Overview:
This month marks the five-year anniversary of the pandemic, and our publisher shares her thoughts on COVID's impact on Bucket List.
Thinking back five years ago about COVID’s impact on the Denver area and Bucket List Community Cafe is somewhat triggering. In February 2020, COVID-19 cases were being reported all over the world; passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship were quarantined due to an outbreak, and Americans who were in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began, returned to Travis AFB and were held for two weeks at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California.
I was among the team working with NBC News on Feb. 11 when they were finally released from quarantine to return to their homes. On Feb. 29, I headed to Seattle, where COVID was racing through the Life Care Center of Kirkland. For days, I waited outside the nursing facility, covering whatever hell was going on inside. Finally, on March 9, I returned to Colorado, and snapped a photo as we were landing at DIA. Shortly thereafter, everything shut down. It would be several months before I got back on an airplane.
As the new normal set in, Bucket List, which had started in summer 2019 as a personal blog with my thoughts on North Denver, found its purpose. In March 2020, when there were more questions than answers, I was watching cable news updates from across the country and had a revelation. Everything that affected us from a national news perspective was happening in our neighborhoods. There were so many stories to tell on our street, around the corner, and within our own community. Hyperlocal neighborly news could have a significant impact. The community needed us to help them figure things out, connect them during a period of isolation and share stories about struggling small businesses.
We helped you find out where to get tested. We shared the news as groceries flew off the shelves, people scrambled to find toilet paper, and lined up to buy liquor and cannabis, when for a few hours, they were considered non-essential. We shared inspiring acts by our neighbors that helped us connect. And when research revealed that masks were effective in reducing the spread of the virus, we made sure you knew where to get them.
As schools, workplaces and families began to use Zoom for all meetings, my home became a newsroom, with me working on Bucket List while producing virtually for NBC News from the den, with my dog, Ca$h, as a wingman, and my partner, Jerry Bell, doing live radio reports for KOA from our kitchen. There were so many stories to share: children adapting to online learning, exhausted healthcare workers, restaurants moving outside, graduates without graduations and deaths without funerals.
Now that the virus has become part of our collective memory, it is clear that COVID’s impact on Bucket List has been significant, prompting us to clarify our mission: to produce trustworthy, hyperlocal neighborly news. We are still here to inform you and connect you. We are here to share what’s wrong and what’s right in our communities, as well as who’s making a mess and who’s making a difference. And we provide it free to the community.
We’re building community by sharing our stories. Like you, community journalism and Bucket List survived an uncertain time. As we head into another time of uncertainty where our neighbors are triggered and struggling with loss and anxiety, you can count on Bucket List and community journalism to keep you on top of things that matter.
If you appreciate the work we do, please contribute to this effort to keep us going and support community journalism. We are here to inform and inspire you. Your support matters as much now, maybe even moreso, than it did during that time of turmoil five years ago. We’re all in this together and we do it in partnership with you.
