Student journalists on rival Colorado campuses team up for historic Rocky Mountain Showdown edition

FORT COLLINS — Mock newsprint riddled with inside jokes papered the walls. College students mainlining caffeine quibbled over headlines above the dulcet beats of a Lady Gaga song. And young journalists with a slice of Krazy Karl’s Pizza in one hand and a red pen in the other edited copy for grammar mistakes well into the evening.

The basement headquarters of Colorado State University’s Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper came alive Tuesday night with the incomparable energy of a student newsroom during the production of a new edition.

In this case, the students were giving articles last-minute tweaks for their issue commemorating Saturday’s Rocky Mountain Showdown, the longstanding football rivalry between the CSU Rams and the University of Colorado Buffaloes.

The kooky chaos of putting out a special edition of the only college newspaper in Colorado to still have a regular print edition was right on track. Except on this night, the student journalists accustomed to documenting history were also making it. The Collegian’s newsroom welcomed two guests to team up on the newspaper — editors from rival CU Boulder’s student publication, the CU Independent.

The Collegian’s editors invited their CUI counterparts to work together to produce a 40-page Rocky Mountain Showdown print edition filled with stories from both universities’ student media staffs — a first-of-its kind collaboration proving that while the Rams and Buffs’ rivalry may be alive and well on the field, in the student journalism world, it’s been replaced with a spirit of collaboration.

“It’s not so much Boulder vs. CSU, it’s Boulder and CSU,” said Allie Seibel, the Collegian’s editor-in-chief. “It bridges the gap across the state in student journalism.”

The idea to partner with CU student journalists had swirled around Seibel and Collegian managing editor Hannah Parcells’ brains for about a year. When they met CUI editors Celia Frazier and Jessi Sachs at a Colorado Press Association conference this summer, they hit it off and extended the offer.

“It was an immediate ‘yes,’ ” Sachs said.

The Rocky Mountain Showdown edition provided the perfect opportunity to meld staffs. The young journalists hashed out story ideas over Zoom meetings and assigned them out to their respective teams — about 100 Collegian staffers and around 55 CUI staffers.

The vision was to fill the paper with head-to-head pieces comparing culture, sports, campus policies and traditions from Boulder and Fort Collins perspectives. The edition features warring nightlife screeds, differences in scoring tickets to the big game, sports analysis, a battle over which college town has the best outdoor recreation, mascot trash-talking and more.

A rousing debate over which college town pizza staple — Boulder’s Cosmos or FoCo’s Krazy Karl’s — broke out in the newsroom Tuesday night, along with a separate melee over the merits of pineapple on pizza. But neither made it into print.

The paper came out Thursday ahead of Saturday’s game in Fort Collins, with 4,000 copies distributed across both campuses. The cover of the magazine-style publication features both publication’s names above an illustration of a ram and buffalo squaring up on a football field.

Working together on content was exciting to Sachs, but even more thrilling for the 20-year-old journalism and political science major was the notion of holding a physical copy of all the students’ hard work in her hands and being able to pass out editions all around campus.

The CUI hasn’t published regular print editions since 2006, when it was still called the Campus Press. In 2019, CU Boulder’s media college announced it would stop funding the student-run CUI and planned to develop a more faculty-led student media outlet, which became The Bold.

The Bold was supposed to be a part of the CU-CSU student-media collaboration, but that publication’s student editors announced their unexpected resignation last week. Neither the students who stepped down nor the publication’s faculty student media adviser responded to The Denver Post’s requests for comment.

Since the shakeup, the CUI has been without a physical newsroom, which made the trip to Fort Collins all the more special for Sachs and Frazier.

“It really contributes to a sense of community to have a space to work together, and we’re seeing that tonight,” Sachs said, overlooking the room of laughing, talking, squabbling journalists hard at work.

The Collegian has been printing since 1891 and Seibel fights “tooth and nail” to keep it that way, she said. Now, the Collegian publishes online daily but still puts out a weekly print paper. The student  paper recently had to move to a new printing press in Wyoming after Prairie Mountain Media — a subsidiary of Denver Post owner MediaNews Group — abruptly closed its printing plant in Berthoud this summer.

The stress of that relocation made the printed product all the more sweet to Seibel, who said student journalists must work together to accomplish bigger, better things.

“To have two large student publications from the two biggest universities in the state being free and open to publish what they want to and working together — that’s a lovely thing,” Seibel said.

Collegian and CUI staffers sat side by side hammering out the final details of this week’s issue, making edits, forging friendships — and all on deadline.

“This meant so much to the CUI to be able to work on our first print edition in so long, and to be able to be one of the people leading it was so special,” Sachs said. “I also definitely consider the team at the Collegian friends now.”

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