Chuck Plunkett receives Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courageous Journalism
By Shoshi Leviton
On Monday evening Oct. 8, Colby students, faculty, and community members gathered in the chapel for the 66th Elijah Parish Lovejoy Convocation. This year, Chuck Plunkett received the award for his work as the editorial editor for the Denver Post. Plunkett earned this honor for his leadership and courage in publishing an editorial in the Opinions section of the Denver Post. The morning before convocation, Plunkett sat down with the Echo to talk journalism, courage, and making it in the news industry.
“We collected nine Op-eds and one editorial that was the centerpiece and the centerpiece is the one that caught the fire. Online it was called ‘As vultures circle the Denver Post must be saved.’ On print it had a different headline, it was ‘News matters’ and ‘Colordoians should demand the newspaper they deserve’ was the subhead,” Plunkett said. To Plunkett, these articles became known as the News Matters Perspectives.
Plunkett and the editorial team felt the need to publish these articles after mismanagement from their parent company, Digital Media First (DFM), which is owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. According to Plunkett, under this ownership the newsrooms staff was constantly cut down, and the number of staff members dramatically dropped from over 300 to around 70.
Although Plunkett and his team knew that publishing the editorial would be risky, they hoped it would also generate a lot of attention. “When we published it we knew it would likely catch fire. In fact, we were depending on it catching fire because if it hadn’t, it would have been easy for all of Global Capital to shut it down and shut me down,” Plunkett said. However, there was the risk that even if the editorial made it online, it would be cut from the Sunday print edition.
“To get in the Sunday Perspective section, to make it into print, it had to go to the printing plant at 7 p.m. that Friday. We normally publish at noon on Friday online so we put all the stuff thats going to be in the Sunday paper online on Friday,” Plunkett said. “And if we had launched all those things and the owners had gotten mad and it hadn’t gotten a response, they could have taken it off our site, could have fired me on the spot, and they could have stripped it out of the printing plant.”
Luckily, the articles did not, in fact, stay under the radar. According to Plunkett, when the story was published, it went off like a nuclear bomb.
Because the section got so much attention, the acting director of Digital First Media wanted to fire Plunkett on the spot; at that point, however, the story had become too big for such a decision to remain plausible. Nevertheless, Plunkett still later resigned.
This act of bravery caught the attention of the Lovejoy selection committee. According to Colby Grossman Professor of Economics and Goldfarb Center Director Patrice Franko, who is a member of the Lovejoy selection committee, “Mr. Plunkett’s selection was both about his life history — and the historical moment we are in. Throughout his career, he has taken principled stands in covering what is most important to communities. His bravery was in his willingness to give up his career when told by the hedge fund that bought the Denver Post that he had to engage in radical cuts in his newsroom. In a period where the media is under pressure from both economic and political forces, his resignation signaled a heroic stand for freedom of the press.”
Plunkett is grateful for this response and recognition. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive and getting to win something like the Lovejoy award just pushes it over the top as overwhelmingly positive. If you have an institution as respected as Colby bestow an award like that, it just gives credence to what we are doing. It says ‘yes, this is the right thing to do. This is a useful public statement. This needed to be said. This was not just an angry journalist. This was a serious statement that needed to be heard,’” Plunkett said.
He reiterated the importance of his stance. “It [the award] was much appreciated and much needed — it helps promote our cause.”
Plunkett went on to express the importance of journalism at any level. “What we did is bigger than any one person, it’s about public journalism and for Colby to stand for us like that just solidifies the importance of the statement and it’s overwhelmingly moving and humbling.”
Plunkett may be out of the newsroom for the time being, but he is not done with his career in journalism. He currently works as a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder where he teaches at the News Corp program. Plunkett still gets the opportunity to work with journalists, and doesn’t believe this change in profession will get in the way of his work. “There is nothing to say that while I’m doing this that I can’t go back to my work as a journalist in other ways. I could write more long form journalism. I could try to test my hand at writing magazine style pieces. Who knows, maybe there’s a book out there that would be fun to try and write,” Plunkett said. Plunkett expressed a dedication to his new position, telling the Echo “I like to believe that if you get a position you owe it to the people who gave it to you to do some useful work.”
As a journalism professor, Plunkett had some advice to give to young writers: “I like to tell aspiring young journalists that theirs is a noble profession. It’s one of the best jobs in the world you could ever have and it’s worth trying to do. The doom and gloom around what’s happening to the newspaper industry is real, but don’t let it dissuade you. When I started out I wanted to be a creative writer and I knew the odds were against me making a career being a writer of fiction. Journalism is a higher calling and it’s a beautiful one and I would hope that they can feel a passion for it, an excitement for it, and a desire to engage because our communities and our nation really need great journalists right now.”
With a degree in creative writing, Plunkett stands as living proof that it does not take a journalism major to create a successful journalist. Plunkett acknowledged that Colby does not have a journalism major, but stressed that this should not be a roadblock in pursuing a career in journalism.
His biggest advice to aspiring journalists was to be persistant. “Journalists should be self-taught and self-motivated. It’s fun to be an autodidact and take things into control on your own two feet. What you need to be a journalist is a mix of skills, but you have to be a good critical thinker and that’s what Colby is going to be teaching you.”
The honoree’s words of wisdom continued during his speech at the Lovejoy award ceremony on Monday night. He emphasized the importance of protecting local journalism and thanked everyone in the audience for “supporting quality journalism over corporate greed.”
Plunkett stressed the importance of thinking seriously about the challenges facing our community as local newsrooms are neglected and popular news outlets become more polarizing. Earlier that day, Plunkett had reflected with the Echo on the impact this award will have on him.
“It feels like my life is going to be forever for the better just having been introduced to the idea of Lovejoy now that I’ve been lucky enough to get this award. You sit around and think about a person like that and it makes you question your sincerity. It makes you question your motivation. It makes you question your commitment and that’s just a meaningful, personal journey to undertake.”
