May 15, 2019 12:34 PM UTC

Colorado Public Radio is Saving Political Journalism

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• by: Colorado Pols

According to Corey Hutchins of Colorado College and the Colorado Independent, there is a new political journalist on the scene whose calls to Sen. Cory Gardner will soon go unreturned:

Colorado Public Radio has hired @caitlynkim to report for the station from Washington, D.C., making her the only full-time Beltway reporter working for a Colorado news outlet. She’ll cover the congressional delegation and federal policy with a Colorado angle pic.twitter.com/mbi2c0ehJ1

— Corey Hutchins (@CoreyHutchins) May 14, 2019

Colorado media outlets haven’t had a regular presence in Washington D.C. since Mark Matthews left the Denver Post last summer. Both the Post and the long-deceased Rocky Mountain News used to employ Beltway-based reporters who covered Colorado political and policy angles; with increasing cutbacks in newsrooms, that luxury has slowly dissolved over time.

Colorado Public Radio (CPR) has made a number of new hires to beef up its reporting on Colorado politics recently, perhaps most notably the move of Bente Birkeland from KUNC radio last fall. The increase in coverage of political and policy news is a welcome change in a state where the trend in recent years had been for news outlets to continually cut back on political reporting.

So, let us welcome Caitlyn Kim to the ranks of Colorado political journalists. May Sen. Gardner’s voicemail treat you well.