AURORA | The heat of the late June day was cooled by the icy drinks in our hands as I began my impromptu toast to 15 people.
What could have been an anxiety-inducing bit of public speaking felt effortless on this occasion — the end of our group of 11 journalist students’ month-long stint working with the Sentinel newspaper in Aurora.
While seemingly unremarkable, the reality is that local newsrooms today struggle to maintain a staff like they once did. For the Sentinel, the full team is made up of a sportswriter, a reporter and an editor. This leaves Aurora, like many other communities, without enough resources to tell some of its most important stories. .
Aurora often makes headlines as a place of tragedy and turmoil — of mass shootings, rogue police officers and poverty. Yet, with the help of these student journalists this summer, the Sentinel gained the ability to tell more positive stories about the community, culture and vibrance that teems within Colorado’s most diverse city.
The idea for the project titled “the Story Sprint” came from a conversation between Sentinel board member Michelle Ancell and editor Dave Perry. Ancell first suggested that they bring in her class of 20 journalism students as interns for the Sentinel. Practical constraints led to a scaled-down project including eight students Ancell was able to contact through email and Instagram.
The group’s first “sprint” — or set of news stories — was planned for one week, with a small one-time stipend for the student journalists. But the program ended up…extended beyond its time frame with unintended changes and challenges. Despite it all, the community responded positively, setting Ancell and Perry to do it again.
Working as editors and coaches, the two modified their approach and secured a grant from the Colorado Media Project to pay the 11 journalists for a two-week period. This allowed the two to pull in students from Colorado State University, Colorado College and Aurora Community College — making a more diverse group, as well.
This is how Alexandrea Muñoz found herself walking underneath the papel picados that lined the streets between the mercados of La Plaza off East Colfax. Papel picados? Think banners made from intricate, colorful paper snowflakes. La Plaza is filled with 172 mercados, 24 food stalls, and entertainment hall and stories waiting to be told. Muñoz, bilingual in English and Spanish, was perfectly suited for the task of telling them.
Muñoz had the time to browse the streets and listen to the different stories which led to her finding the owner, Doug McMurran. “It’s nice to be in a place where I can speak Spanish, and that I can be in a place where I feel like I’ve been before,” she said about being in La Plaza.
The feeling of belonging led to an in-depth look into the lives and stories of vendors throughout La Plaza, which before Muñoz wouldn’t have been possible. There are just far more stories than reporters have hours in a day, or even a year.
Lentheus Chaney, another Story Sprint reporter, covered the Colorado Lynching Memorial Project, which honored the memory of Preston Porter Jr., a 15-year-old lynching victim from the early 1900s, through ceremonies, plaques and advocacy. That assignment took Chaney from Denver to Limon, connecting historical threads between the two cities and the members of Lynching Memorial project. His background, including running a culture magazine and writing for the Atlanta Voice, made him uniquely qualified to handle such a significant story.
From day one, Chaney immersed himself in the project, conducting interviews and meeting with Jovan Mays, the Aurora poet laureate and CLMP board member. Chaney’s lived experiences as a black man allowed him to add his personal experiences to the story to highlight the enduring impact of historical injustices and the importance of remembering them.
Breaking News Journalists
Perry didn’t want the Sprint reporters to only write feature stories. So, he assigned them Chaney, Muñoz and Ivy Secrest to cover more breaking news about the officer-involved shooting of Kylin Lewis, an unarmed black man shot by an Aurora SWAT member. The subject was a delicate one with room for error, but Perry believed in every single member of his team.
Despite having to work on other stories, each journalist dove into coverage of the Lewis story swiftly and collaboratively. The group covered their first press conferences, rallies and city council meetings, hurrying to meet tight deadlines to push stories and pictures out to readers who were eager to know more about Lewis’s killing.
By the end of the sprint, the journalists produced eleven stories — each highlighting a different facet of the Aurora community while proving the power of local journalism. Participating in the program hit home for Ancell in particular. She recalled the first time she saw the Sentinel — on her grandmother’s coffee table years ago. “At the time you take it for granted, but I think over time the whole scene means home,” Ancell said.
That home is what ultimately brought that celebratory toast to life that day in the Asian bistro surrounded by the remarkable group, I felt a profound sense of privilege. It’s rare to witness such a diverse and talented collection of people come together with a shared purpose.
The future of journalism may be uncertain, but projects like the Story Sprint offer a glimpse of hope. They remind us that the stories of our communities will continue to unfold, and that new journalists will rise to the occasion, eager to help tell them.