Getting out there

Photos by Brian Ray, Steamboat Pilot & Today Above, participants at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs click on links to follow Web links to environmental sources provided by Associate Professor Tom Yulsman, below.

Associate Professor Tom Yulsman

George Orbanek

Photo by Alan Kirkpatrick Instructor Paul Daugherty explains video editing during July workshops at Mesa State College in Grand Junction.

Loveland. Durango. Fort Morgan. Grand Junction. Steamboat Springs. And that's just the beginning.

The list of Colorado communities visited by School outreach teams will only continue to grow, thanks to a grant from the James M. Cox Foundation in the name of one of Cox Newspapers' longtime publishers and SJMC alum, George Orbanek (MA '75). The $75,000 grant from the foundation in April funds a three-year program designed to empower journalists and other Colorado residents.

The George Orbanek Journalism Workshop: An Outreach Program for Negotiating the Invisible Web and Interactively Engaging Residents of Colorado Communities will take place five times annually in towns and cities in every corner of the state. The "invisible Web" is the estimated 95 percent of the World Wide Web that popular search engines don't reach but that contains huge stores of reliable, easily localized information. The first Orbanek workshop was in late July in Grand Junction, with interactive seminars led by CU-Boulder SJMC professors, staff and graduate students.

"It is certainly no exaggeration to say that the development of the Internet and World Wide Web has had the most transformative effect on the business of newspapers and journalism since the development of the printing press," Orbanek said. "It's to the University of Colorado's great credit that it is offering this unique seminar to working journalists and members of the broader public." Orbanek will retire Jan. 1 after 22 years as publisher of The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction. His wife, Rebecca, majored in News-Editorial at the SJMC, graduating in 1971.

The Web-based workshops, held in computer labs, have been extremely well-attended. Participants typically include local journalists, community bloggers, librarians, public affairs specialists and journalists, advisers, instructors and other professionals from colleges and high schools. For more information, contact SJMC Outreach Director Alan Kirkpatrick (MA '96) at Alan.Kirkpatrick@Colorado.edu.