Maeve Conran is the managing editor for Rocky Mountain Community Radio. It’s a coalition of public media stations in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
Conran works with reporters throughout the network to identify stories with regional relevance — on topics like climate change, housing and mental health — then helps share them with more than a dozen different stations. The partnership helps listeners throughout the region understand what’s happening in nearby communities, and hear about local efforts to address big-picture issues.
Conran joined reporter Kaya Williams live in the Aspen Public Radio studio for an interview earlier this month to talk about the value of collaboration. It’s part of a series of live interviews Aspen Public Radio conducted during our year-end membership drive.
You can hear the audio using the “Listen” button above and read a transcript below; this interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Kaya Williams: Now, we get a lot of our regional stories from reporters in the RMCR network, like Clark Adomaitis and Chris Clements in southwest Colorado, Emily Arntsen in Moab and Gavin McGough in Telluride. How would you describe your role in the network?
Maeve Conran: Well, I have the wonderful job of sort of overseeing all the news that's being produced at all of our stations and getting a sense of what stories would play well in other communities. And so I get to work with reporters as an editor in story development.
And then regionally, I get to really get a sense of the kind of news being produced — how those stories have such commonality across our area. Of course, we're all dealing with the climate crisis, with the lack of water resources, and so many other issues.
And so hearing a story on that issue, say, produced at Moab, or in Telluride has great resonance here in Aspen. And likewise, I love it when I tune into KGNU in Boulder, which is my home station, and I hear Kaya Williams on their morning news, or Eleanor Bennett or Halle (Zander) or Caroline (Llanes).
I mean, it's wonderful to be able to get this real sense of what a great, diverse, rich, newsworthy region we're living in by being able to share all of these stories.
Williams: And you raise a really great point there about the diversity of the region. We're all kind of in mountainous communities. Some of them are more desert-like, but there's a lot of diverse perspectives to this. So how do you pick out stories that you think will resonate both in Aspen, and Telluride, and Boulder and southwest Colorado, for instance?
Conran: Well, to me, it's all about elevating these stories from communities, and particularly communities that are doing incredible work. So we have this great pollination of, they're playing your stories, you're playing their stories. But I hear a story and I say, “That has got to have relevance in other communities and great interest, too.”
Plus, I know that the listeners here of Aspen Public Radio are so clued in to what's happening in the region. They want to know what's happening in other mountain communities in the Rocky Mountain West. They want to know what's happening to our neighbors in the north, Wyoming, or in Utah, because they have a real sense of being part of a region as well. So it really is a joy to be able to share these stories, to hear them played out in different radio stations as well.
Williams: We get to see all of these stories coming in, we get to put stories out. It's kind of an exchange of stories, but there can also be an exchange of ideas. And there's a lot of a collaborative element here. How can, one, stations work together? And how does that benefit all of our communities to have this collaborative element to the network?
Conran: Well, we've done wonderful collaborative reporting projects in the past onaffordable housing, really taking a regional look at what's happening with that, or the transition away from fossil fuels. But one of the great things I've been able to do as well is look at a story that's being reported in one community, and then look at the same story being reported in a slightly different way in a different community, and have both reporters come together, and we'll have a little conversation and we get to hear what's happening with those.
And we've done that with Aspen Public Radio. Actually, recently, I got to have a great chat with Eleanor and Halle about what's happening (with) the situation with migrants in Carbondale, and to be able to dig deep into the reporting they've been doing and share that across the entire RMCR network. So it's really a great way to also identify how connected we all are.
There's so much division that's being talked about. But I think when you elevate these stories from communities, and you recognize the commonality, that is the counterbalance to this conversation about division. Now, we are more connected than we actually think we are. And I think when we embrace that notion, share stories, share these voices — whether it's students, whether it's stories of migrants, whether it's the community that's working to help them — when we elevate those voices across the entire region, I think that just makes us all more connected.
We need those stories of people really seeking out solutions and working together, and so what a joy it is to be able to elevate those stories and share them right across the region.
