Editor's Note

By Tim Covi

We want to start this month with a resounding “THANK YOU.” Everyone at the VOICE, our vendors and our staff, are extremely grateful for the outpouring of support you gave us last month. Throughout the year, VOICE readers are extremely supportive and involved, but the past month has been extraordinary. We still have a long way to go and we still need your help.

In August we started a major fundraising drive, with a need to raise $68,000 by the end of the year to keep the VOICE alive. Your generosity has helped us nock that down to $61,000.  In one month, supporters have given $7,000; if we can get that to $15,000 then we have a donor who will match that amount!

Click to read more ...

The Vendor Issue

By Tim Covi

This issue of the paper is dedicated to Denver VOICE vendors, the hardworking folks that hustle hour after hour each day peddling this monthly newsmagazine.

It’s not an easy job. It takes no small amount of grit to handle such a social enterprise, one that involves as much rejection as it does reward. Almost every vendor doubles down on the emotional impact of the work: most people who are homeless at some point internalize that state of being. They begin to feel that they’re not capable of accomplishing much; their self-worth decays; their self-image gets as beat up as hanger meat. So every “no” can be potentially personal at first. And the flip side, every “yes” can be potentially transformational. If you’re reading this, you’ve taken part in that.

I can be pretty disconnected at times from the street side of the paper as an editor. My focus is on putting together a product that will make our vendors’ jobs easier, a product that people will want to pick up each month. Of course some buyers will simply give our vendors a dollar, take the paper and toss it.  But our hope is that by constantly improving our content, we’ll help our vendors get out of that charity niche. Maybe I’m naively optimistic, but I imagine that very few people actually want to live off charity. When it comes to our vendors, I’m quite sure that most want to work for their money, and take pride in their jobs.

I think this synthesis between our vendors and our newspaper is crucial to our product.

Click to read more ...

Editor's Note: Tim Covi

Published April 2010 Vol. 14 Issue 4

by Tim Covi

While print journalism is floundering and well-established publications across the country tighten their belts, cutting content, page-count and staff, it’s interesting and ironic to see the success of “street” papers.

The Denver VOICE’s distribution has been bouncing off 17,000 papers a month for nearly a year, vastly higher than the 1,500 papers we started vending in August 2007. In that time, the Rocky Mountain News closed, turning Denver from a two-daily to a one-daily city for the first time in over a century.

Another large distribution street paper, Seattle’s Real Change, has had even greater success. Now distributing upwards of 72,000 papers a month, Real Change went from roughly 250 vendors a month to 350 when the economy turned south. During the same period, one of the oldest businesses in the city, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, stopped printing and converted to an online only news source.

So what is it that makes street papers viable at a time when these bastions of print news are failing? In part, obviously, it’s a question of scale. We’re still relatively small, low budget operations without the bloated newsrooms and printing presses to worry about. But that could be said about plenty of weeklies as well—a number of which are building their online presence as their print service lags.

More important than size, street papers are publications that have relevance not only in terms of ideas and content, but also on a social level—for the vendors who need immediate employment to help alleviate or escape poverty or street life. We fill a niche for people who want critical ideas, but also want to help others.

This gives us a huge responsibility. Beyond surviving for ourselves and our readers, we need to find a way to stay alive for our vendors. In 2009, 989 people worked for the VOICE, distributing over 177,500 papers. On average, our vendors earned $2.00 per issue. Collectively, this means that Denver VOICE readers put $355,128 into our vendors’ hands last year.

Some vendors earned enough to get into housing. Currently, 55 percent of our vendors live in hotels, apartments and houses, and 82 percent of these vendors reported paying for their housing with money earned from vending the paper.

To keep these vendors in business and help Denver’s growing homeless population by building our vendor program, we need to raise money every year. This year we’re implementing our first-ever silent auction. We hope, as avid readers, you can either attend or will consider contributing something for bid. We will hold a dinner and comedy show in conjunction with the auction at Baur’s Ristorante on Thursday, May 13 from 6-9 P.M. Tickets for the dinner and show are $100.

Please consider coming out and supporting the VOICE and our many vendors!



Editor's Note: Denver’s New Urbanism

Published March 2010 Vol. 14 Issue 3

by Tim Covi

Where I grew up, there was hardly a crane in the sky. When you did see one, it usually had a wrecking ball attached. The city was an architectural mausoleum. Nothing new ever happened. Invariably time would pass, the wrecking crane would depart and a new parking lot would spring up as if born from a magic well of tar and concrete boiling below the quiet streets of the Queen City on the Lake. That was progress.

So you can imagine my shock when I moved to Colorado 14 years ago. Cranes everywhere. Buildings shooting up like geysers. I liked driving through Denver just to have the sense of something happening. At that time, Lodo was just a developer’s dream; people still slept in the loading docks at the Post Office building on Wynkoop; Platte Street was home to vacant buildings and café drifters, El Chapultepec had yet to be engulfed by frat-addled nightclubs and bougie bars, and things like Stapleton were a distant future.

And the suburbs blew up, too. Tan and beige boxes have oozed out onto every prairie from Monument Pass to Fort Collins. By 2030, metro Denver’s projected population will be roughly 3.8 million, a growth of almost 1 million people within the next 20 years. And of course, if we don’t want our brown cloud to smear away our mountain views entirely, that growth has to be managed.

City planners, community members, zoning experts, politicians and developers have all had a voice and perspective in crafting methods to manage the growth. Enacted in March 2002, Blueprint Denver, for instance, created a comprehensive plan to address growth and development. Key components were designing multipurpose streets, “mixed-use” neighborhoods with shopping corridors; and incorporating green design into new buildings.

Building on the principles of Blueprint Denver, the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) crafted Metro Vision 2035. Enacted in 2007, “Metro Vision concentrates development in a defined 750-squaremile urban growth boundary and identifies guidelines for nearly 70 high-density, mixed-use developments in the region, many around transit centers,” According to Metrodenver.org.

High density and mixed use sound like great ideas, and places like Lowry, Stapleton and Belmar are some of the largest scale projects. They have some obvious benefits, and some room to improve (see pages 4 and 5).

In keeping with the plan-focused city, this February Denver adopted its first comprehensive overhaul of city zoning codes since 1956. Aside from the details of what you can and can’t do on a remodel, the new code identifies areas for specific kinds of growth, from high to low density and from commercial districts to mixed-use developments.

This issue of the Denver VOICE looks at how more than a decade of planning and development is affecting Denver, from the community identity of neighborhoods like Five Points, to the architectural identity of the city as a whole. We also look at innovative ways to create community, whether it be in the context of the  expansive suburbs or the urban core.

Editor's Note: The Buskers and Listing and Soused and Befuddled

Published January 2010 Vol. 14 Issue 1

by Tim Covi

I was caught a little off guard the day before going to print with this issue. I went for a quick walk to get some air with Amelia, our executive director. We were running between banks downtown, and within five blocks four people asked us for money.

Don’t be silly; that’s not what caught me off guard.

The first couple we met asked with a bit of drunken flare. Long, ambling prose providing the details of where from and where to and what’s in between. And that’s alright by me. I’m not offended by a little alcohol. I’ve got time for a story. A little further along, another man just kind of listed around the corner of a building and into my path, half ready for rejection from the go. I think he was looking past me and behind him in the same moment, remembering that barely anyone says yes and prepping for the next ask. Further down a couple was busking, picking a banjo and stomping a tambourine at the north end of skyline-park, a blue-grass melody pitched against a crisp wind calling out for greenbacks and silver dollars. And a fourth, god bless her, was vending the Denver VOICE.

It’s a brisk day. My scalp is getting a little cold in the wind as I carry my money from one place to another, like a highly advanced squirrel with rudimentary assets: checking, savings, credit. Oh the credit! Who invented that nightmare?

We stopped to talk to the Denver VOICE vendor. We hadn’t met before, so Amelia and I introduced ourselves. A stack of papers tucked beneath her left arm, bag swinging by her waist, a folded paper in her right hand while struggling with a cigarette and a light, she was a picture of everything at once. She was excited and grateful, practically brimming over with pride at her sales, and wonder at the fact that she’s able to do it. She told us sometimes she has a hard time because she’s shy. It’s not easy for her to just walk up to people and talk, let alone ask to make an exchange, ask to give someone a paper, ask for a donation. She talked about how she’s really impressed with the VOICE, that she always tells people what a good paper it is.

You could see her sincerity. And later in the day, as I sit writing this, thinking about the buskers and listing and soused and befuddled; I think of about her and I am totally and completely humbled. I’ve been working here almost two years, and I get focused on journalism as an editor. I get focused on my piece, which I love. But it’s also nice to get pulled out of that tunnel to see the impact of this particular media model.

So on behalf of all the hard working VOICE vendors, I’d like to thank our readers and donors who have supported and embraced this project throughout 2009. It was an amazing year. Vendors distributed close to 17,000 papers in our peak month, and have averaged close to 15,500 per month since the spring, and the paper just keeps getting better!