'No leak necessary,' says Denver's 9NEWS journalist about ICE raids in Colorado
The news behind the news in Colorado
A Denver TV station made national news this week for its coverage of local ICE raids under the new Trump administration.
Across the country, local news organizations have come under fire from immigration officials and the Republican president’s supporters. When ICE agents have not been as successful as planned with recent roundups, the agency has blamed local media for what they called “leaks.”
Writing in Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine that covers the media industry, Josh Hersh reported on the role of local journalism amid these ICE raids.
He zeroed in on Colorado, the state that is home to a city Trump chose as the namesake during his campaign for a promised national deportation plan he called “Operation Aurora.”
Now that raids are rolling out across the country, how local news organizations, including those in Colorado, are responding has become its own story.
From the piece in CJR’s “The Media Today”:
Chris Vanderveen, 9News’s director of special projects, quickly dispatched teams of reporters to pursue the leads. “One crew said, ‘I think I’m going to follow the vehicles, and see where they go,’” Vanderveen explained. “I said, ‘Great. Do not get in the way.’” On Wednesday, ICE officials claimed to have “targeted” more than a hundred “violent Venezuelan gang” members for arrest and detention. 9News journalists confirmed that raids took place at several apartment buildings and a mobile home community, but reported that the number of people who were taken into custody was much lower. (ICE officials later acknowledged that they had detained only about thirty people, just one of whom was identified as a gang member.)
The next day, Vanderveen was surprised to see Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” blame the limited number of arrests on the fact that news of the raids had publicly leaked. “We’re not going to tolerate it anymore,” Homan told Fox News. “This is not a game.” Homan later indicated that ICE might restrict how much access reporters had to officials during future raids.
Hersh reported how one TV presenter who works for the national FOX cable TV channel framed the Denver raid.
“There had been media leaks,” the presenter said. “The media articles written that this entire operation was coming — and when we were with them, within the first couple hours, it seemed every property they went to was either vacant or the targets they were after simply weren’t there.”
More from the CJR story:
9News’s Vanderveen scoffed at the idea that the reporters covering raids are privy to sensitive information. “There was no leak necessary to figure this one out,” he said, of the operation in Denver. “The worst-kept secret in the world is when you put a bunch of vehicles and personnel dressed in fatigues in shopping-center parking lots.”
That may have been the point: the ICE raids are a show of force, part of a campaign by the Trump administration to demonstrate the use of aggressive tactics to remove people who officials claim are violent and dangerous. In Denver, at least, that wasn’t how things turned out. “It couldn’t have possibly gone wrong because we were obvious with what we were doing,” Vanderveen said, of how those in charge appear to be seeing things. “It had to be the press.”
For nearly six months, a story has consumed local media about the extent of the influence that a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua has in Aurora and its relationship to the living conditions at a handful of troubled apartment complexes in Colorado’s third-largest city.
Reaction on social media to the coverage and commentary has become something of a Rorschach test for a political worldview as narratives and framing have varied sharply. The storylines made national news and grabbed the attention of Trump during his campaign for president.
With Trump in office, reporters are covering the federal government’s response.
Last week, one immigrant family in one of the Aurora apartments was on FaceTime with Denver7 reporter Kristian Lopez as ICE agents entered their apartment. The segment offered a real-time view of one early morning raid as a couple prepared to take their daughter to school.
Kevin Beaty of the hyperlocal news site Denverite spent the night at an Aurora apartment complex. When he reported a photo-heavy story headlined “What we saw from inside ICE’s raid at Aurora’s Edge apartments,” it included this line: “All newly arrived immigrants we spoke to for this story asked to have their last names withheld, fearing deportation or consequences in their pending asylum cases. Most gave us middle names, or nicknames, for identification in this story.”
The Aurora Sentinel, the weekly newspaper serving the city, offered a “fact check” stating there was “no proof” of media tipping off local immigration activists to the raids.
Last week, 9NEWS covered ICE’s complaints about what the agency called leaks.
“Despite concerns about leaked information, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement did little to hide those operations Wednesday, assembling in high-traffic, visible retail center parking lots across Denver before moving to homes to conduct raids,” Evan Kruegel of 9NEWS, who followed one particular convoy, reported for the station.
“It didn’t take long for community members to see the visible operation at a park, and activists showed up shortly thereafter, following the convoy to a raid in a Thornton mobile home park,” he reported. “Activists shouted at immigration officials and at Thornton Police, who told 9NEWS they were there for crowd control.”
On the 9NEWS nightly newscast “Next,” anchor Kyle Clark and reporter Kruegel addressed the local media leak theory and spoke to University of Denver journalism professor Kareem El Damanhoury.
“What is happening with President Donald Trump is that … his administration is creating a spectacle,” El Damanhoury said, adding that he wasn’t surprised to see such a visible operation that included embedded ride-alongs with a select cable TV channel.
El Damanhoury said journalists will play an important role in the weeks to come about the details and impacts of such raids.
“To be clear, we as an organization are not accepting any invitations for ride-alongs with immigration officials at this time,” Kruegel said on air about 9NEWS. “We will, however, continue to respond and report on what we see at those operations.”
In recent days, ire about leaks has shifted from the local media to the FBI.
"We think it’s coming from inside. And we know the first leak in Aurora is under current investigation,” Trump’s border chief told a FOX cable show host. “We think we’ve identified that person.”
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Meet 3 Coloradans who have risen to the ‘role of local reporter’
Multimedia reporter Chase McCleary at Rocky Mountain PBS has fashioned something of a niche beat for himself over the past year or so.
“Much of Chase’s reporting focuses on small-town Colorado and the communities that make them special, including sports, arts and culture, and local media,” reads his bio at the RMPBS site.
Indeed, he has trained his video lens on local media with deep dives into how the local news landscape is changing in parts of Colorado.
In March, McCleary reported how a Palmer High School teacher in Colorado Springs is teaching media fluency in his social studies classes through “lateral reading” and other techniques.
Over the summer, he produced an in-depth story titled “Bought-out, priced out, burned out: the individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado.” He followed that up in January with a story headlined “Reposting vs. reporting: How Facebook groups are replacing shuttered rural newsrooms.”
This week, McCleary trained his focus on three Coloradans who might not have a background in journalism but run or work for local newspapers.
Titled “Rising to the role of local reporter,” the story profiles Lyn Ettinger-Harwell, publisher of the nonprofit Pikes Peak Bulletin, U.S. Army veteran T’Naus Nieto, who is a reporter with The Chronicle-News in Trinidad, and Ruth Stodghill, an English teacher at the Primero Junior and Senior High School in Southern Colorado who writes for Trinidad’s Chronicle-News and the regional World Journal based in Walsenburg.
From the story:
Nieto, Ettinger-Harwell and Stodghill are a few of the many small-town Colorado community members who have stepped up to fill the role of local journalist in a time when newspaper jobs are simultaneously becoming harder to fill and harder to find. …
Small-town staff shortages, matched with increasing operational expenses and decreasing advertising revenue, are leading to shuttered small newsrooms across the state and across the country.
Yet in some localities, passionate, community-connected citizens are putting on their press vests to meet the need.
Some nuggets from the piece:
“While a number of institutions and universities offer programs aimed at cultivating future journalists, conditions like low pay, limited and difficult-to-land job opportunities and working in sometimes dangerous environments drive many potential journalists in different career paths. This simultaneous decrease in available positions and decrease in job favorability makes finding journalists willing to take the reins more difficult, particularly in more rural and sparsely-populated areas.”
“While Nieto’s favorite subjects are lighter feature stories, like this one on Trinidad’s ‘plant whisperer,’ he recognizes the personal nuances that can make local reporting more difficult. ‘While I was in La Junta, I reported on a crime from an old friend in high school… that was hard. I got a lot of negative feedback from friends and their friends, and I had to live with that,’ said Nieto.”
“Starting with her daughter, Stodghill piloted a program at Primero that connects students with the local paper, teaching them what it means to report in their community. Today, Stodghill’s ‘newspaper kids’ are actively contributing original work to papers like The World Journal.”
Find the whole in-depth story at the link above. McCleary has also reported on one of the few remaining video stores left in the state.
New effort, Colorful ColoRadio, launches to ‘connect and inspire’ audio creators and fans
Three Denver-based self-described audio people have launched a monthly series they hope will create some connective tissue among those in the audio field and those who admire it.
The team consists of Esther Honig, a producer for StoryCorps and long-form journalism freelancer, Josh Mattison, a designer and audio producer, and Ann Marie Awad, who serves as editorial director for the Institute for Independent Journalists.
From their launch announcement:
Colorado is rich with audio artists, podcast producers and radio professionals, not to mention countless talented journalists who might be curious about the world of sound. Our goal is to connect and inspire by offering a regular space to elevate interesting and impactful work. Each month, we invite speakers who are using audio to tell stories, serve communities, create art or all of the above. In partnership with the Denver Press Club, each event is a conversation between one of us and a guest on a specific topic or project. Afterwards, there’s time to socialize and build community. These conversations will be made available as a podcast later (stay tuned).
Their first event is Feb. 21 at 6:30 p.m. at the Denver Press Club and will feature the team behind Colorado Radio for Justice, a new 24/7 streaming radio station by and for formerly incarcerated Coloradans.
RSVP here for the event.
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Layoffs lash Outside Magazine as it buys Inntopia
The company that owns Outside magazine recently laid off 20 people, including eight in Colorado, Jenna Barackman reported for the Denver Business Journal.
While some un-bylined items and social media posts cited emails or those familiar with the developments, Barackman directly cited CEO Robin Thurston of Boulder, who owns the magazine’s parent company.
The layoffs came as Outside Interactive bought the travel-booking and planning platform Inntopia.
From the DBJ story:
Acquiring Inntopia’s travel booking platform, used by more than 200 resorts and destinations in North America, Europe and Australia, will allow users of Outside to book a trip directly on its social network, the company said. …
With the acquisition, users will be able to read an article from one of Outside’s publications and book the same trip outlined in the article, Thurston said. Its technology will also allow users to book things like ski rentals, lessons and other details which “may not be included” by other travel platforms such as Expedia. …
Outside last year acquired MapMyFitness from Under Armour, buying the workout tracking app that was cofounded by Thurston. It also launched its social platform at the same time.
Outside’s layoffs were “to keep the business sustainable, he said,” referring to CEO Thurston, “but Outside will bring on about 80 employees from Inntopia, including 12 in Colorado, as a result of the acquisition.”
National Press Women conference will be in Colorado this year
Each year, the National Federation of Press Women holds an annual conference.
This year, the state chapter will host it, which means Colorado will be the setting. The event, Sept. 11 to 13, will be at the Denver Marriott West in Golden.
Planning for it is already underway, the Colorado Press Women told its members and supporters this week.
This year’s conference theme is “The Next Frontier” and is slated to include panels dedicated to combating misinformation, informing the public during crises, advancing media literacy, embracing media ethics, using AI with integrity, and communicating science through storytelling.
“Tours include a day in Denver with stops at History Colorado, the Denver Art Museum, and other sites in the Golden Triangle, with lunch at the Art Hotel and a post-tour happy hour at the showcase home of CPW member Donna Bryson,” the announcement read.
The event marks the first time Colorado has hosted the conference since 2006, and CPW expects 100 to 120 people will attend from around the country.
“Coloradans who attend this national conference will find us a lively, friendly bunch,” says Sandy Nance, Co-President of Colorado Press Women.
Nance also urged Colorado journalists to submit entries for an NFPW contest with a deadline of Feb. 19. Winners are recognized at the fall conference in Golden.
🌿 This week’s newsletter is proudly supported by PR firm Grasslands: A Journalism-Minded Agency™, founded by Ricardo Baca (ex-Denver Post, ex-Rocky Mountain News, and current Colorado Public Radio board of directors). We understand journalists because we were journalists — and we’re here to help. Need expert sources or compelling stories? Our diverse client roster includes beloved Colorado institutions (Naropa University and Illegal Pete’s), innovative wellness brands (Boulder County Farmers Markets, Naturally Colorado, Eden Health Club), bold natural products businesses (Wild Zora, Flatiron Food Factory, Flower Union Brands), and other purpose-driven organizations. As creators of the Colorado Journalist Meet-Up and longtime champions of quality journalism, Grasslands recognizes the essential role reporters play in our communities. Our team is ready to connect you with sources, data, and unique perspectives that elevate your reporting.
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More Colorado media odds & ends
❓ Do you know of a local media-on-media newsletter similar to this one in your state? I plan to conduct a landscape study to gauge which states might have something similar — especially if it’s produced by someone with an affiliation at a college or university. So, if you subscribe to this newsletter from outside of Colorado and you know of one — or might know of someone who wants to start one — please let me know!
🤖 Following this newsletter’s recent coverage of an exposé about AI-generated newsletters targeting cities and towns, including several in Colorado, Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner invited Nieman Lab reporter Andrew Deck on the show to talk about them for the station’s statewide audience.
🇲🇽 “GULF OF MEXICO! GULF OF MEXICO! GULF OF MEXICO! GULF OF MEXICO! GULF OF MEXICO! GULF OF MEXICO! GULF OF MEXICO! GULF OF MEXICO!” wrote Jon Mitchell, who is an editor at the Gazette in Colorado Springs, on Bluesky. “For the record,” he added, “I also refuse to call the school I graduated from, Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colo., by its new name. And I’m still allowed to go on campus!” (President Donald Trump has barred the Associated Press from certain events after the news organization declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in news coverage and its popular style guide.)
❌ Last week’s newsletter used an incorrect pronoun when referring to a journalist.
🖨 The National Trust for Local News was “thrilled to unveil The Trust Press on Thursday evening to partners and supporters in the Colorado media ecosystem,” the organization wrote on LinkedIn. “The Trust Press anticipates generating $500,000 in savings this year for publishers like us: trusted voices delivering news and stories that Colorado communities can’t find anywhere else.”
👀 Writing from Dove Creek, Colorado, the “pinto bean capital of the world,” Kendra Cook, editor and publisher of the monthly Pinto Bean print publication, authored a front-page editorial about politics, artificial intelligence, and more that warned of “the potential for the ‘false flags’ to usher in a civil and or world wide war.”
💨 Joe Hight, the former editor of the Gazette in Colorado Springs, who is known as Oklahoma Joe for a regular column he has written for the Journal Record in Oklahoma City, penned a Feb. 10 farewell address. “Many factors contributed to this decision,” he wrote. “Among them, I am writing a book tentatively titled ‘The Traumatic Journey: A Moment in Time’ that RoadRunner Press is scheduled to publish in 2026.”
📺 KUSA 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark illustrated what sets journalists apart from other kinds of public communicators when he issued an on-air correction and apology this week about a report on a man who had been detained for deportation. Clark spent two minutes walking viewers through the station’s reporting process to explain how the error occurred. “As we seek to hold government agencies accountable to you, the public, we should also be accountable to you, which includes detailing our reporting process and explaining errors when they happen.”
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.
I really appreciate your work, Corey. Thank you!