Crestone Eagle News

Caption: Managing editor Matt Lit and director Jenn Eytcheson at the fundraising event By Jennifer Eytcheson It was a great feeling to see the community of Crestone gather to support their local newspaper during the Wine, Cheese & Silent Fundraiser on Saturday, June 15th. In a testament to the goodwill that permeates our town, we raised $1,300 in just a few hours from all locally donated goods. But this event is only the beginning of our journey. Our aspirations are set higher, with a summer target of $15,000 firmly in our sights. We are using these funds to expand our news coverage,...

Crestone Eagle Community Media (CECM) is pleased to announce that Jennifer Eytcheson is returning to the Eagle and has been named the Business & Operations Manager. She will lead the direction of the paper going forward, oversee operations, systems and technology, and manage staff. Eytcheson was the Eagle’s advertising manager for five years, and is excited to return to what she calls her “happy place.” She will work closely with the CECM board to ensure the paper’s continued success and expansion. “I’m really passionate about getting the operations and sys- tems of the Eagle back in place, and I’m very excited to take things to a new level,” she said. Now that the...

December, 1989 I published the first Crestone Eagle newspaper. It was a huge leap of faith. Crestone was small then, but big things were happening. I felt that people needed to know about them. I started out small. But the amount of community support for this wild endeavor was huge.

If Kizzen Laki had any interest in journalism as a teen, her South Side Chicago high school journalism teacher extinguished it. He was also the typing teacher, and as a holdover of patriarchal conventions in those late-’60s days, he required all the girls to wear hose to class. He inspected their fingernails for perfect polish. He couldn’t stand Kizzen, and even though she was an excellent student and handed in A-worthy work, he gave her D-minus grades. “I was such a nongirl. He gave me terrible grades because I didn’t have the proper subservient girly attitude,” she says. Then...

Thirty-three years and counting. What began as a simple newsletter for property owners in the Baca grew into one of the most widely read newspapers in the San Luis Valley. For 33 years, The Crestone Eagle has exemplified the meaning of community journalism. That’s because it has largely been written by you, the readers. Kizzen Laki, the Eagle editor and publisher for much of her adult life, along with her wife Janet Woodman, have kept the enterprise moving forward for more than three decades, finding the writers and readers to sustain this community newspaper. As of September 1 when Crestone...

This fall semester, during a Colorado College class called “The Future and Sustainability of Local News,” several students visited Crestone and stayed at the college’s Baca campus. While there, they met with staff of The Crestone Eagle, read archives of area newspapers at the local museum, interviewed residents about where they get their local news and information, and met with a public official to talk about the efficacy of a potential sales tax grant to support local journalism. Throughout their intensive course at our liberal arts campus in Colorado Springs, students studied the various causes of a broken business model in...

We need your help! Starting November 30, Colorado Gives Day, and during the month of December, you, our beloved community, will have the opportunity to make contributions toward the expansion of The Crestone Eagle. The Eagle has been selected for a Colorado Media Project $5,000 matching grant. This means donations can be doubled. We often hear from our readers that our reporting truly makes a difference in their lives—that no other publication covers Crestone and the San Luis Valley like we do. Well, we’d like to continue doing what we do and bring you even more! Like most newspapers in Colorado...

Janet Woodman remembers staring intently out the train window every day during one section of her commute from suburban New Jersey to work in New York City as a young woman. The train passed through a wetlands area—deep grasses, birds, a tantalizing glimpse of natural wildness. She soaked it all in. “Then we’d go underground and come up in Manhattan and I’d trudge to my job.”  Trapped in a world of sidewalks and buildings, she understood how her father had felt for years. “He hated the city. He should have been a farmer,” she says and then smiles, adding, “He’s...