2025 Award Winner

Laura Frank

Colorado News Collaborative

Laura Frank is executive director of the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab), where nearly 200 local news outlets and a dozen college partners work together to innovate collaborative journalism and better serve democracy. She pioneered collaborative journalism in Colorado as the founder of I-News, the nonprofit investigative news organization that merged with Rocky Mountain Public Media in 2013–the first merger between an independent nonprofit news and public media outlet. Frank is a co-founder and chair emerita of the Institute for Nonprofit News, which was created in 2009 as a consortium of 27 nonprofit newsrooms. She has led nonprofit investigative reporting teams to duPont and Murrow awards, received entrepreneurial fellowships at Columbia and USC, and is the Wolzien Visiting Professor at University of Denver.

Frank “has been a superb leader in the amazing emergence of nonprofit newsrooms,” said Brant Houston, co-founder of INN and a longtime colleague. “She has chronicled the dramatic changes in journalism, co-founded INN, and created and directed investigative and community nonprofit newsrooms, and played a crucial role as a board member and board chair of INN. Recognition of her achievements in the field is richly deserved.”

“Laura Frank is a woman of firsts in nonprofit news — one of a few who first realized the potential of nonprofit models for supporting investigative journalism,” said Sue Cross, former INN executive director. “She is one of the first leaders of INN, who as a co-founder had the vision to form it as a collaborative network. One of the first well-known journalists to leave an esteemed career in traditional media and become a news entrepreneur. And her leadership continues — strengthening investigative reporting in public media and for local newsrooms across Colorado. At INN, she continued to lead the entire field as chair of the board of directors, and speaking personally, by serving as a mentor and role model for me and so many other journalists.  

“It sounds like hyperbole when you say one person changed a whole field — changed the world — in some notable way. With Laura, there’s no hyperbole. She really did.”