for solid news coverage.

Narrator: Through the years, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel employed many talented journalists.

You know, there were a bunch of bunch of people here when I started that are just, just really wonderful people.

Mary Louise Giblin was a political reporter at The Daily Sentinel and really one of the preeminent political reporters in the state.

If a politician, whether it was a national politician or just, you know, a member of the legislature, if they came to Mesa County, they had to come talk to Mary Louise Giblin.

Alice Wright.

She used to write obituaries and, you know, obituaries, you know, they can become very formulaic.

But, you know, a good obituary is a wonderful piece of writing.

And Alice would do that and write these great stories about people who had died.

And I think they were some of the best read things in the paper.

Bob Grant was a photographer.

He took pictures for The Sentinel for I don't know how many years, 30 or 40.

And, you know, he covered everything in this town.

He was the only photographer The Sentinel had for all those years or most of those years.

Narrator: Ken Johnson sold the paper to Cox Enterprises in 1979 Cox then sold the paper to current owners, the Seaton group in 2009.

We thought there was a, you know, a real opportunity for what is a great newspaper in a community with great newspaper penetration.

We own small town newspapers around the Midwest.

In fact, William Winston Seaton founded the Washington Intelligencer in 1812.

I think as things started changing when Cox took over was Seaton's as well.

It's become more looking at business activities more objectively.

And, you know, yes, we want business, we want jobs and stuff, but is this the right fit?

It's not just knee jerk boosterism.

It's more careful thought put into economic development, economic activities in this area.

Music I probably should have developed a greater familiarity with really, what the hell went on back then.

I think it's indisputable that at least for some period of time, to some degree, one or the other, you know, Walter Walker was affiliated with the Klan.

Narrator: Born in Marion, Kentucky in 1883, Walter Walker moved to Grand Junction when he was 20.

He started working in the newspaper business at the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

A well-educated man, he quickly became an editor for the Sentinel and eventually the owner.

Throughout his time in Grand Junction, Walter Walker greatly impacted the Grand Junction community and The Daily Sentinel.

The Walker family had a huge, huge impact on this community.

I suspect if you're an historian, I'm not, but I've lived here long enough.

But I think you can make the affair argument that probably no one family had a greater impact on this community over a hundred year period than the Walker family.

He had a considerable role, let's say, in the advent of the Sentinel.

He also had a role in the Ku Klux Klan and the local chapter back then.

And I remember we were doing a story at the time I was working for my university's newspaper about Walter Walker and his prevailing prevalence, not just in the community, but specifically at CMU.

The Sentinel had this pivotal role in and ended up kind of finding itself in contrast and against this really, really prominent social group, amongst other things, which was the Ku Klux Klan.

Narrator: Some say Walker even tried to promote Klan values and activities, in Grand Junction, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was at its peak.

They tried to do that in Colorado and Walter Walker was part of that.

Colorado Springs had a big Klan organization there.

Narrator: During this time, Walter Walker occupied the limelight for many reasons.

He had just recently been appointed as Colorado's United States Senator and was now a national figure.

With all eyes on him, Walker wanted to do everything he could to continue building up Grand Junction, even if that meant opposing the Klan.

Opposition brought about by either a change of heart or personal conflict with Klan members.

Silbernagel: We also have to recognize that Walter Walker changed his mind about the Klan for a number of reasons, I think.

But I think it came to primarily came down to what he thought was best for this community and he didn't think the Klan was going to be good for the economy of Grand Junction, which was always at the top of his list of important issues.

And so he changed and had the famous fight with the Klan member on Main Street in Grand Junction and then started writing editorials that were very anti Klan and saying we should get away from it.

Music Narrator: 130 years reflect stories locally and nationally that left an indelible mark on the Grand Junction community.

On May 2nd, 1982, they still call a Black Sunday.

All the stuff that was beginning to go crazy in the seventies, you know, with respect to energy development, Northwestern Colorado, came crashing down when, you know, Exxon pulled out of the, you know, Colony Project.

It was kind of amazing, you know, their Colony Oil Shale projects and, you know, by Parachute and it would employ over 2000 people at the time, it was the biggest construction project going on in the United States.

And one Sunday, they just shut it down.

And the impacts of that were, at the time, we didn't realize how bad, but I mean, we knew it was going to be bad, but we had no idea how bad it was going to be.

And it had a huge, huge effect on the entire regional economy.

Mesa County didn't lose just 20% of its job base.

It pretty much lost 20% of its population over the course of, you know, two or three years.

You know, the number of people who simply had to leave or was, you know, work.

When you lose 2000 jobs, plus all the jobs that support those jobs, lose it all in one day.

And they basically had to go to the bank and hand them the keys and say, here it is nothing, you know, it's all yours.

I can't pay you.

And that wasn't just an isolated incident, that was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.

You know, dozens and dozens of businesses had to close.

That was a huge, huge story that, you know, had quite a shelf life because the the economy really didn't recover until the latter part of the decade of the 1980s.

So I would have to say, you know, during my time, that was probably the, you know, the biggest overall story in terms of, you know, impact.

You know, one of my first beat, my first beat as a reporter at The Daily Sentinel was covering education.

And I really took it upon myself to immerse myself and learn everything I could.

Everything about how the school board operated, meet the staff in the schools, just scrub through the budget and spend a lot of time in schools.

But there was a school bond issue at the time, and I spent a lot of time going to the schools with the photographer and showing what happens inside the schools and what they look like and the difference between what a 60 year old school looks like and a ten year old school looks like is night and day.

And how would we know that if somebody like The Daily Sentinel didn't go down those narrow halls and see where janitors closet had been turned into an office and all of the things that have to happen to retrofit these old buildings.

I really dedicated myself to showing people what was happening inside the schools in a way they hadn't seen before.

And I felt like I had done a good service for the community to allow them to make an informed decision when they voted for that bond.

I would say that the issue of uranium tailings within the region and the Sentinel's ensuing coverage of that, that fascinated me early on.

That was an issue that had dire implications.

And without that information being put out, I think a lot of the right actors that were needed to mitigate the very scary residual and ripple effects of that issue, of uranium tailings in the area that wouldn't have been as it wouldn't have been as likely that that would have happened.

So I think and that speaks to the importance of news media in general, being able to spread awareness and underscore and highlight issues for people to act on and to change.

The ongoing political coverage that we've seen in the last decade, decade and a half.

That to me has been very interesting.

And then specifically the Colorado River crisis, The Daily Sentinel has been more or less on the front lines regionally of this ongoing drought and concern regarding a dwindling water supply from the Colorado River.

And their coverage is sort of sounding the alarm bell early on warning people of what this could mean if things aren't managed properly in regards to the river.

Seaton: You know, I think we've done great coverage on the Tina Peters story, which is a I think, a unique phenomenon, but a reflection of a national phenomenon in that, you know, there's a lot of questions about election integrity.

And here we have somebody that questioned it to a point where the elected clerk broke into her own elections office and imaged hard drives of the Dominion voting machines.

And what she did with those images, we're not exactly sure, but we've been able to follow this story very, very closely, partly because we have a we have a very transparent district attorney's office.

It's been always entertaining.

You know, I would like to think that the the last city council election was affected by our coverage.

You know, we've been covering the city pretty thoroughly, I think, over the course of, well, the existence of the Sentinel.

I think that the just serving mission continuing to serve that role of covering our communities.

The drip, drip, drip of local coverage on what's happening here, it has an effect on how our government operates.

This was actually one that was it's a national story, but I keep coming back to it.

It was because it was a local story, too, because it affected all of us.

And that was 9/11.

You know, I can only remember maybe half a dozen specific days in 30 years that were, wow, that was a big day.

And that was one of them.

And it was such a huge, huge story.

We did something that day that we'd never, ever done before and I don't think the Sentinel's ever done it since.

We produced an eight page tabloid special edition about 9/11 and had kids out at the, you know, intersections hawking it and we you know, and of course, the two or 3 hours, and it was a rapidly changing two or 3 hours.

And we threw virtually every reporter we had at it, I mean, every reporter, every editor, every photographer, we threw out it to find local angles, which we found several.

The interesting thing about it was watching this staff work, I mean, while they realized, my God, something terrible has happened to this country and, you know, it's going to affect me, it's going to affect my kids, gonna affect my family, you know, I mean, it's it's goin change the way we see the world.

but they still had a job to do that morning.

And, you know, they were consummate professionals on one hand and but, you know, they had an extra 5 minutes they couldn't stay away from the television on the other.

So it was a hectic day.

Well, hectic several days, actually.

But that first day especially, it was particularly hectic.

But it's where you could sort of look at, you know, a staff you've put together and realize, wow, these guys are really good.

So when I think of some of the stories that I remember that stand out to me, I think about some great writers like the Nancy Lofholms and the Rachel Sauers and the Sharon Wizdas, who could just turn of phrase and I'll give you an example, there was a truck that overturned in the DeBeque Canyon, as happens with some regularity, right outside of Palisade.

And it was hauling hogs and one was still loose.

And Sharon Wizda wrote, It's unknown if there is a porcine significant other still at large.

And it's like thats porcine I mean who says that.

I mean it's just the absolute delight of wordplay and just this really joy and engagement of language.

I mean, that really was a big pleasurable part of being in that newsroom.

Music Narrator: Local media fills one of the most important roles as watchdog for a community.

The local media plays a critical role in being the eyes and ears for citizens about what is going on in the community.

You know, the finger on the pulse.

Everybody's busy.

Everybody can't attend every city council meeting or school board meeting or sus through a budget.

But that's what the media does.

The media does that for its citizens so that they can have information about what's going on in their community.

Our entire system is based on checks and balances.

And so particularly with sunshine laws requiring that government, you know, give notification of upcoming meetings and make their, you know, minutes public and all of those things.

Having the media there, knowing that they're going to be looking for that, that there's going to be that level of accountability.

It just keeps everybody sharper.

Right?

It just there's the understanding that the media is going to be paying attention.

And that makes government more mindful of its accountability to its citizens as well.

It sharpens everyone's game.

Narrator: When local news stories receive national attention, it highlights the importance of local media and the role it plays in the bigger picture.

It's certainly not the biggest media outlet or publication in the state, for that matter.

However, it's in an interesting place from a geopolitical standpoint because you're in the third Congressional District and Lauren Boebert is a person that we cover quite a bit because obviously she's from Rifle and she's in Grand Junction on a regular basis.

Covering her and covering her rallies and everything along those lines, brings a lot of national attention to the paper.

The other thing that is worth noting about The Sentinel is that we cover a wide range of things and of course that's endemic to any newspaper.

But what makes The Sentinel interesting is, like I said, there are certain issues that we're covering that get national attention.

Lauren Boebert or some of these darker cases like the Brian Cohee case, for example, that just recently reached the verdict a few weeks ago.

But at the same time, I mean, I might be covering something that has, like I said, national eyes drawn to it.

But then the next day I might be covering just a local interest story of like a, you know, a local cat fair or something.

So trying to reconcile those two things of covering just local interest stories that are relatively inconsequential, but just fun for the community and covering these things that are sometimes dark or difficult to cover.

That's been a fun sort of learning curve of working at the Daily Sentinel.

Narrator: In recent years, struggling local news outlets face the possibility of bankruptcy due to larger corporations and the digital age, making small agencies obsolete.

This keeps me up at night because, frankly, newspapers are written into the Constitution.

After the framers created the three branches of government in this country, the next thing they did is create a free press, immune from the power of that government.

We play a critical role, I think, in the functioning of this democracy.

The functioning of the republic.

And when these newspapers fall or are diminished so significantly, I think we're renouncing our fourth estate role, our check on the power of that government.

You know, a lot of people think that, you know, we get our marching orders from omniscient third party that tells us what to do.

We get on a call with the media.

They tell us what we're supposed to do.

But in fact, all the decisions about what's going to go in the paper are editorial positions.

Everything that happens here happens in this building.

So it is completely locally controlled, locally managed.

And I think we try to be a reflection on the community and a reflection to the community.

So that's our role.

We don't serve any other master.

You know, I think it's critical.

And in fact, I just had this conversation with a couple electeds, people were complaining that we just had a Denver mayor race and nobody was paying attention.

And the, you know, electoral turnout was very low.

And they said it's because there's not a vibrant newspaper in Denver anymore.

Contrast that with Grand Junction, we just had an election and we had massive turnout.

The biggest turnout we've had a municipal election in memory.

I think that having a newspaper engaged in local affairs and local issues drives that conversation, which I think drives engagement.

Narrator: Supporting local media is crucial for maintaining a strong and healthy democracy.

Local news outlets provide an essential service by informing the public about important issues and events that affect their daily lives.

The Daily Sentinel is more important than ever that it provide information as smaller communities have lost their regional newspapers.

You know, it's a business.

I tell my friends and family members, I said, if you like getting local news, subscribe to The Daily Sentinel.

If you like getting local news, advertise in The Daily Sentinel.

You know, vote with your wallet.

That's how that works.

That's what support is.

If you, you know, value this vetted news that you know they're going to be accountable for what they print, well then support it.

And that's important, now more than ever.

There's nothing free.

Right?

Let's not kid ourselves.

And so you can subscribe or you can give over your eyeballs to a dizzying number of online ads, but you're paying one way or the other.

Music Narrator: The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel faces a new challenge, becoming paperless as television, online news and social media gain greater prominence in the news industry.

The Sentinel, as with all local media, must adapt to this evolving landscape to keep its audience.

I know that the concept now of sitting down and opening up a newspaper, kicking your feet up, having a glass of coffee, that seems like something that's reserved for an older demographic.

I know that with a lot of my younger friends, that's just not something that's done.

And so I think, again, the key thing for The Sentinel to be able to do, and any other local news source like it, is going to be figuring out ways to adapt and mark themselves to a wider audience and make their things more palatable and accessible to an audience that is accustomed to the digital side of things.

The Daily Sentinel was really in the leading edge of digital news.

We had a digital editor before I had even heard the term before.

We all coded our stories.

We designed quizzes and interactive and it's like there's this great new tool that we can provide our readers.

What can we do with it?

Now, how that all shook out over the years, you know, it was a work in progress and we were all figuring it out as we went.

But there was the idea that it was an innovation.

We had a newsroom full of reporters who could cover the news better than anybody else between Denver and Salt Lake City.

And we had a new tool to share our news on and if our readers wanted that immediacy, this was something that we were going to learn to utilize.

Music I have to commend the Cox Family and Cox Enterprises for being very selective about their buyer.

They, in fact, would not sell to any buyer who was going to finance the sale.

They wanted a cash deal because they want an assurance that the newspaper was going to survive.

This was at a time of upheaval.

In 2008, 2009, the larger national economy was in the ditch.

Newspapers were in massive upheaval, and Cox wanted a good buyer that they could trust would shepherd the newspaper through that time.

So the Sentinel seems to be in sort of this purgatory stage where they're still providing the traditional newspaper, but it's also now trying to adapt to an online base where I think more people are now getting their news.

And so I've been sort of having my feet in both camps and I've gotten familiar with the print side of things, but I've also continued to kind of develop my skills in the online arena.

What matters the most is that that content is solid and intriguing and engaging and whatever platform readers want, The Daily Sentinel is poised to deliver it.

Biller: I feel relatively hopeful about the future.

I understand that things are changing, but when people tell me that newspapers are dying, well, yes, maybe the traditional in the traditional sense they are.

But news itself, I don't think is going anywhere.

Music