We started this paper on a hunch about our neighbors. The Town of Monument’s own voter file, surfaced this spring in a survey the town commissioned, has turned that hunch into a number: half of Monument’s registered voters belong to no political party, and the share that does is moving further from the parties every year. Whatever you make of that, it is not a town that can be covered as a red dot or a blue one.
That is the simplest case for what we are trying to build here. A newsroom organized around party — the national habit, increasingly the national business model — speaks to a Monument that no longer exists, if it ever did. The largest group of voters in this town has declined to pick a side, and the survey suggests why our kind of coverage might suit them: asked about a road tax, Monument voters swung twenty-five points once they were handed specifics about what the money would do. They did not move on a partisan cue. They moved on information about a problem they can see from their own cars.
Information about problems you can see is the entire job. Roads, water, growth, budgets, who is on the ballot and who actually shows up to vote — these are not left or right questions, and most of our neighbors do not experience them that way. An independent, issue-based paper is not a neutral pose we have adopted to seem fair. It is the only model that fits the readership the data describes.
We will cover issues, not teams. And when we get something wrong, you will read about it here first.
A word about that data, because independence is mostly a matter of showing your work. The registration figures we reported came from a poll the town paid for, run by Magellan Strategies, a firm best known for its work with Republican campaigns. We told you that in the news story, and we are telling you again here, because the alternative — passing along a useful number while hiding where it came from — is exactly the habit that has taught so many people to distrust what they read. The same survey found that fewer than half of Monument residents believe the town spends their money wisely. Trust, in other words, is scarce around here. We intend to earn ours the slow way, by being right, by correcting ourselves in public when we are not, and by telling you who paid for the numbers we print.
So this is the promise, narrow enough that you can hold us to it. We will cover issues, not teams. We will tell you where our facts come from. And when we get something wrong, you will read about it here first. In a town of independents, that is not a marketing strategy. It is just the assignment.
We live here too.
