When we launched COLab in the early, dark days of the pandemic more than five years ago, we did so with a guiding light in our first executive director, Laura Frank.
If you know Laura at all, you know she vibrates with ideas on how local news in general and nonprofit news in particular can better serve its communities. As a COLab co-founder, staff member and now a board member, I have watched her marry an engineer’s brain for mechanics and problem-solving with the kind of vision and optimism our industry needs. Laura has held fast to that optimism because she is anchored in the understanding that a free press is critical to democracy. She is committed to public service journalism. It’s not just lofty talk to her. These principles are the light that guides Laura as COLab’s guiding light.
We are so pleased, then, to tell you that Laura recently won national recognition for her contributions to nonprofit journalism. The Institute for Nonprofit News, the leading national organization supporting a network of nonprofit, nonpartisan newsrooms, gave her its 2025 Service to Nonprofit News award.
Listen to this praise from Sue Cross, INN’s former executive director: “It sounds like hyperbole when you say one person changed a whole field — changed the world — in some notable way. With Laura, there’s no hyperbole. She really did.”
Laura, Cross said, is a “woman of firsts in nonprofit news — one of a few who first realized the potential of nonprofit models for supporting investigative journalism.”
Laura is never going to trumpet her own accomplishments, so let me just rattle off a few that INN hailed:
“She pioneered collaborative journalism in Colorado as the founder of I-News, the nonprofit investigative news organization that merged with Rocky Mountain Public Media in 2013–the first merger between an independent nonprofit news and public media outlet.”
She was a co-founder and chair emerita of the Institute for Nonprofit News.
She led nonprofit investigative reporting teams to duPont and Murrow awards, received entrepreneurial fellowships at Columbia and USC, and is the Wolzien Visiting Professor at University of Denver.
Maybe you know this, but with Laura’s leadership, COLab created a structure for collaboration among Colorado newsrooms that has become a model from which other states are learning. That structure has brought together multiple newsrooms to work together on award-winning journalism projects and investigations, yes, but also upon the bottom-line challenges that have to be tackled to pay for the journalism.
With Laura’s leadership, COLab, which has never had more than four full-time staffers, built a network of more than 200 newsroom partners and a half dozen universities.
I’m so happy to see this work evolve. The need for such collaboration in the name of strengthening local news may be greater than ever. So, join me in a heartfelt “Brava, Laura! Brava!” Congratulations on this recognition of your leadership.
VIDEO: Laura Frank accepts the 2025 Service to Nonprofit News Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News in New Orleans in September.
