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The Flatirons, in Boulder, during a more typical winter. CMDI’s Water Desk has been fielding calls throughout the winter drought from resource-starved reporters looking for help covering a warm, extremely dry season. Photo by Joe Arney.

Call it the winter of our discontent: With just 23 inches of snow accumulation since November, Boulder—and Colorado as a whole—is enduring one of the driest winters on record.

And as parts of Colorado and the American West start to look more like deserts, they’re becoming news deserts, as well. Cuts, closures and consolidations are shuttering newsrooms and robbing reporters of resources, making it harder to ensure the public is getting trustworthy, verified information about the scope of this crisis.

It’s a challenge Luke Runyon sees daily as co-director of .

Luke Runyon

“It’s been an extremely dry and extremely warm winter for the southern Rocky Mountains—really, for much of the West,” said Runyon, whose work with a local NPR station won a prestigious Murrow Award in 2024.

“What I’d love to see more of is reporters going into the field and talking to the people on the ground who have to make tough decisions because of a lack of water. But I understand why that doesn’t happen—it’s more expensive to do that kind of reporting, to find the characters who tell that story.”

It’s not that you can’t watch the local news to see reports of just how dry the weather has been. But resource-starved newsrooms have to make hard editorial decisions about which in-depth stories to pursue, and Runyon said environmental reporting struggles to compete with other beats—so it’s often scaled back.

We ignore water coverage at our own peril, Runyon said, especially as climate change stresses ecosystems, upends established norms and ushers in more brutal fire seasons.

“Access to water is the issue affecting the modern West, one that underlies almost every major question we’re talking about,” he said. “It pops up in housing, agriculture and our ability to feed ourselves, recreation and the broader environment. If we’re not talking about water, we’re missing a huge piece of what it means to live in the west.”

Beyond just financial support

At The Water Desk, Runyon works directly with the journalists trying to tell those stories. Its work has evolved as the needs of journalists have changed. The team used to exclusively provide financial support through small grants; today, it also offers assistance with data visualization and mapping on big stories, even direct editing support from Runyon, who’s covered Colorado River issues for nearly a decade. The Water Desk, which is housed out of the Center for Environmental Journalism at С���� Boulder’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, also on timely issues.

That’s important because while there are good reporters covering water issues, it’s been a hard time to be a journalist—especially one covering a highly complex issue like water, “because it isn’t easy to understand the crazy infrastructure, the complicated legal mechanisms in place to manage water,” he said.

A major story right now that is getting national attention is the need for an updated management proposal for the Colorado River, which supplies water to seven Western U.S. states and Mexico. The states, which disagree on how to manage a shrinking supply of water, missed a fall deadline to submit a plan to the federal government; the new deadline is Saturday.

“The timing of this very dry year comes at a critical moment for the river itself,” Runyon said. “I think you’ll see more being written on this leading up to the 14th.”

Most of the stories Runyon is fielding calls about right now concern poor skiing conditions and the economic impact on resorts and mountain towns. He expects the cycle to turn to agriculture in the spring—especially how farmers will adjust plantings in the face of shortages—and to recreation and ecology in the summer.

“The reason snow gets so much coverage in the winter is because it has all these domino effects that are felt through the rest of the year,” Runyon said.

Finding ways to help a dwindling cast of media to tell deeper and more impactful stories remains his greatest challenge, but Runyon does see opportunities for people looking to break into journalism, especially as new platforms allow reporters to offer their audience deep dives on important topics like climate and water.

“There are a lot of cool, innovative startups out there,” he said. “And there is a much broader definition of who gets to call themselves a journalist. You can be an expert with a Substack newsletter, and you’re basically running your own small business. Hopefully, there’s more of that to come.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.