For all the talk about police misconduct, little has been known – at least publicly – about what, if anything, actually happens to most rogue cops in Colorado. One journalist set out
Colorado’s new Behavioral Health Administration shut down part of the Western Slope’s only psychiatric hospital on Wednesday in response to complaints about the quality and safety of the care it
Aspen is Colorado’s last two-newspaper town. Locals there have free access to daily reporting by the Aspen Times and Aspen Daily News, and to the work of Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio. Four news outlets
The Colorado News Collaborative (COLab) is a nonprofit seeking to stop the spread of news deserts in our state. We serve as a local media resource hub and ideas lab
Editor’s Note: This report has been updated as of 8-26-2022 to add corrections and clarifications. For more details on those changes, please see the note at the end of the
Something big happened this week here at the Colorado News Collaborative’s headquarters. Six Coloradans representing six communities often bitterly divided over problems with the state’s mental health safety-net system sat down
State regulators have overlooked what former Mind Springs workers describe as a long pattern of fraud
Kiowa County has reached a $9.5 million settlement with the family of Zach Gifford, the unarmed local handyman its undersheriff and a rookie deputy gunned down in 2020 with three
Questions remain about who’s ultimately responsible for keeping the most vulnerable Coloradans from slipping through the cracks
Dear reader, My faith is rattled lately. This is not so much a crisis of the spirit (although, like many of us, I’ve had my moments these past few years).
Two counties are breaking from their mental health provider. Others are taking notes.
Dear Fellow Coloradan, I wrote a whole different letter to you last night about the investigation COLab and our media partners have been working on, which started appearing in big outlets like The
Will planned reforms fix or further the problems?
Kiowa County Sheriff’s Department’s pattern of condoning illegal searches and tolerating excessive force led to last year’s killing of a handyman by the local undersheriff and a rookie deputy, a
Join us for a discussion about the movement to minimize longterm harm in crime reporting Newsrooms in Colorado and nationally are starting to adopt policies seeking to reduce harm to criminal suspects and make it easier for them to move
COLab journalist Susan Greene shares strategies for maintaining long and fruitful relationships with the people you cover. Presented as part of the 2021 Joint Virtual Conference of the Colorado and
COLab journalists Susan Greene and Tina Griego provide training for journalists on the basics of culling more – and better – information from subjects, with extra tips for handling COVID-related
COLab journalist Susan Greene moderates a conversation with Niki Turner, owner/publisher/reporter of the Rio Blanco Herald Times and Priscilla Waggoner, journalist for the Alamosa Valley Courier and former editor of
Dear reader, If I have learned anything about Kiowa County, it’s that the phrase “You’re not from around here” isn’t a compliment. I’d been warned last spring by then-Eads-based journalist
Casey Sheridan has announced his resignation as Kiowa County sheriff a year after two of his officers gunned down an unarmed handyman during a routine traffic stop. The second-term law
Help oppose bill that would hinder accountability journalism
Kiowa County’s sheriff ignored questionable incidents, records show
Dear reader, The people of Kiowa County woke Wednesday morning to an edition of their local newspaper unlike any other. The cover story, “Three Bullets to the Back,” is a deep investigative
KIOWA COUNTY, Colo. – Nearly a year has passed since the local undersheriff and a rookie deputy gunned down handyman Zach Gifford in this Eastern Plains county where trust in law
Navee Essien has grown up keenly aware of her gifts. More times than she can count, people have reminded the senior at Aurora’s Rangeview High how fortunate she is to
It started about four years ago when Laurel Carpenter and Melissa Humphrey bought matching parkas and then matching comfort shoes. Soon enough, the nurses-slash-best friends from Grand Junction found themselves
Scott Zayatz upped his dosage of antidepression and antianxiety medication in early spring when the pandemic started clobbering the nation and the presidential race, post-primary, turned foul. The 43-year-old news
Millete Birhanemaskel, a refugee, long-time Denver resident and businesswoman, grappled with 2020 as many others have: She tried to protect her family, her employees, her tenants from COVID’s reach. She
Some words fail us, and for Robert Werthwein, “depression” is one of them. The 41-year-old director of Colorado’s Behavioral Health Office prefers to say “everything turned to complete shit” when
Dr. Patricia Westmoreland washes her hands 20 to 30 times each day she does rounds at the Medical Center of Aurora. That, she says, “doesn’t count sanitizing them who-knows-how-many times
EADS – “The Splotch,” as some here call the brown mark on the map they check weekly, is the color of scorched earth. Here in Kiowa County, farmers have always
On Denver’s west side, an elderly man had been managing his solitude just fine until the pandemic hit, taking with it what social life he had and leaving in its
There are times when she does not recognize herself. Who is this cautious woman whose heart hammers when she hears her kids cough or when the latest national political outrage
Dear reader, Words generally come easily for me. But I have been struggling for seven months to name how it feels to live through this time. The pit in my
Dear reader, Wow. We asked for your thoughts last week on the test the Trump administration has posed to journalists seeking to be “objective” while adhering to the obligation to
Dear reader, From our angst department, I’m writing to fill you in about an ethical question I and journalists across the country are wrestling with this election cycle – one
Dear reader, Brandon, population 21, lies three hours southeast of Denver. It’s a speck of a place amid Colorado’s Southeastern Plains as they reach toward Kansas. On the afternoon of April
Dear reader, We’re writing to introduce you to our new boss, the Colorado News Collaborative’s (COLab) Executive Director Laura Frank. Laura is a Denver native and award-winning journalist who spent
Dear reader, Tina and I have spent much of the last month knee-deep in documents for a difficult investigative project we’re still piecing together. So instead of a newsy newsletter,
Colorado has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. Under a grant from the Carter Center and family of Ben Rosenthal, we will be chronicling mental health issues here over the next year.
Dear reader, It had been too long since I smelled a newspaper. By that, I don’t mean the thing tossed on our front stoops each morning. I mean the building
Jayla Felix took a bus and then light rail from east Aurora to Denver Sunday to see black lives mattering in person. By that point, the 14-year-old had been to
A pair of Denver officers taught me a few things in the summer of 2018. #1: That a woman ought to “Act like a lady” when unlawfully being handcuffed for photographing police.
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