Our mission
To provide the people who live, work, learn and play in and around Boulder, Colorado, with high-quality, trustworthy, local-first reporting and essential information to make sense of issues and events happening around them, navigate their lives and build community.
About us
Boulder Reporting Lab launched in November 2021 to fill a gap in Boulder-local, public interest daily journalism. We’re the only independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit, digitally native news organization in our city and county. We believe local journalism is a public good, vital to a healthy, thriving and equitable community and local economy. Our work is data-driven, solutions-focused and service-oriented. And, it is free to consume for all. To provide this public service, we rely on the support of philanthropic donors, readers and sponsors.
The Google News Initiative’s Local Experiments Project, which seeks to support innovative new models for journalism, provided our initial funding and is providing technical and product expertise. This support will last up to two years. GNI has zero involvement or influence in any of our editorial decisions. Neither will any of our funders. (Read more about our editorial and transparency policies.) We’re also part of Village Media’s Publisher Services Program, which provides audience growth services.
Boulder Reporting Lab is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit news organization. Our tax identification number is 87-1232586. All donations received by readers, donors and sponsors are tax deductible, to the fullest extent allowable by law, retroactive to the date of our incorporation (May 26, 2021). One-hundred percent of your donation goes to fund our journalism!
Read more about our origins and why we call ourselves a “lab” here.
How it works
We publish in-depth stories and news coverage, along with an a.m. newsletter that seeks to keep you informed and connected on issues you care most about. (Learn about our priority coverage areas.) All you have to do is:
Bookmark our website. Our original reporting and storytelling is published here first. You’ll find exclusive stories and news briefs.
Join our newsletter community to get:
- BRL Today. A tidy a.m. newsletter of the most compelling stories, information and events to keep you informed locally, delivered (to start) three mornings a week.
- BRL Weekly A weekly newsletter of all the original stories we publish during the week, delivered every Saturday. (Coming soon!)
Follow us on social. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram.
What we strive to bring
- Quality, non-partisan reporting that digs beneath the surface on issues of public importance and uncovers effective solutions to problems.
Shrinking staff and resources at legacy newspapers have left reporting gaps in our communities. We fill gaps locally by digging deep on issues of greatest community concern and pride across our beautiful city. We engage directly with our community to ensure we’re meeting actual information needs and interests, not our own whims or the political horse race of the day. We believe high-quality, fact-based local journalism and information can be a unifying force, sparking new conversation and connection, understanding, solutions and action.
- Important community information, curated.
We live in an information-rich community. It can feel overwhelming to navigate. In our newsletter, we carefully curate the most useful local information. We comb through thousands of social posts, press releases, reports and other content from non-news sources every day so you don’t have to. We elevate, in digestible snippets, what you need to know. We invite the community to take part in this work to hold us accountable and ensure we are elevating diverse sources and perspectives.
- A living laboratory for public service hyperlocal journalism.
We’re building a community-driven funding model for news to serve our community and inform our industry. We aim to position Boulder as a model for financially sustainable, impactful and equitable local nonprofit journalism. We see our city, with innovation in its DNA, as a fertile testing ground for replicable solutions to our nation’s local news crisis.
Meet our (growing) newsroom
We’re the journalists of the Boulder Reporting Lab.
Our editorial policy and transparency
We adhere to standards of editorial independence adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News:
Our organization retains full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic and business interests of our organization. We maintain a firewall between news coverage decisions and sources of all revenue. Acceptance of financial support does not constitute implied or actual endorsement of donors or their products, services or opinions.
We accept gifts, grants and sponsorships from individuals and organizations for the general support of our activities, but our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support. Editorial decisions are made by journalists and editors alone. We do not give supporters the rights to assign, review or edit content.
Our organization may consider donations to support the coverage of particular topics, but our organization maintains editorial control of the coverage. We will cede no right of review or influence of editorial content, nor of unauthorized distribution of editorial content.
As a nonprofit that operates as a public trust, we do not pay certain taxes. We may receive funds from standard government programs offered to nonprofits or similar businesses.
Our organization will make public all one-time donations of $5,000 or more. We will avoid accepting charitable donations from anonymous sources in excess of $5,000, political parties, elected officials or candidates seeking public office. If our board of directors deems a donation presents a conflict of interest with our work or will compromise our independence, we will not accept that donation.
Nonprofit newsrooms that are members of the Institute for Nonprofit News pledge to be transparent about the funding of their news operations and maintain editorial independence from all revenue sources to ensure news judgments are made in the interest of the communities they serve as journalists.
We also adhere to the code of ethics of the Society for Professional Journalists.
Learn about our supporters.
Corrections
We acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently. We explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly.
Meet our (growing) board of directors
We are currently developing our board of directors and are looking for 2-3 new board members to join us in growing Boulder Reporting Lab. Please contact us for more information.
Tammy Terwelp
Tammy Terwelp is the CEO & President of KUNC public radio in Northern Colorado. She is a 20-year public media veteran with roots in music commercial radio in Wisconsin. She oversee all aspects of KUNC and The Colorado Sound’s operations, the ongoing development of the organization’s culture, and the fulfillment of its mission. She works with KUNC’s Board in the continual development of strategic planning, embody the plan’s vision, and lead the organization to its successful implementation.
She previously worked in public television in Wisconsin and Chicago and was the Director of Distribution and Logistics at WBEZ in Chicago, Director of Content and Programming at WESA in Pittsburgh, General Manager of KRCC in Colorado Springs, and most recently, the Executive Director at Aspen Public Radio.
Hillary Rosner
Hillary Rosner is the assistant director of the Center for Environmental Journalism. She teaches courses in science writing and environmental journalism, among other topics. In the Center, she mentors master’s students and helps run the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.
Rosner came to the University of Colorado with years of experience as a journalist and editor specializing in long-form, narrative stories about science and the environment. Her work has been published in National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Scientific American, Men’s Journal, High Country News, Popular Science, and dozens of other national and regional outlets. She is a contributing editor for the website bioGraphic. Her articles have garnered many awards, including two AAAS-Kavli Science Journalism Awards, and she has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, an Alicia Patterson Fellow, and a Ted Scripps Fellow.
Rosner started her career as a cub reporter at the New York Post and went on to become an editor at The Village Voice and a contributing editor at New York Magazine, as well as working on staff at several pioneering online journalism startups. She holds an MS in environmental studies from CU-Boulder, an MFA in creative writing from New York University, and a BA in American Studies from Wesleyan University.
Stacy Feldman
Stacy Feldman is the founder and publisher of Boulder Reporting Lab. She is an editor with expertise in climate change issues and experience in journalism entrepreneurship. In 2007, she co-founded Inside Climate News (ICN), a Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit news organization providing reporting and analysis on climate change, energy and the environment. For 13 years, Stacy helped to build and lead ICN as it transformed from a two-person startup to nearly 20 employees and became a model for national and award-winning climate journalism. Stacy held many roles in the organization, including executive editor from 2015-2020. During that time, ICN won dozens of national journalism awards and cemented its place in the national news ecosystem. Stacy holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. In August 2020, she became a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she developed the concept for Boulder Reporting Lab.