Colorado News Collaborative
The Colorado News Collaborative, known as COLab, is an independent nonprofit organization in Denver that coordinates shared reporting, training and content distribution among news organizations across Colorado. Founded in 2020, it is not a newsroom in the conventional sense and not a publisher competing with its members. It is a coalition and a service bureau for an entire state's journalism: a small staff whose job is to help more than one hundred and seventy partner outlets, from metropolitan broadcasters to rural weeklies and tribal radio, do together what none of them could sustain alone.
COLab's slogan-like mission is better news for all Coloradans. Behind that phrase sits a structural diagnosis. Colorado's local news industry, like America's generally, was losing reporters, budgets and whole outlets, leaving communities uncovered even as the remaining journalists worked harder. COLab's founders concluded that the competitive model, in which every outlet duplicated every other outlet's effort, wasted resources nobody had anymore. Collaboration, shared content, shared learning and shared infrastructure became the alternative, and COLab was built to make collaboration routine rather than exceptional.
Origins in a statewide conversation
The collaborative grew from converging efforts in 2018 and 2019. In the fall of 2018, a handful of Colorado news outlets began meeting to ask what would happen if they worked together on stories, on understanding their communities and on sharing resources. At the same time, the Colorado Media Project, a community initiative led by the University of Denver and the Gates Family Foundation, was studying research from a summer survey of thousands of Coloradans about what they wanted and needed from local news. Meanwhile the Colorado Press Association, an institution with a history of more than one hundred and forty years, and The Colorado Independent were planning to evolve their missions to strengthen journalism statewide.
From those threads COLab took shape. The Colorado Independent converted its 501(c)(3) nonprofit designation to serve as the new, independent, statewide journalism coalition, media resource hub and ideas lab. The Colorado Media Project and the Press Association each made two-year commitments to underwrite COLab staff and programming, and the partners planned to work from a shared newsroom in Rocky Mountain Public Media's new Denver building, a physical symbol of the idea that former competitors could literally work under one roof.
An accelerated launch in the pandemic
COLab launched on March 31, 2020, six months earlier than planned, because the COVID-19 pandemic made the need undeniable. With journalists suddenly working from home and communities desperate for reliable local information, the collaborative became unbound by geography: partners met weekly online and organized the coalition's first major statewide project, COVID Diaries, which lifted up voices and stories of Coloradans from all walks of life and corners of the state on a single day of pandemic life, covered collaboratively across the state. Executive director Laura Frank has said the crisis heightened a feeling of the greater good that made collaboration easier to begin.
Growth was immediate. The coalition began with thirteen founding organizations. By November 2020 it had become an active statewide coalition of journalists from about one hundred news outlets of all sizes, geographies, formats and business models. By its first anniversary it counted more than one hundred and twenty outlets, and in subsequent years partner counts rose past one hundred and sixty and then one hundred and seventy, with later descriptions placing the network above one hundred and eighty outlets. More than one thousand individual Coloradans made personal donations in support of its mission in its early years.
How the collaboration works
COLab's everyday machinery is content sharing and joint production. The Associated Press, a founding partner, helped jump-start sharing during the pandemic by launching its StoryShare tool in Colorado, allowing partner outlets of all sizes and formats to share their content for free and republish one another's work for audiences across the state in the public interest. For a small weekly, that means access to statewide reporting it could never staff. For a large metropolitan daily, participation signals membership in a shared ecosystem; one top Denver editor explained that joining an early project told other organizations the paper did not imagine itself as a lone wolf.
On larger subjects, COLab coordinates genuinely joint reporting: projects conceived so that many outlets contribute reporting from their own communities and publish the combined result. Its journalists and partner newsrooms hold regular cross-outlet conversations, including weekly calls in which rural, ethnic and urban newsrooms compare notes, an interaction participants say simply did not happen before COLab existed. The collaborative also supplies training, research and editing capacity, and convenes funders and mentors around the business sustainability of local news, treating revenue and innovation as part of the same mission as reporting quality.
Leadership
COLab's executive director, Laura Frank, is a pioneer of collaborative journalism in Colorado. A veteran of the Rocky Mountain News, she founded I-News, a nonprofit investigative news organization that merged with Rocky Mountain Public Media in 2013 in what was described as the first such merger in the nation, and she led the journalism team there for seven years as a vice president before becoming COLab's inaugural director. Her oft-quoted assessment of the old model is that the resources wasted on competition were, in her word, criminal, and that nobody has those resources now.
Her team has included some of Colorado's most decorated journalists. Investigative reporter John Ferrugia, holder of two duPont-Columbia silver batons, three Peabody Awards, a national Investigative Reporters and Editors award, a national Murrow Award and more than two dozen regional Emmys, joined COLab's team of award-winning journalists, alongside veteran reporters and columnists such as Tina Griego and Susan Greene. That seniority is strategic: a collaborative asking proud, independent newsrooms to share work needs conveners those newsrooms respect as peers, and COLab staffed itself accordingly.
Trust, voices and community connection
A major strand of COLab's work concerns trust, particularly between newsrooms and communities of color. Its Voices work began with Free Press and the Colorado Media Project and was expanded by COLab through working groups of Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian Coloradans asked a common question: how can local media better serve you? The groups converged on a finding that their stories were not being told, or were being mistold, because communities and news organizations lacked connection with each other and did not know how to build it.
COLab's answer was Amplify Colorado, a digital tool created with grant support that functions as an open, searchable guide to people with diverse experiences and expertise in communities across the state, including their biographies, contact information, languages and areas of knowledge. Journalists use it to find sources beyond their usual circles; community members use it to find the reporters serving their neighborhoods. Related work includes voter-focused engagement, public conversations about how Latina and Latino communities have been covered over time, and media-literacy efforts to help Coloradans think critically about news. The through-line is that trust is infrastructure, built by repeated contact rather than declared in mission statements.
Innovation and saving news outlets
COLab's second mandate is evolution: helping newsrooms innovate and remain financially alive. Its project portfolio includes a MATCH Lab for collaborative problem-solving, a State of News tracking effort that monitors trends and challenges in Colorado's news ecosystem and work on new ownership models for endangered outlets. It supported the Colorado News Conservancy, described as a first-in-the-nation effort to keep newspapers locally owned, and later the Colorado Journalism Investment Group, a temporary holding structure created to preserve local control of Aurora's Sentinel while residents and readers helped determine its future.
These interventions reflect a widening definition of what a news collaborative does. COLab began by coordinating stories; it now also helps engineer ownership transitions, because shared reporting is pointless if the partner outlets themselves disappear. Its leaders argue that journalism leaders and community members in Colorado are changing the trajectory of failing outlets, and that stronger journalism makes democracy stronger. Funders have backed that expanded role: entering its second phase in 2022, the Colorado Media Project's leaders pledged at least three and a half million dollars over three years to innovations making the state's news ecosystem more sustainable, collaborative, trusted, equitable and accountable.
Who belongs to COLab
The partner list deliberately spans every divide in Colorado media. It includes The Colorado Sun, 9News and Colorado Public Radio at the large end, and the Kiowa County Independent and Ark Valley Voice at the small end. It includes some of the state's most diverse newsrooms, from KSUT Tribal Radio to Denver Urban Spectrum to Entravision's Spanish-language operations, and historic competitors such as The Denver Post, the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Aurora Sentinel working in the same projects. Partners are newspapers, radio and television stations and online outlets, for-profit and nonprofit, rural, urban and suburban, serving tribal communities, communities of color and Spanish-speaking communities.
The coalition is housed, physically and symbolically, in Denver. Its headquarters address is on Arapahoe Street in the city, and its newsroom home is the Gates COLab Newsroom at Rocky Mountain Public Media, where civic news organizations co-locate. But its governing idea is statewide and distributed: a community-led governing board, partner newsrooms in every corner of Colorado and a staff whose product is other people's stronger journalism.
A model watched nationally
COLab emerged at the moment when collaborative journalism was becoming a national movement, with statewide initiatives forming from New Hampshire and North Carolina to New Jersey, and journalism reviews and funders study Colorado's version closely because of its scale and permanence. Unlike project-based collaborations that dissolve when a grant ends, COLab built standing infrastructure: a nonprofit home, a sharing platform, a source database, regular convenings and a staff. Its leaders have argued that if the model can work in Colorado, with its mix of a large metro area, mountain towns, agricultural plains and tribal nations, it can work anywhere.
National attention has not changed its local accountability test. COLab reports that more than a thousand Coloradans have financially supported the work, and it frames its legitimacy as coming from that local base as much as from foundation grants. Its public reflections on anniversaries return to a counterfactual: without the collaborative, stories requiring many newsrooms would not exist, outlets would not share savings or sources, and conversations across the state's media divides would not happen. The organization asks to be judged on those concrete absences avoided.
Why COLab matters as a news service
In this directory's terms, COLab is a news agency of a new kind. Traditional agencies gather news centrally and sell it to outlets. COLab instead organizes the outlets themselves into a gathering and distribution system, supplies the connective services, editing, data tools, training, convening and increasingly business support, that make their combined output possible, and distributes joint work back through every partner's own channels. Its byline appears on projects, explainers and investigations, but its larger output is invisible: the story a rural editor could publish because StoryShare carried it, the source a reporter found through Amplify, the outlet that survived because an ownership bridge held.
Colorado's experiment is therefore best read as infrastructure for an entire information ecosystem, built in Denver in 2020 under pandemic pressure and matured into one of the most complete collaborative models in American local news. For communities facing news deserts, for journalists in shrinking newsrooms and for readers who simply need better news, COLab's proposition is that cooperation is not a retreat from journalistic ambition but the only remaining way to fund it, and its growing partner list suggests Colorado's newsrooms, competitors and all, have largely agreed.
