The award-winning Great Salt Lake Collaborative is expanding to cover the Colorado River and The Times-Independent has joined the team of media outlets to produce solutions-oriented coverage of this vital and imperiled natural resource.
The new initiative, called the Colorado River Collaborative, is made up of 11 Utah newsrooms that have agreed to report on the river, its tributaries and destinations together. Stories will explore how Utahns are impacted by the river and how they can address a dwindling water supply in the face of a megadrought, climate change and rapid growth.
As a solutions journalism initiative, Collaborative stories will also explain what can be done to adapt to the new realities facing the river, what actions are being taken and why.
The Colorado River Collaborative includes the following media partners (listed alphabetically): Deseret News, FOX 13 News, KSL-TV, KSL.com, KUER, Moab Times-Independent, PBS Utah, Radio West, The Salt Lake Tribune, St. George News, and Utah Public Radio,
This expanded reporting scope is made possible due to a founding gift from the Utah State University’s Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, & Air. All editorial decisions are made independently by member news organizations in accordance with their respective editorial policies.
The new collaborative was officially launched April 25-26 at a conference in Moab. The Colorado River Collaborative gathered 17 Utah journalists — including digital, TV and radio reporters and photojournalists — and a dozen panelists to discuss the river’s current state, the pressures of growth, the importance of the river for recreation and the future of agriculture. The conference was presented by the Institute for Land, Water & Air and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder, a nonprofit that supports journalists who cover water in the West.
The collaborative’s emphasis will be on exploring the importance of the river and the impacts of its decline on Utahns. Much of the U.S. news coverage about the river focuses on water users in the Lower Basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada. But water from the Colorado River is crucial to the fate of Utah, which grew faster than any other state from 2010 to 2020, and whose population is projected to jump from 3.3 million to 5.5 million by 2060.
According to the Colorado River Authority of Utah, the river is a key source of municipal water for Utah’s most densely populated counties and the rapidly growing southwestern region of the state. The river and its reservoirs fuel a recreation industry that generates $750 million in economic activity. Federally recognized tribes within Utah have claims to the water for agricultural, cultural and economic purposes. Its hydropower dams, including one located in Utah, are a significant source of electricity in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico.
About the Great Salt Lake Collaborative
The groundbreaking Great Salt Lake Collaborative launched in 2022 and since then its dozen local news partners have produced nearly 600 stories about the Great Salt Lake, exploring why it is shrinking, the impacts to public health, ecology and the economy and potential solutions to get more water to the lake.
Its model of sharing stories across newsrooms, focusing on solutions and catalyzing cross-newsroom reporting projects has been nationally recognized for relentlessly focusing on a single urgent issue and locally for spurring Utahns to care about a body of water they once dismissed as a waste.
