In Colorado, 'legitimate members of the media' sparks open records debate

The news behind the news in Colorado

Feb 28, 2025

Lawmakers in Colorado this year are proposing new laws that would impact how transparent state government could be.

The extent to which these laws, if passed, would draw more public business out of the shadows and into the sunlight has sparked debate in recent weeks.

At issue is a pair of dueling proposals — one by a Democrat and another from Republicans. They come a year after Democrats who run state government changed the laws to allow lawmakers to conduct more of their business in secret.

The Republican bill, put forward in the Colorado House, seeks to undo last year’s changes to Colorado’s Open Meetings Law.

Here’s how Jeff Roberts, director of the nonpartisan open government Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, put it:

The wide-ranging legislation would reform the Colorado Open Meetings Law, the Colorado Open Records Act and the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act. Brought by Rep. Lori Garcia Sander of Eaton and Sen. Byron Pelton of Sterling, it does not yet have a Democratic sponsor in the Democratic-controlled legislature and has been assigned to the House Civic, Military & Veterans Affairs Committee (sometimes referred to as a “kill committee”). … The Garcia Sander/Pelton bill also addresses the charging of exorbitant fees to process CORA requests, which can make public records unaffordable for some requesters. CFOIC has identified nearly 1,500 state agencies and local governments that have raised their research-retrieval fees since the new maximum hourly rate of $41.37 went into effect last July 1. …

Reporting for Complete Colorado, the news and commentary arm of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, Sherrie Peif wrote that the new law would also do this:

Requires the requestor to submit an affidavit of service with all requests in order to make official the date the request was submitted.
Clarifies that the custodian cannot increase costs charged or expand date and time for inspection.
Does not include the day that the service is fulfilled in the time computation.
Requires that the computation of time begins on the third day after a request is postmarked if mailed.
Changes reasonable time from three to five working days.
Requires a custodian to provide evidence of proof that a document requested would violate copyright or licensing agreement.
Caps hourly fees for public records at $25 per hour.
Adds to the definition of “official record” any incident report or other record of an interaction between any on-duty peace officer and any member of the public.
Changes the response time for CCJRA records to three days after the request is received with up to 10 days for extenuating circumstances.
Records from a completed internal investigation be available within 21 days of the request being submitted, whether or not the investigation involved a member of the public.
Applies all the same parameters as those under CORA for search and retrieval and attorney fees to CCJRA.

That’s a lot.

Public records statutes in Colorado are three-pronged. We have the Colorado Open Records Act, which applies to many aspects of government, the Colorado Open Meetings Laws, and also the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act, which applies to law enforcement.

Roberts noted this new bill to reform our open government laws reflects some of the concerns that have “come up during meetings of a broad group of stakeholders considering a state constitutional ‘right to know’ ballot initiative for 2026.”

In other words, if the Democratic majority doesn’t take the proposed new law seriously during this legislative session, a group might seek to put a similar package together, raise money, and try to get it on the ballot for voters to decide.

In Colorado, voters have been receptive to passing statewide ballot measures that seek more transparency and limit what lawmakers can do (like accepting gifts)— sometimes to the chagrin of the professional political class.

‘Legitimate members of the media’

As some Republicans rattle sabers in the House, one lawmaker in the Senate, and on the Democratic side, is trying something else.

Cathy Kipp, a Democrat from Fort Collins, is trying to give governments more days to respond to open records requests. In the process, her bill would give preferential treatment to what she called “legitimate members of the media.”

The mechanism for determining the extent to which a public records requester meets such a distinction comes from how journalists are defined in Colorado’s press-friendly reporter’s Shield Law.

In 2023, Jeff Roberts of the CFOIC and I appeared on the Local News Matters podcast to talk about a similar and controversial effort that year to define journalists that ultimately went nowhere.

Reporting for Colorado Public Radio, Ben Markus noted that this particular aspect was a sticking point for one Republican member of a committee that heard this latest CORA bill.

From the story:

Kipp wanted to “make sure that we were giving access to people who are legitimate members of the media, and not just somebody who’s got a blog somewhere.”
But that differentiation bothered one lawmaker who argued that the media shouldn’t be treated any differently.
“These are the people’s records,” said Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling. He said there are so many new ways to communicate information to the public, like through podcasts that anyone can produce and publish with their smartphone, that it’s uncomfortable territory to start defining what is professional news media.
“I just cannot get past the media part of it,” said Pelton, who was the lone ‘no’ vote on the bill.

While not particularly surprising, the lawmaker’s remark about “just somebody who’s got a blog somewhere” demonstrates some lack of understanding about the current media environment.

This newsletter has chronicled the rise of the one-person newsroom in Colorado. People with podcasts, or newsletters like the one you’re currently reading, contribute valuably to the state’s news and information ecosystem.

Given the splintering media environment, it’s not surprising to see resistance to carveouts for credentialed or preferred media as ordained by state government.

“The reason that we are carving out the news media is that we do believe since they are doing reporting for other people and to get the word out more publicly — and that their requests tend to be more targeted, honestly — that it was a fair thing to carve them out and … retain those deadlines for the news media,” Kipp said in a committee hearing.

At least one person who writes a Substack newsletter in Colorado said he plans to challenge the media distinction if it gets through the legislature and governor’s veto pen.

“Should this bill pass with the media privilege still intact, I intend to claim myself as media,” wrote Cory Gaines, a Northeastern Junior College physics instructor from Sterling who authors a newsletter called Colorado Accountability Project. “If challenged by a records custodian, I will be giving serious thought to taking the issue to court, even if I have to fund that challenge myself. What Kipp and others are trying to do here is not okay.”

Kipp testified that she is trying to alleviate some pressure on governments that get a lot of open-records requests. One county attorney testified about offices getting overwhelmed by processing CORA requests at the detriment to other work.

The bill also does some things that open-government types tend to appreciate.

For instance, “it requires government entities to post on their websites rules and policies about how to make CORA requests as well as their records retention policies,” Roberts wrote for the CFOIC site. “If a requester asks, a custodian must provide “a reasonable break-down of costs that comprises the fee charged for research and retrieval of public records.”

And the bill “also clarifies that a government entity must allow electronic payments for public records if that government entity lets the public pay for services or products electronically.”

That would go a long way toward mitigating a headache some journalists might get when told they can only pay for public records by check, which often means by mail or in person.

For context in all of this, Markus reported for CPR News that the bill “further codifies an erosion in public access to government that has been growing for years in Colorado as cash-strapped governments essentially stopped treating the maintenance and provision of public documents as a core function. Today, requesting records is routinely treated as a service for a fee in the state.”

Last year, Democrats in the legislature kind of slipped on banana peels throughout the session when it came to open government.

They chose Sunshine Week of all weeks to pass a law that exempted themselves from the state’s Sunshine Laws. They indicated it wouldn’t make their public business less transparent, but then used the new law to bar reporters from covering their caucus meetings. Circus music ensued.

Then, some of the lawmakers who were behind the bill accepted a questionable award from the Colorado Press Association for being a “Defender of a Free Press,” which made both groups look a bit silly.

So, it should be of little surprise that open-records legislation is bubbling up this year at the Capitol. The question might be whether it can get handled there or if it will head to the ballot box.

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Regional SPJ conference will take place in Denver

Next month, journalists from across New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado will gather in Denver for the Top of the Rockies awards.

The event, held at the Slate Hotel in Denver on Saturday, April 5, coincides with the Society of Professional Journalists regional conference.

The theme of this year’s all-day conference, hosted by the Colorado Pro Chapter of SPJ, of which I’m a board member, is “Fundamentals and the Future.”

Panels include “Social Media: A Changing Landscape,” “Pitch Perfect with Freelance Pros,” “AI Ethics and the Newsroom,” “Reporter to Editor: How to Make the Jump,” “Photojournalism in Focus,” “How to Get a Job,” “Neutrality in a Divisive World,” and “Walking the Beat: How to Strike Journalistic Gold.”

College students might also appreciate a panel called “So You Started a Student SPJ Chapter. Now What?”

Get tickets for the event here.

A cure for the common ‘fried and frozen’ Colorado newsroom?

Laura Frank, who runs the Colorado News Collaborative, a.k.a COLab, is also serving as the current Wolzien visiting professor of the practice in research-informed communication at the University of Denver.

On Feb. 13, she gave the Wolzien Lecture that included a panel titled “Local Journalism, Higher Education, and the Future of Democracy.”

In her talk, Frank outlined her vision for how to mitigate a phenomenon among local Colorado newsrooms she calls “fried and frozen.”

“Here in Colorado, we are gathering classrooms and boardrooms to help newsrooms,” she said. “We’re calling this the news operations network.”

The idea, she said, is that classrooms — “and not just journalism classrooms, but business and law and computer science” — can come together with a 60-year-old nonprofit called SCORE, which was formerly called the Senior Corps of Retired Executives.

“These are people who have all kinds of expertise and they want to help small businesses,” she said. “So we’re going to bring together the professors and their classes with all kinds of expertise, and match them with the SCORE mentors who have all kinds of expertise to have a kind of personalized team to help individual newsrooms with whatever the challenge is that they have.”

Following the lecture, I joined panelists Linda Shapley, the editorial director of Colorado Community Media, and University of Colorado Boulder journalism professor Patrick Ferrucci to talk about our roles in the project.

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Listen to leading doers and thinkers in local news — from small rural and ethnic publications to large ecosystem builders and funders — address these topics and more on the Local News Matters podcast hosted by Tim Regan-Porter, CEO of the Colorado Press Association. Know someone you think should be on the show? Fill out this form.🎙

A history of Colorado Springs newspapers

The latest edition of the mighty nonprofit Pikes Peak Bulletin weekly newspaper carries a column by John Hazlehurst called “The life cycle of a newspaper.”

“Newspapers are mortal,” he wrote. “They’re born, they grow and hopefully they thrive. Comparatively few make it for 10 years, even fewer to 20, and only a handful to 40 or more.”

For the rest of the column, Hazlehurst chronicled the history of Colorado Springs newspapers beginning in 1859.

“In 1861 the Colorado City Journal became the first newspaper in the Pikes Peak Region, apparently because Colorado City had become the territorial capital of Colorado,” he wrote. “Denver-area legislators were forced to stay for a session in Lucy Maggard’s little hotel. They didn’t like it and skedaddled as soon as possible. Denver soon became the capital, and the Journal only printed six issues.”

Eventually, he got to the modern era. An excerpt:

Meanwhile, the Gazette has retained its daily monopoly and has had no fiscal issues since being acquired by Phil [Anschutz’s] Clarity Media in 2012. It’s still reliably conservative, but its presentation of the news appears to be laudably independent. How long will the print issue last? I don’t know, but the past suggests that it’ll outlive many of its current subscribers. But as print lovers age, the print edition may become unsustainable.

Find the whole column at the link above.

9NEWS in Denver sues Aurora police

For months, journalists at Denver’s 9NEWS TV station have been asking for unedited body cam footage of an Aurora police officer shooting and killing an unarmed Black man last May.

“There are no open investigations into the shooting, yet APD has still not released the full footage,” Aaron Adelson and Kevin Vaughan reported this week.

With the help of a lawyer, the station has been able to get some footage, but not all.

From 9NEWS:

Normally, body camera footage begins in silence. Most cameras are set up to record the moments before a person hits record, and that gets recorded without audio. Every video APD provided begins with audio and each ends without the officer appearing to move to stop their body camera recording.

A law that went into effect in 2023 “states that when there is a complaint of officer misconduct, all unedited video and audio recordings of the incident must be released,” the station reported.

So, now the NBC affiliate in Denver has sued. The station argues the department must release the full footage.

On May 23, 2024, 9NEWS reported that officers had surrounded Kilyn Lewis outside of an apartment building. Aurora Police say they wanted to arrest him on behalf of Denver Police in connection with what they called an attempted murder.

“Footage APD has released shows one officer shot Lewis ten seconds after getting out of his police car,” the station reported. “No other officer fired.”

More Colorado media odds & ends

❓ ICYMI: “‘Very unfortunate news’: Colorado Community Media closes 2 papers: What is the future of Colorado Community Media and the National Trust for Local News?”

🎙 Denver journalist Gil Asakawa appeared on an episode this week of the Freelance Journalism Podcast. On the show, Asakawa talked about how he “carved out a few niches for himself, including music journalism, pop culture, and Japanese-American and Asian-American cultures and communities.”

🆕 Tricia Stortz, a recent graduate of Columbia Journalism School, is currently “working as a freelance mental health reporter and am looking for new opportunities in Colorado,” Stortz said recently. “I am open to both freelance and full-time positions.” Find out more about the journalist here.

📺 Joy Reid, the MSNBC host who is from Colorado, is out at her cable TV show amid a shakeup. “Reid has anchored The ReidOut since 2020, having been put in that time period following the departure of Chris Matthews. Her last show is expected to be this week,” Ted Johnson reported for Deadline. Essence reported that an outpouring of support followed the news.

👀 “The Gazette and KRDO ran stories today about last week’s Manitou Springs City Council meeting and Councilors who sat during the pledge,” wrote Colorado Springs journalist Heidi Beedle, who writes for the Pikes Peak Bulletin. “Our story ran last week and went on social media yesterday when they realized it was outrage engagement bait.”

🪦 Sonya Ellingboe, a “longtime Littleton resident and beloved community activist widely known for her decades of writing about arts and culture in Colorado Community Media newspapers, died Feb. 22, 2025, at age 94,” Scott Gilbert wrote for CCM.

💸 “A judge has ordered the Colorado Office of the State Public Defender to pay a prison inmate a $25-a-day penalty, totaling $13,650, for its ‘arbitrary and capricious’ denial of his request for a policy document,” Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition reported.

✊ “To get a better sense of what union organizing in journalism looks and feels like for women, researchers Ever Josue Figueroa (University of Colorado, Boulder), Gino Canella (Emerson College), and Annalise Baines (University of Zurich)” sought to find out.

🏔👂 “This paper wouldn’t be here for you all to read, without the incredible people who make it happen every week. Here is a current list of contributors, staff and volunteers that work hard to make your newspaper the very best around,” wrote the Mountain Ear newspaper’s editor Barbara Hardt. (You might be surprised at how many local news sources might not list their staff, so kudos for that. One addition might be to add contact info for each journalist.)

🏆 KKTV 11 News Chief Meteorologist Sydney Jackson earned recognition in Southern Colorado’s first-ever “40 Under 40” honors, awarded by the Southern Colorado Business Forum & Digest magazine.

🏈 “Is the media too afraid to criticize Shedeur Sanders because they don’t want to either ruin their relationship with Deion Sanders or deal with Deion Sanders going after them?” asked Jared Stillman on social media this week.

🎓 The Denver Post chose a Colorado College student for its breaking news internship for the third time in a row.

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Colorado Media Project, where I’m an advisor, is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter hit me up.) Follow me on Bluesky, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.

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