The Monument Independent is owned by people who live here, answers only to the people who read it, and gives its work away for free. That is a choice, and it has a cost. If the reporting you’ve read here is worth something to you, this is the part where we ask you to help keep it coming — by chipping in, or, if you run a business here, by advertising with us.
Every news site has to pay for itself somehow, and there are really only three ways to do it:
- A paywall — lock the stories away and charge for a key.
- Google ads and programmatic displays — the auto-loading, follow-you-around banners that pay in fractions of a cent and quietly treat the reader as the product being sold.
- Voluntary reader contributions, plus a little light local sponsorship from businesses in the community — the option we chose.
We picked the third on purpose, because it is the one that keeps the reporting free, in front of everyone, and as free of distractions as we can make it.
That choice is the whole personality of the paper. The Monument Independent is small, locally owned, and free to read — no paywall, no chain owner, no hedge fund waiting to strip it for parts. Anyone in the Tri-Lakes can open any story we have ever published without paying a cent, and without wading through a screen full of blinking ads to get to it. We think local news is more useful when it is in front of everyone, not locked away from the people it is about.
Free to read is not the same as free to produce. So, plainly: we ask the readers and businesses who can to chip in.
What the first month bought
It is a fair question what a one-person newsroom actually does with the time. Here is some of it.
When Buc-ee’s tried to have a 74,000-square-foot travel center near the Greenland wildlife crossing waved through as a “convenience store” — a classification that would skip the public hearing and the neighbor notice — we read the county file, checked the land-use code against the county’s own tables, and laid out how the “back door” worked. The county ultimately said it could not determine that the project was a convenience store; Buc-ee’s has appealed to the commissioners, and that fight is now in the open where residents can weigh in on it. We have stayed on the story through four articles and counting.
When about fifteen acres beside Monument Academy were proposed for rezoning to as many as several hundred apartments, we did not stop at the vote count. We pulled the recorded deeds and followed the land back through a chain of companies to a single developer who controls the parcel, the project, and the private water utility that signed the will-serve letter for his own rezoning — the same utility a regional committee has warned is roughly a million dollars short of replacing a failing wastewater plant. None of it, on the record, is illegal. All of it is something residents deserved to see before the Board of County Commissioners votes on July 23rd.
We also counted. Since 2021, the county commissioners have approved land-use matters 354 times out of 354 — including several the planning commission urged them to reject — so we built a vote tracker that lets you check the record yourself. We cover the town council, the school district, and the fire restrictions that decide whether you can light a grill in August.
And it is not all government. We recently launched a Business Spotlight — profiles of the local businesses that make this a place worth living, chosen because they’ve earned it. Those pieces are unsponsored: no one pays for the coverage, we spend our own money to go and report them, and we write the story we actually find. All of it, every week, is folded into the Palmer Divide Digest — a plain summary of what happened and what meetings are coming — delivered to your inbox for free.
That is the work. It takes reading long documents, sitting through long hearings, and asking questions that are easier not to ask.
And it is being read. In our first thirty days The Monument Independent went from no audience at all to about 7,000 unique visitors and roughly 13,000 page views — and the growth is only accelerating. We are also investing heavily in search-engine optimization, so that the traffic is durable and the reporting stays easy to find: so a neighbor searching for what is happening on their own road turns up our work long after the week it ran, not a placeholder or a dead link.
Where the money goes
Nobody here is getting rich. Reader contributions and sponsorships go toward the unglamorous, non-negotiable cost of keeping a newsroom online and out of trouble: the platform and hosting fees that keep the site up, the technology that runs it, journalism liability insurance, and the fees the government charges us to see its own records. The Colorado Open Records Act is one of our most important tools — it is how we get the deeds, the filings and the meeting materials behind the stories above — and it is not free. In July alone, records requests have already cost us $323.
We want to be straight with you about one thing. The Monument Independent is a Colorado LLC, not a nonprofit, so your contribution is not tax-deductible, and we will never pretend otherwise. This is not a donation to charity. It is closer to buying in — helping fund a newsroom that stays, that you can call when something is wrong, and that lives on the same roads and drinks the same water you do.
How to help
If the reporting has been worth something to you, here are the ways to keep it going.
Contribute. A one-time gift, or a few dollars a month, goes directly toward keeping the paper free and independent. You can give once, monthly, or yearly — whatever fits — in under a minute at monumentindependent.com/support.
Advertise with us. If you run a business in the Tri-Lakes, sponsoring the paper puts you in front of your neighbors while helping keep local reporting free. Our advertising is deliberately light and clearly local — a spot in the weekly Digest or on the site, no pop-ups, no auto-play, no tracking-driven clutter. And in the spirit of the honesty above: our founding-partner rates are, at the moment, almost embarrassingly cheap — roughly the price of a large pizza to reach the whole town for a week. This is the part where a sensible business person would tell us to raise them. We’d gently suggest getting in before we listen. See the options at monumentindependent.com/advertise.
And plenty of the most valuable things you can do cost nothing at all. Share our stories with a neighbor. Send us story ideas — much of the work above started with a reader who noticed something. Follow us on social media, join our mailing list for the Digest, and tell your friends about The Monument Independent. A paper is only as strong as the number of people paying attention to it.
We are not going to guilt anyone. Plenty of readers cannot spare a dollar, and they are welcome here exactly the same. But if you can, a small monthly contribution — or an ad, or simply forwarding this to someone who should read it — is the single most useful thing you can do to make sure there is still someone reading the county’s files a year from now.
We live here too. Thank you for reading — and for helping us keep watch.
