Tina is a co-founder of COLab and was its managing editor before joining ProPublica in January 2025. 

She has been a journalist for more than three decades, spending most of her career as a Colorado journalist. She worked both the Denver Post and the late, great Rocky Mountain News as a project reporter and, later, as the first Latina staff columnist for a major metro daily in Colorado. 

After a stint back East — and an even briefer stint at the Washington Post — Tina returned to Colorado and became the managing editor of the Colorado Independent, which folded in 2020 to become one of COLab’s founding organizations. 

She has won national recognition for her reporting on immigration, education and urban poverty, including the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Frank del Olmo “Print Journalist of the Year” award, and the National Headliner Award. She was also among the team of reporters who received the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the Los Angeles uprisings.

Tina is a member of the Scripps Howard and Denver Press Club Halls of Fame. She lives in Fort Collins with her husband, Harrison, a former journalist turned CSU professor. Their two kids are out of the nest and trying out the East Coast again. Tina’s a native New Mexican and prefers red over green.