Kcnc Bios

[Maria]

Manyof these were the kinds of pages that explode with pop-up ad vomit and chumbox sponsored content and seem designed to splatter data-tracking cookies all over your web browser. Amid all that, they displayed multiple (maybe copyrighted) photos of the Hughes I knew.

The biographical information about him seemed scraped from his various bios on social media or from his employer. And to me, the items looked like they were written by robots, or perhaps by people who speak English as a second language.

Beyond the items at those fake-news-looking sites, nothing credible indicated Trevor Hughes of USA Today had died. No news story in a known outlet quoting family members or his news organization, no obituary posted to the website of a legitimate funeral home.

Years ago, it was a best practice for journalists not to report a death unless the coroner had made an official announcement. The past decade or so of social media and mass shootings pretty much made that dinosaur behavior, but there are still some standards.

In it, he recalls notable local anecdotes about a roster of people who some Denverites might recall as household names back in the Anchorman days of appointment TV news viewing. (Caveat: mustache count in the photos accompanying the column: 1.)

For the past several decades, he said, corporations and businesses that a newspaper covered subsidized the coverage through advertising, and there were guardrails in place to keep them from compromising or influencing the reporting.

The new space will reflect the needs of a leaner, more mobile operation that spends most of its time out in the community. Today, the office for many of our journalists and ad representatives is wherever they open their laptop.

These death notices, all published Saturday, Aug. 5, were posted on sites I\u2019d never heard of with names like PKB News (headline: \u201CWho Is Trevor Hughes? Trevor Hughes Obituary And Death\u201D), Dehk News (\u201CTrevor Hughes Death Reason?\u201D), or GeniusCelebs.com (\u201CColorado Trevor Hughes Obituary And Death Cause: Family Mourns The Loss.\u201D) Another post, at Ambrsoft.com, which calls itself a \u201Ctrending news portal,\u201D came with this typo in a headline: \u201CTrevor Hughes Death and Obituary: How Did He Died?\u201D

Trevor Hughes has a great experience in journalism. he first did the job of a reporter in the State House\u2019s new service. Then he worked for the Longmont Times call, then he worked in Fort Collins Coloradoan. Then he finally joined USA Today. He totally worked in USA Today for 15 years 4 months till the end of his life.

Two years ago, Ben Weiss reported for Wired magazine how online \u201Cobituary pirates\u201D were scraping websites and re-writing death notices to generate traffic, and even \u201Creaping commissions on flowers and gifts.\u201D Meanwhile, at least one tech company is offering funeral homes obituary-writing services powered by artificial intelligence. (Philadelphia Magazine reporter Victor Fiorillo tried it out on himself and instantly got back a \u201Cplayful\u201D version and a \u201Cwitty\u201D version memorializing his life.)

\u201CAfter the unfortunate demise of Trevor Hughes, his name has become a widely searched topic across various online platforms,\u201D noted one in Current-Affairs.org. \u201CPeople are hugely searching for his cause of death,\u201D mentioned Dehk News. \u201CTrevor Hughes\u2019s death news is the most trending topic on the internet,\u201D stated PKB News. \u201CHis death news has been searched as the \u2018Colorado Trevor Hughes\u2019.\u201D

Indeed, Google Trends, which publicly tracks what people are searching, shows that searches for \u201CTrevor Hughes\u201D jumped on Aug. 4 \u2014 a day before the bogus obituary items posted. People were searching from Colorado, but also in Indiana, and, more than anywhere else, Ohio. Notably, a YouTube video of a man speaking another language popped up on Aug. 5 titled \u201CTrevor Hughes Death Reason? Colorado,\u201D and another titled \u201CTrevor Hughes Ohio Obituary USA\u201D posted around the same time.

I reached out Monday and Tuesday to one of the dubious sites that inaccurately published news of Hughes\u2019s death seeking to talk to someone about how they conduct their work. I haven\u2019t yet heard back.

Regardless of the methodology used by the sites that knocked off Trevor Hughes of USA Today, you don\u2019t have to consult a journalism ethics professor about how this is outside the bounds of responsible media. We\u2019d probably better start thinking more about how we deal with these kinds of things as advancements in technology make them cheaper and easier to do.

For his part, Hughes, who previously worked at a local newspaper where he actually wrote legit obituaries, told me he doesn\u2019t know why this happened to him. At the time we spoke, the inaccurate news of his demise hadn\u2019t made many ripples outside a circle of close friends, one of whom had spotted an item before even Hughes himself caught it through a Google alert. (He\u2019d been on a plane.)

\u201CAs a journalist who covers a wide variety of topics, I often find myself coming across what appear to be computer-generated obituaries that have been created to generate traffic,\u201D he told me. \u201CSo I kind of have gotten to a point where I sort of ignore them. They feel a little bit like noise.\u201D

While I waited for a reply, I noticed Hughes had posted something on Facebook since I\u2019d last checked \u2014 photos from a reporting trip in Florida. So I called his cellphone and held my breath.

\uD83D\uDCC8 Too often, data is only in the hands of the politically powerful or well-connected. Pulse: The Colorado Health Foundation Poll aims to change that by making everything publicly available, transparent and easy to understand. We hope you\u2019ll dig into the results, use them in your reporting and share them far and wide. By partnering with Pulse, you gain access to comprehensive data on issues that impact the health and well-being of Coloradans.

Dave Marston, who publishes the syndicated column Writers on the Range, is out with one this week about Colorado journalist Allen Best who \u201Cedits a one-man online journalism shop he calls Big Pivots.\u201D

\u201CBest is based in the Denver area, and his twice-a-month e-journal looks for the radical transitions in Colorado\u2019s energy, water, and other urgent aspects of the state\u2019s economy. These changes, he thinks, overwhelm the arrival of the telephone, rural electrification and even the internal combustion engine in terms of their impact.\u201D

\u201CA major story that Best, 71, has relentlessly chronicled concerns Tri-State, a wholesale power supplier serving Colorado and three other states. Late to welcome renewable energy, it\u2019s been weighed down with aging coal-fired power plants. Best closely followed how many of its 42 customers \u2014 rural electric cooperatives \u2014 have fought to withdraw from, or at least renegotiate, contracts that hampered their ability to buy cheaper power and use local renewable sources.\u201D

\u201CBest also vacuums up stories from towns like Craig in northwestern Colorado, home to soon-to-be-closed coal plants. He says he finds Farmington, New Mexico, fascinating because it has electric transmission lines idling from shuttered coal power plants.\u201D

As for the current TV sports news scene in Denver, \u201Cno one has taken a more circuitous route to history than Bean, twice a Denver Broncos cheerleader who paid her dues and is quickly becoming one of the great stories in local sports TV annals,\u201D Moore wrote.

Now, with Mackey alongside her, Moore wrote, the development \u201Cleaves 9News vulnerable in a way it never has been before simply because of the enormous amount of institutional knowledge that leaves with him.\u201D

The former newspaperman who spent 14 years as editor of the Denver Post appeared this week with conservative pundit Jon Caldara for his \u201CDevil\u2019s Advocate\u201D Internet video show produced for the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute think tank.

When Moore started there were 309 journalists on staff at the Post. \u201CI would say it\u2019s probably around 60,\u201D he said about the staff now. \u201CDramatic drop.\u201D (He and Caldara spent the first 10 minutes or so talking in detail about what it was like to lay people off in a newsroom. Grim stuff all around.)

Asked to look into the future of news in 10 years, Moore said, \u201CI think we\u2019re going to see a bunch of different models, but I do think we\u2019re going to see more narrowcasting\u201D \u2014 meaning more niche coverage of topics and even sports teams. \u201CTechnology is going to make it much easier to get into the game \u2026 you just need a fertile mind and a lot of energy, and hopefully, if you\u2019re credible, you\u2019ll have a pretty good audience and you may be be able to monetize it.\u201D

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