Stiff easterly winds pushed flames up to 30 feet high briefly Saturday evening off Echo Creek Ranch Road before crews were able to hold an apparent lightning fire to 10.6 acres.

They had the fire burning in grass and sage, along with about a dozen junipers, contained by midnight as the wind subsided.

Summit County Fire Warden Bryce Boyer had stopped by to observe the fire scene around 1:15 p.m. Sunday when contacted for an update.

“I’m actually looking at it right now,” he said. He said officials and nearby residents would continue monitoring the burn area, but they considered the fire controlled and he didn’t see anything that would cause him concern.

He said locals had reported lightning strikes in the area and then the fire shortly before 6 p.m. The fire didn’t reach any roads and no structures or vehicles were damaged. Officials notified nearby Echo Creek Ranch residents as a precaution and no evacuation was necessary.

But a long list of fire agencies responded when the fire ignited and took off at first with the wind: North Summit Fire, of course, along with the Utah Interagency Fire Center, Morgan County, Wyoming’s Uinta County Fire and Ambulance, Park City Fire District, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, Utah Highway Patrol, Summit County Emergency Management, and both the Summit County fire warden and the assistant warden.

The post Apparent lightning fire near Echo Creek Ranch Road held to under 11 acres appeared first on Park Record.

The mission for Intermountain Health in terms of cancer care is this: Make treatment accessible and first rate.

This was a lesson learned years ago in Logan, a regional leader recounted while speaking at the ground-breaking Thursday morning for the Intermountain Park City Hospital’s expanded cancer center and emergency room.

In short, given the stakes of cancer, patients will choose quality over convenience. If they believe they’ll get better care in Salt Lake City, they’ll make the trek every time, rain or shine or driving snow.

South Market President Kyle Hanson, Senior Medical Director for Oncology Dr. Tonya Bowles, and Park City Hospital President Lori Weston all emphasized that point during their turns at the podium before 200 people who attended the ceremony and brunch afterward.

So building cancer centers in the hinterlands also means staffing them with high quality practitioners, they said, while pointing out that Intermountain system doctors work as teams specializing on types of cases and coordinating care for individual patients.

“We’re embarking on a ground-breaking era at Intermountain Park City Hospital that will generationally redefine cancer care along the Wasatch Back,” said Lori Weston, president of Intermountain Park City Hospital. “Research has shown people have better outcomes when they can receive care closer to home and this expansion will help us meet that goal.”

When the expansion is completed in the third quarter of 2026, the new cancer center will be able to serve an estimated 1,500 patients each year, up from the current 500.

Some diagnoses and more complex surgeries will still require care at larger facilities, but Park City will be able to provide breast surgery and reconstruction, prostate surgery, biopsies and robotic urogynecological surgery, along with follow-up treatment for those who needed specialty care elsewhere, Weston said.

These additions will help ensure the hospital can continue to meet the needs of a growing population, along with the millions of tourists who visit every year, hospital officials said.

The new Intermountain Health cancer center will span 10,800 square feet and bring services like medical oncology, a state-of-the-art linear accelerator for radiation treatment and 18 infusion bays, according to the hospital. That’s up from the current six infusion bays.

Previously, patients had to travel outside the Wasatch Back to receive those services.

The new cancer center will be able to treat 90 percent of the cancer cases along the Wasatch Back, officials said.

“These counties in the Wasatch Back see some of the highest incidence of cancer in our state,” Bowles said, picking out breast and prostate cancers, along with melanoma, as the most common.

“Cancer care takes a physical and mental toll on patients and having to commute nearly 100 miles round trip to get care only adds to an already stressful situation,” she said. “We hope this new cancer center will help ease the burden on patients and families.”

Other hospital upgrades will include an emergency department expansion of nearly 9,000 square feet and will include four new trauma bays and an imaging suite with state-of-the-art equipment. hospital officials said. That’s up from the current one trauma bay.

Considering the significant amount of outdoor recreation from residents and tourists, having an emergency department that can handle additional patients is vital, they said.

The other parts of the upgrade include new operating rooms and two more surgical rooms dedicated for gastrointestinal procedures.

The hospital anticipates adding 20 more caregivers in addition to the current 700 employed now.

The cost of construction is estimated at $48 million. Intermountain’s design and construction team is managing the project with Jacobson Construction as the general contractor.

Beano Solomon is the lead donor for this project. She was instrumental in building the Park City Hospital, which opened in 2009, through funding the feasibility study.

“Intermountain has committed to fund this but is looking for help from donors in the community to help support start up and ongoing operations for provided services,” Weston said.

Solomon remembered that when the hospital opened in 2009, the occasion was such a big deal that even then-Mayor Dana Williams wore a suit. Since then the hospital added its ICU in 2014, North Medical Office Building in 2017, surgery center in 2022, and now this, the biggest expansion to date since opening.

Solomon joked that the emergency room docs know her well as a “frequent flier” and spoke more seriously about the value of the hospital to the Park City community.

“Thank you all for being here and for supporting this very important hospital that I do,” she said. “My child has been here. I now have grandchildren. I’m sure they will be here.”

The post Hospital breaks ground on cancer center, expanded emergency room appeared first on Park Record.

La Junta Escolar de Park City no perdió tiempo en nombrar a un superintendente interino del distrito: el director de Treasure Mountain Junior High, Caleb Fine, quien asumió su puesto de inmediato el martes por la tarde.

Trabajará con la superintendente saliente, Jill Gildea, hasta octubre, antes de que ella tome un permiso pagado hasta su último día con el distrito en enero.

Fine se graduó de Park City High School en 2004. Ha vivido aquí durante 31 años. Ha trabajado en el distrito desde maestro de negocios hasta director y ahora superintendente interino en los últimos 15 años.

Entrenó al equipo de baloncesto masculino de Park City High durante siete años, dejando el cargo en 2016 con la llegada de su primer hijo.

Dijo en un video el martes que tenía tres prioridades:

• “Es que el corazón de nuestro distrito no ha cambiado ni cambiará, y eso es nuestro increíble equipo de maestros que se dedican a cuidar y educar a nuestros asombrosos estudiantes.”
• “Haremos todo lo posible para cumplir y superar las expectativas establecidas en el acuerdo de resolución de la Oficina de Derechos Civiles. Sabemos que todos los estudiantes merecen una escuela libre de odio, acoso y bullying.”
• “Y, por último, enfocándonos en nuestra misión de inspirar y apoyar a todos los estudiantes de manera equitativa para que alcancen su potencial académico y social, haré todo lo que esté en mis manos para asegurar que nuestro distrito esté en la mejor posición posible.”

“En los últimos 15 años, he tenido la alegría de compartir con las personas que tengo el mejor trabajo del mundo: como entrenador, subdirector, director y ahora como superintendente interino, tengo el privilegio de trabajar con los estudiantes del Distrito Escolar de Park City, sus estudiantes, y ha sido un increíble privilegio y una bendición. Espero ver a muchos de ustedes en nuestras escuelas y en la comunidad a lo largo del año escolar.”

The post El director de Treasure Mountain asume el rol de superintendente interino appeared first on Park Record.

With Mount Timpanogos overhead, Bill Jensen called Sundance Resort magical during the liminal event for any bigger project: the groundbreaking.

In this case, for an inn at the understated resort with 63 rooms, a center of healing for wounded warriors as well as a means to help Robert Redford’s old place thrive in a new era.

You can bet the actor chose carefully among suitors before selling in 2020, seeking the right blend of something old, something new in this part of his legacy. The new lodge will go up amid the ol’ trees, the ol’ restaurant, the ol’ cottages, studios and such where lots of film and other creative magic has been made.

Groundbreakings themselves are predawn, a twilight when anything is possible, a state of pure wonder. The die is cast, but the work is yet to come. Behind Jensen and the other speakers awaited bare dirt, a line of fancy shovels capped with white hardhats, a big American flag held up by two facing cranes. All promise.

Other magic is at play now in Sundance, too. That’s why I came to an event technically outside our local realm for news. I mean, it’s so 45 minutes and a couple of counties away, far more Provo than Park City for an outlet as provincial as ours.

One coin pulled from an ear is how the mom-and-pop with 450 skiable acres attracted a ski industry legend like Jensen as an ownership partner. Another partner company executive was wide-eyed as he told the story over lunch. The notion Jensen would even consider joining their venture was only a fun fantasy at first.

Jensen, after all, was the CEO of Intrawest when Deer Valley Resort and 2010 Olympics venue Whistler Blackcomb were part of the company; he ran Vail Mountain and Vail Resorts’ mountain division, Telluride, Breckenridge and Northstar (the latter before he turned 40); he was the North American sales manager of Pisten Bully Tracked Vehicles, a master course of its own on ski resorts; and he started at Mammoth as a drop-everything, walk-on liftie from LA after skiing fewer times than he could count on one hand. He was inducted into the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2019.

The legend came to Sundance in 2020 for the first time since maybe an afternoon in the mid-’80s to check it out. Went alone on a hike up the slopes beneath Timpanogos.

“I’m in,” he said when he got back, as my lunch partner recounted. And that was that. No wait as they expected while he mulled, no protracted negotiations, no hemming, no hawing. He knew right then. Done.

Before the ceremony last week, Jensen declared that the Sundance crew matched up with any in the ski business. The resort has opened new terrain, changed out lifts, improved snowmaking and parking, built a spa, opened a restaurant on the mountain, and plans to add another lift and 300 acres for skiing while leaving thousands of acres undeveloped.

I have no idea whether Jensen has made any hands-on difference or not. But such is his touch. Good things tend to happen around him, a thumb that doesn’t necessarily leave a print.

He’s known in the ski world as something of a Yoda. His hall of fame bio includes a list of sayings, or “Billisms.” My favorites are “1+1=3” decisions and the “grocery store test,” which translate well to my calling. The blessing and bane of ski town journalism, what makes our bar higher, is knowing you’ll surely run into whoever you just wrote about. Can you look them in the eye?

I knew Jensen in Vail from long phone calls when he thought the paper got something wrong. And rarer, from somewhat shorter phone calls when he thought we got something right. He joined one of our monthly news staff brown bag lunch sessions to teach us about ski company economics. I still remember him exhorting us to give just 2% more in our daily work, another Billism. The idea is that 2% is doable — for us an extra call, one more look that can make all the difference. What mattered was he made the effort with us.

Sundance and Jensen are a good match for the Military Installation Development Authority, which is more purely aligned with this project than doubling the size of Deer Valley. Jensen and mainly his wife, Cheryl, another force, started the Vail Veterans Program in 2004, which has since brought in 3,500 injured military veterans for outdoor experiences there.

They will do much the same at Sundance with the new Mountain Veterans Program, which will work out of the new inn. That’s all a bit of magic, too. Serendipity qualifies, I’ve always believed.

He dwelled during his speech on the magical qualities of the outdoors, the mountains and specifically Mt. Timpanogos, along with the resort itself, for healing mind and spirit as well as body. He emphasized emotional healing most of all.

I think of Jensen as thoughtful, detailed, disciplined, even methodical in his analysis starting with breakfast, never mind business. The idea he just went for a hike and decided on the spot he’d join the ownership team stretches my sense of his reliance on reason.

Something must have happened up on that mountain outside of strict understanding.

Maybe Redford had a gut sense. In any case, he chose well. The script couldn’t be better for Sundance today.

 Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@swiftcharge.net or (970) 376-0745.

The post Journalism Matters: Fortunes align at new Sundance Resort appeared first on Park Record.

The Park City School Board president woke up last Monday and apparently thought something like, “You know what? Enough of this” — and dropped out of his race for reelection to a third term.

Two days later, the board’s vice president had a similar epiphany. And then another candidate for the board president’s seat followed suit.

Who knows what the next weeks will bring, but so far the last of the incumbents running again remains in her race and says she plans to stay.

The terms for two more incumbents aren’t up until 2026. Everyone on the board plans to serve out their current commitments. No rats scurrying from sinking ships here.

The incumbents who quit their campaigns said that the latest blight — a doozy, sure — with the scathing civil rights report on how the district failed to handle students bullying other students wasn’t why they decided they were just done.

The board president said he’s tired and that either of the remaining candidates for his seat would bring fresh energy to the post.

Then one of those candidates quit her race without explanation. But the winner by default vowed to work hard, listen well and do the right thing.

The vice president cited personal reasons and declared she’d find other ways to serve the community after she finished her term. Two others running for her seat are still all in, so far as we know.

And the incumbent who continues to seek another term has competition, too.

So there will be choices. That’s always healthy.

The district finds itself in a curious place.

Academically, you can’t do much better among the nation’s public or private schools. The extracurricular offerings are out of this world. Ask the kids interested in becoming pilots, entrepreneurs, engineers, collegiate athletes, anything they want to become on this planet, Olympians. Programs from football to debate team are competitive. Community support is incredible.

It’s easy to take the special qualities of these schools for granted if you don’t know any better. Sure, it helps living in a largely wealthy community that values education with college a family expectation.

But teachers, principals, district administrators and, yes, school boards have to do a few things right as well to build undeniable excellence like this. They’ve also endured Covid, low state funding, population growth and a lot else to get there.

A school board member’s role comes with plenty of strain and stress, buffeted by strict laws and angsty parents — there are no stakes higher during a certain period in our lives than the shaping of our children, most acutely during adolescence.

Not every district has developed such strengths as Park City. But every district in the land has rotten apples, adolescent bullying and an undertow of drug and alcohol abuse all fanned to flame through social media.

A wonder, at least as viewed from outside, is how a school district so good in other ways turned out to be so bad at such a core responsibility as making sure students spend the largest share of their days in a safe environment.

This is not the rare distinction a school district could ever want — an investigation into student harassment of other students finding big flaws in how these have been handled.

The incidences are appalling. Reports that they’ve continued are worse. Accountability at the district level has been, well, slippery. Ask district leaders who is accountable for this mess and the answer seems to be everyone. Which in effect means no one.

But the school board president, freed of running, allowed that the board might at least be perceived as “soft” on this while pointing out the challenges of openness with laws concerning confidentiality.

The school district superintendent has identified with Martin Luther King Jr., which is great, but equivocating on what “zero tolerance” for certain behaviors has meant in practice might be a clue about a basic difference between other mountain town school districts with the same underlying dynamics and the Park City School District.

My kids went through the public schools in the Vail Valley, and they dealt with the same dark parts of school life as here and elsewhere. A clear difference was that district and the school leaders meant it with “zero tolerance” and seemed to follow through in every instance. Maybe they were harsh. I thought so sometimes.

With the gift of hindsight, however, I can see now they made the better of difficult choices and no doubt had a similar tight rein on administrators reporting properly.

This board and administration appear to be tightening up, at least. Part of the district website is devoted to addressing the civil rights crisis. We’re hearing anecdotally that reports are being taken more seriously.

I know board members and administrators are as appalled as everyone else at the behaviors. They’re also not wrong about the social ills that result in kids being awful to other kids. That’s inevitably a problem with parents primarily. Social media exacerbates it all, and here parents all too often prove to be no help at all. If anything, they’re worse than the kids. Easy enough to see that much.

The course for the district is clear, if agonizing: Bring the same drive for excellence in academics and extracurriculars to making the campuses truly safe places for all the kids. Some of that is practicing actual zero tolerance, and a lot of it is channeling the energy and enthusiasm that have made the district so successful in other ways to this most important one.

The board president and vice president have something profound to fix if they really mean to stay and complete their commitments. Freed of running for another term, maybe they can bear down and get this right. The district has to get this right. Tired won’t cut it.

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@swiftcharge.net or (970) 376-0745.

The post Journalism Matters: The best of districts, the worst of … appeared first on Park Record.

The house will pass. The calendar will endure.

I was fined $50 at Rotary last week for blurring lines between news and opinion, so obviously not everyone agrees with what I believe was the most careful separation of the two among all the news media outlets in the world. No dog crap in our news coverage of Matthew and Tatiana Prince’s quest to build a large new home overlooking Old Town, and “Yellowstone” has stayed in the opinion section.

I’m happy to be shown where in fact we missed. Here’s a challenge: I don’t think you’ll find that in our news coverage. It should go without saying you won’t necessarily like my opinion in this column. But that’s not my concern; accuracy and relevance very much are.

The neighboring titans overlooking Old Town will never be besties, but I’ll venture that they’ll settle next door to each other into their respective homes, the perhaps surprising one still way larger than the other no matter what happens from here. The dogs, leashed properly, will be able to cross one property to a city trail, and the driveway across the other’s will get its building permit. Just my guess here. A wall will come down.

And the portion of the community that gets caught up in these things won’t even notice, having moved on to some other existential outrage on their feeds.

In any case, the row is not simply the sound of one hand SLAPPing. Democracy is not really at stake over Sasha and Mocha, or the rich guys going at each other.

I think you’ll be surprised how fast this one vanishes in the rearview mirror. Like Y2K. I’ve watched this happen over and over again with larger issues. This one at every level is smaller than made out in the moment.

So, yes, the humble community calendar stands up as much more important. It’s also a better way to assess The Park Record owners’ intent with the paper than this blip.

For me, the calendar is the latest tangible progression toward a fully local paper that serves to strengthen community.

The first was in effect burning the boats behind me when I began in September. We unhooked from The Associated Press, which was a bigger deal than you might think. It means there’s no backup if you run out of local copy. So how do you make sure you’ll have enough material? I attribute more local stories to the jump by nearly half in our online reader metrics from a year ago.

The second was around Christmas making the paper free to the consumer and reducing subscriptions to the cost of delivery. Risky, but I think it makes sense for the business if done correctly and advertisers understand the value gained from visitors and especially second-home owners who more readily pick up the paper. The initial growth in circulation at around 30% is encouraging, and we haven’t even really begun the stage two to going free, which is being everywhere.

Starting the full-page calendar in print, or restarting what disappeared during Covid rather, is the third step. Calendars might not seem like such big deals, but the time required and the part of a position we hired recently to do this is a commitment to community I very much appreciate.

There is more to come that will endure, laid in a sense brick by brick, and it will take far longer than that house on the hill to build.

The winds will blow, the fines will come. I don’t have to agree while settling up, nails in my teeth, hammer in hand. We all really do have a future to build. That’s what the calendar represents.

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@swiftcharge.net or (970) 376-0745.

The post Journalism Matters: What it is we’re building here appeared first on Park Record.

There is a serious story about the Prince house on the hill, mainly about conflicting zoning rules and how those get resolved. But the other one is way more fun. The Wall Street Journal reporter told me as much.

Fluffy Sasha and Mocha down at the Egyptian for pets? That’s fun, great fodder for the Follies, also kind of brilliant, right?

I looked up their human, Eric Hermann, for fun and was surprised by a couple of things. One, he was notorious himself for an instant over a dozen years ago when his activities brought about change in the British court system. And two, none of the important press has stirred this easy background into their stew full of castles on high, spatting among the wealthy, settling who’s the big bad neighbor, dogs and walls and all. 

According to the BBC back then: “Mr. Hermann is known in the finance business as a debt ‘vulture.’ He and his associates buy up the debt of the poorest nations on the planet, usually for pennies on the dollar, then sue or use other means to squeeze the nations to pay ten times, even a hundred times, what the vulture fund paid for the debt.”

From The Guardian, in a story about Hermann and a partner: “Such funds buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for them to win debt relief from the international community, and then use courts to pursue the countries for assets.”

They sued through the British courts until Great Britain put a stop to it. There was a fair amount of outrage then at him and others like him. 

Sounds at least as delectable for a certain kind of reporting as directed at the villainous co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, a cybersecurity and connectivity company that has exploded in value since launching in 2009, helping Ukraine and effectively shutting down 8Chan along the way.

Forbes now ranks Matthew Prince the second richest person in Utah (“richest man!”). Of course, it is Utah. That puts him at 949 on the list this year for the United States. Still, not shabby if a bit short of generating the ohmygod reaction sought over and over and over again by headline writers having their fun.

Hermann isn’t exactly poverty stricken himself, of course. He and his wife, Susan, own a residential complex off Sampson Avenue whose mushroom-like sproutings above ground, as if unconnected houses, alone dwarf what the Planning Commission approved for the Princes next door.

Seems the “sprawling!” and “massive!” headlines miss by a couple of hundred feet. That’s fun.

Anyway, the Hermanns don’t like the plans, obviously. Eight others who signed on to their appeal don’t like them, either.  

Coverage of the house and the feud between the ski town titans has been described with varying degrees of breathless inaccuracy, innuendo and incompleteness by the larger press having fun, Bloomberg the most knowingly adrift. It all has the feel of middle school, entertainment like “Mean Girls.”

One small big-press goof is characterizing the eight others as “neighbors.” Indeed, three have homes in the neighborhood, while the rest are from other parts of town, one outside the city proper near Kimball Junction.

Fun fact: Ten letters of support for the proposal come from the immediate neighborhood, including representatives of two homes the Princes own. Bloomberg pointed out that, shockingly, one of those supportive neighbors is a longtime friend of Matthew Prince. A billionaire with a friend? Is that even allowed?

Less fun than ferreting out the existence of a friend on the block — though easy enough to find in the dry documents and recordings of the meetings — is that the new home would have a slightly lower profile on balance than the two homes there now. It would be too banal to include that duff, obviously, and not an easy fit with the narrative.

So basically, one rich dude is the villain, the other the vulture. And we’re all sucked into all this fun a la “Dallas,” “Dynasty” and “Yellowstone.”

Ah, that’s it! I get it now. “Park City”! This is a show, the trope serving as script, reporters taking their cues, a break for everyone from the news, the serious news anyway.

OK, I’m kind of loving it, this mostly stupid fun stuff that accounts for the nation’s (sort-of) bigtime journalists not managing to get half the story, and what they do get, well, half of that is all wrong.

Laugh now, I guess, because what it says more seriously about journalism today ain’t so hilarious, especially when the editors get rolling with their earnest “democracy dies in darkness” stuff. Their own reporters don’t believe that tripe, busy as they are having fun.

Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@swiftcharge.net or (970) 376-0745.

The post Journalism Matters: Oh, got it, this is ‘Yellowstone’ appeared first on Park Record.

Oh, oh, looks like the local Republican Party has a little leadership problem.

Journalists can be a pain, I know. Always asking the most annoying questions possible and homing in on whatever seems most like a problem. Believe me, it’s no less so in the office.  

But if Summit County Republican Party Chair Melanie Monestere thinks she has an issue with Park Record staff writer Jay Hamburger reporting straight up in March on the party’s voting snafus statewide, what about her own party members irked at the same thing, writing to the editor, calling, talking on and off the record with that dreadful press?

Hamburger only bore witness to the primary, after all, quoting Republicans at the event at Ecker Hill Middle School who were trying to vote amid a bit of chaos with voting machines and the party’s decision to have members vote in person this time. He also witnessed that attendance was great, though apparently only 9% of registered Republicans statewide cast votes.  

It was his fault the Republican faithful themselves were frustrated that night? Wouldn’t the party leadership have a bit more to do with that frustration than some reporter standing around with a notebook?

If you can’t do something right, try to make sure no one else knows — is that it? Makes a certain amount of sense, I guess. But is that really the face of the local Republican Party, ducking a basic responsibility? Don’t Republicans pride themselves on being accountable?

Barring the press last week from doing its work at something as presumably public as candidates seeking office was digging the hole deeper in a blue county where Republicans must reach across divides to convince voters they might really have a better way.

And the local GOP leadership couldn’t even be competent at that. Only Toria Barnhart was stopped and a production made about the press being banned except for some alt right tweeter covering the event for an account with 40 followers, which sounds less like a journalist than a wannabe influencer.

The rest of the local news media streamed right past. Only Barnhart identified herself up front and sought help (hah!) lining up interviews with candidates, mistaking local party leaders for honorable and honest brokers. What a sucker, right?

All the local and statewide news entities covered the hiccups in March the same way. That is, accurately. Hamburger did nothing unusual or untoward in his work covering what happened.

The delays, the confusion, the lines weren’t hard to see. Rankled Republicans who tried to vote weren’t hard to hear.

The state chair of the party, Rob Axson, had better sense than to dodge reporters and fail to return simple phone calls and emails ever since.

“I want to thank all the candidates who participated, our dedicated organizers and volunteers, and especially the caucus-goers, even when dealing with long lines and some hiccups to the check-in process in some locations,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune last month.

It’s not that hard, see? Too bad word didn’t trickle to the head of the Summit County branch of the party, where presumably the party hopes to make inroads with the community at large.

The local party chairwoman refusing to answer questions and then looking for easy scapegoats doesn’t reflect much leadership, sorry. Under pressure is exactly when to step up and be accountable, I’d think, scary as that might be.

The message here is that Monestere wasn’t up to the moment. Instead of modeling the higher values of her party, she showed a lack of character and did a disservice to her candidates. How else to interpret this behavior from the face of the local party? Did she not read her job description?

She also gave Barnhart the far more interesting, revealing story about the GOP leadership, at least in Summit County, than we’d get from the usual rah-rah elevator speeches for the partisan choir at these events. Nothing wrong with those. They are bonding moments for the party faithful, for Democrats as well as Republicans.

I had hoped the Summit County Republicans would be as sharp and solid as Aspen’s organization. Like here, Aspen’s GOP has no prayer of winning local elections, but they persevere, help the state cause, and are a very viable, open organization, way better than the Democrats there who became lost in their own rhetoric.

I was a huge fan of the local Republicans in my time there. Their leaders always returned calls promptly, and they had plenty to say when they did, smart enough to never lose their opportunity to make their point.

But I’m also mindful of the opposite at the local level. In Grass Valley/Nevada City, California, we had a contentious county clerk primary in spring 2022 for the office that runs local elections.

A racist, lying flier against the Democratic candidate showed up in mailboxes throughout the county, a mysterious PAC taking credit. Her ethnicity is Filipina, and the folks responsible for the flier seemed to think playing that up as darkly as possible would be some sort of advantage, along with lying about her positions since the truth apparently wouldn’t do.

Naturally, one of our dreadful journalists assigned to the task found the members and donors of that PAC. Key members turned out to be the officers of the local Republican Party. I mean chair, treasurer, other leaders.

The Republican candidate was crushed. I have no idea if reporting on who exactly was behind that dirty trick made a difference, but in a rural county where nearly 40% of the affiliated voters are Republican, more voted for the Democrat. This in a area that routinely elects Republicans to their version of the county council.

Can’t say I minded being banned from their meetings after that.

Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached atdrogers@swiftcharge.net or (970) 376-0745.

The post Journalism Matters: Real leaders don’t need scapegoats; local GOP ducks responsibility appeared first on Park Record.

I check in periodically with Andy Bernhard, the publisher at The Park Record forever — 35 or so years qualifying as forever on my calendar.

He retired in the fall of 2022, another forever ago to me in the wake of Covid and my paper in California being sold twice in six months, the second freeing me for fresh ski town sojourns to Aspen and now here, where I hope to settle.

He was my picture of the perfect publisher after I’d unexpectedly found myself in that position another forever ago in Vail, a battlefield promotion during the financial meltdown when literally no one else was available and I appeared to be the closest thing to a grownup then as the longish-time editor.

I remember that suddenly I was what I swore I’d never be, a publisher.

I was in awe of the guy when I met him while embedding with the town of Vail during a week of meetings in Park City in a sweet brief return to my reporting roots. I had an audience in his office, and he asked about business numbers and such, publisher stuff, nodding sagely as I divulged in a humble-bragging way.

Truth be told, our folks on the business side of my paper were killing it then. Only operation in our company, maybe America, to be growing by double digits annually as we soared out of that crisis, mainly by breaking some rules with magazines.

‘Course, we only got there by stubbing our toes more than maybe anyone while I learned the job. I still kick myself for letting very smart people on that side of the biz do some very, very dumb things, as seen with the gift of hindsight but seemed right then. Here’s the price of going along even if your gut is barking no, no! I didn’t realize then that I did know better than basically failing to bend with a big advertiser in light of the times. Our biggest mistake in that crisis. A great lesson.

My gut didn’t bark with Andy. It still doesn’t. Not that we agree on everything, even if there is a solid thread connecting me to his perspective. Made me a better publisher then, I think, and maybe a better editor now.

All this to say, yeah, I talk to him about stuff we’re thinking about. On the way to a Jazz game, at the bar, if I catch him at a Rotary Club meeting. It’s not so much thumbs up or thumbs down, or been-there-done-that feedback. Though of course he’s not shy about that either.

We added a copy editor-plus recently, Parker Mortensen, who already is a huge help with getting the print editions out. They also are keeping us way more up to date in with brief-and-broad news postings online, where today’s competition plays out. But the main advantage in my mind is the most comprehensive community calendar possible that they’ll build out and maintain.

I mean enough for full pages in print for community events and separately, I think, for arts and entertainment. Covid killed calendars like this at little papers all over. I told Andy I wanted to bring these back, and with human hands rather than leaving it to automation and vendors, which already had weakened these calendars.

Of course I was happy my mentor agreed with that idea. But more enlightening, if that’s the right word, was his sense from decades here of this community’s likely receptiveness, and then, duh, some advertising possibilities if we can do this right that I hadn’t given sufficient thought.

My gut already said go. That and having done this before, building out calendars at previous stops. This is a simple, humble way of strengthening community.

Andy and I bonded after my company of the time bought The Park Record and then I transferred to northern California, which made me the representative of an outpost like Park City. He and I became the curmudgeons of the lead team, sometimes commiserating over what we viewed as a groupthink that sometimes took over.

Andy, well, let’s just say he knows how to say no, and I had the mostly unfortunate habit of blurting all too bluntly when I saw elephants in the room. If Andy saw one too, well, I figured I might not be imagining things.

But I caved before Covid after trumpeting my concern over sending our production work and editorial layout overseas for the promise of savings — savings Andy and I alone loudly doubted would happen.

We turned out to be correct about that. We saved almost nothing. But long before that, I finally, reluctantly joined the team at our bosses’ direction. Andy figured out how to simply not comply. There was an example I wished I had followed in California. Another gift of hindsight when I coulda-shoulda followed my gut, and Andy.

The Park Record editions remain to this day homegrown from stem to stern. The slog to full independence from all the old company’s systems is difficult and complicated enough without having to rebuild a production staff, too. Besides that, the production people were and are among the strongest anywhere for the work.

So yeah, all the rounds should be on me. Least I can do.

Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached atdrogers@swiftcharge.netor (970) 376-0745.

The post Journalism Matters: Mentors are gold, though it helps if you listen to ’em appeared first on Park Record.

Sogar and I, strangers then, happened to sit next to each other at the gate, waiting for our flight to Las Vegas, working on our laptops.

“Great we can,” I said to his nods. Soon we were acquaintances enough to know he was visiting a friend in Chicago on a working vacation, and I would be working through a visit to Southern California to see a niece get married.

With that, the editor and the software engineer got back to it, missing our cues to join the line for the connecting flight until the very end. Then, wouldn’t you know it, we sat in the same short row on the plane, me at my usual window and he on the aisle.

A dinosaur of a medium, half a millennium old, has been a whitewater of technological change since I began, every year a leap until I could put out my paper from anywhere, including plenty of times and plenty of papers in airports.

Sogar’s whole job is a recent evolutionary breakthrough by comparison. He and others like him made my work today possible.  

“Have you heard of ChatGPT?” he asked.

“This will change everything,” I said. “I’m not thinking so much about ChapGPT as what comes next.” More nods.

ChatGPT, after all, is the Australopithecus of this form of AI.

“Australopithecus?” he asked.

“You know, like Lucy?” I said.

He got it. True. ChatGPT will evolve and extremely rapidly. But still, hallucinations and all, the biases of humanity baked into the repository, the bot remains remarkable.

My daughter uses it or a cousin AI to extend her reach for her marketing business. Some instructions and out pops an email or a newsletter, say. Make it less formal for one batch and more so for another, she instructs. Done. She changes some language to make it more hers and sends. Same with social media posts. Now she has scale.

My son, also a newspaper guy, uses artificial intelligence for sales presentations, and to employ strategic mixes tailored for specific prospects that sales people can use effectively, way more so than if they did the research themselves. His company aims to stay in business even if print disappears. AI will help them do it.

The Associated Press and Bloomberg for years have used AI to generate game summaries and earnings reports automatically. Actually, that’s a precursor, simple as a couple of algorithms strung together. Machine stuff. Sogar said the menu will widen considerably.

My new friend knows AI has been around forever and that ChatGPT is just a blooming of consciousness: the general public’s a little belatedly. But the bot’s launch at the end of November also heralds a big shift in generative AI from here. By January there were more than 100 million users, making this the fastest growing software application in history until Threads popped in July.

I confess I wonder — though I’m told this is silly — about the gap between generative and sentient. I’m guessing this chasm narrows from here, at least in the human perception of the black box in which AI operates. The large language model learns on its own. Sogar needs AI, or soon enough will, to do his job.

Some newsrooms are using AI to enhance headlines for maximum online reach. I can see AI easily designing and headlining our print pages almost instantly vs. a process today that sucks up most of Tuesdays and Fridays for The Park Record. And I trust AI within an ecosystem for work like this.

The mischief lies in the open internet. ChatGPT is a most unreliable journalist, which I realize is saying something. But even here, the bot falls somewhere around Wikipedia for quick guidance in a directional way, if off with some of the particulars. That’s valuable for a reporter on deadline. An AI could do it reasonably accurately based on local government data and early human reporting. Just ask the right questions, give the right instruction, and voila. If not ready to publish, a big boost that way.  

AI today can line edit for spelling, grammar and style — Associated Press or Chicago, or New York Times if we want that.  

The potential in propaganda is endless. These models can inflict real havoc in an already poisoned environment, chockful of humanity, all our greatness and all our many evils.  

Our newsroom doesn’t use AI, and I’m not sure how much my new colleagues have played with ChatGPT. As of May, 14% of adult Americans had interacted with it, though 58% were aware of its existence.

Meantime, similar applications are blooming everywhere. Our first use of AI may well be in trying to make sense of what’s out there and all the ethical quandaries that come with this.

Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@swiftcharge.net or (970) 376-0745.

The post Journalism Matters: Buckle up for AI appeared first on Park Record.