Laura Frank is executive director of the Colorado News Collaborative, where she works with more than 175 news outlets and their communities to strengthen local journalism and democracy across the state. She pioneered collaborative journalism in Colorado as the founder of I-News, a nonprofit investigative newsroom that merged with Rocky Mountain Public Media in 2013 in the first merger of its kind in the country. Frank led the journalism team there for seven years before launching COLab.
A Denver native, she spent 20 years reporting for newspapers, radio and public television around the country, specializing in investigative reporting and data analysis. She is a founding member and former chair of the Institute for Nonprofit News and has received media-entrepreneurship fellowships from Columbia University and the University of Southern California.
Her work has earned awards in both broadcast and print and has led to changes in laws and in people’s lives. Frank also serves as a visiting professor at the University of Denver and received Colorado’s Governor’s Citizenship Medal for Public Service in 2026.