Colorado

Liz Teitz

Liz Teitz covers housing affordability for the Ouray County Plaindealer, a weekly paper that’s been publishing for over a century in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. Teitz previously covered higher education and state politics for Hearst Connecticut Media Group through the Hearst Journalism Fellowship. She has also covered education for the San Antonio Express-News, and written about local government, schools, courts and disaster recovery in Southeast Texas for the Beaumont Enterprise. Teitz grew up in Rhode Island and has a B.A. in American Studies from Georgetown University.

Patricia Nieberg

Patty Nieberg covers the Colorado statehouse for The Associated Press, where she concentrates on energy and environmental issues. She returned to the U.S. recently after completing fellowships with The Associated Press in Jerusalem and Haaretz through the Jerusalem Press Club. She graduated from Northwestern University with a master’s in journalism with a concentration in politics and national security. During graduate school, Nieberg reported from Washington, D.C., and worked with the James Foley Foundation on U.S. hostage policy and journalist safety. Her reporting also took her to swing states for 2018 congressional races, North Carolina to cover Hurricane Florence, and Guantánamo Bay for a military commission hearing, where she focused on the facility’s healthcare system for detainees. She grew up in south Brooklyn and received her bachelor’s degree from Binghamton University.  

Associated Press

The Associated Press is a global news agency that began 172 years ago as a cooperative of five New York City newspapers. With 263 locations in more than 100 countries, AP provides journalism to roughly 15,000 media outlets around the world. AP sets standards for ethics and excellence, and has won 52 Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2016 gold medal for Public Service for an investigation into labor abuses in the seafood industry, reports that freed more than 2,000 slaves. AP’s seven news bureaus in the northeast U.S. provide vital local and regional news to 378 newsrooms.

Ouray County Plaindealer

The Ouray County Plaindealer is a weekly newspaper. It’s been operating since 1877, since miners and other settlers came to this mountainous area of Colorado to seek their fortunes and make a living. Today, the Plaindealer’s readership includes locals whose families have been in the area for just as long as the newspaper, as well as newcomers who have moved to Ouray County after retiring or to work in the tourism industry. One of the notable things about the Plaindealer’s circulation is we deliver to 41 states—and are discovering that many of these subscribers are part-time residents or folks who wish to move here someday. The Plaindealer is the paper of record for Ouray County, and it’s what people rely on to know what happened at city and town council meetings, who said what at the school board retreat, and what happened to that bear that was wandering around town breaking into people’s houses. The goal is to provide The Plaindealer’s publishers, a couple who bought the newspaper in April 2019, are longtime Colorado journalists who left the largest newspaper in the western half of the state to purchase the weekly and bring quality journalism to the publication. They believe that even small, rural places deserve good journalism.