The Denver Gazette turns 4 years old this week, and not only are Denver and Colorado starting to take serious note of our journalism, but the country is as well.

The Denver Gazette’s reporters won three national awards in the last year, including the prestigious Polk Award, won by investigative editor Chris Osher for his work in exposing Colorado’s dysfunctional and dangerous family court system.

Denver Gazette senior investigative reporter Jenny Deam was honored by the renowned National Headliner Awards for her reporting on Colorado’s troubled oversight of the assisted living industry and other elder care issues.

Deam also was awarded a National Press Club journalism award for her series “The Unwatched: How Colorado Systematically Fails Its Most Vulnerable Elderly in Long-Term Care.”

The Denver Gazette, together with its sister publications Colorado Springs Gazette and Colorado Politics, brought home a record 45 awards from The Society of Professional Journalists in a contest among four states: Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Our publications collected 40 awards from the Colorado Press Association as well, including 21 first place awards and the top award for public service for our parental evaluators series. No other media outlet in Colorado collected as many awards in the last year.

The Denver Gazette is finding its audience in Denver and Colorado, too. In 2023, the DG experienced a 535.7 percent surge in audience growth, and we’re already 57 percent higher in audience growth in 2024 than we were in 2023. More than 70 percent of our subscribers tell us they use our product every day. 

More than 95 percent of readers polled in a recent readership survey said they appreciate the quality of news and factual reporting in the Denver Gazette.

We set out four years ago to make accountability journalism our bread and butter, and last year saw our reporters fill that mandate with a vengeance.

The Denver Gazette’s investigative team dug into why Denver’s homeless crisis is among the most acute and most expensive in the nation, and found that although Mayor Mike Johnston spent $155 million to get people off the streets, homelessness still grew and very few homeless end up in permanent housing.

Reporters Nico Brambila and Tom Hellauer traveled to the Mexican border to document why 40,000 immigrants ended up in Denver, and relentlessly tracked the $100 million Denver has spent on the immigrants. Nico has now written 72 stories on the subject, including many pieces on the latest twist in this saga – a notorious Venezuelan gang operating in the Front Range. She has written about the cost and benefits of immigration, and the impact on crime, Denver Public Schools, charities, and state and city government.

Chris Osher and Evan Wyloge found that Colorado’s “highly effective” teachers are unequally distributed across its public schools. Their investigation was part of a Colorado schools’ Road to Recovery series on why schools are lagging after Covid.

There is no more complex and important issue in the West than water, and senior investigative reporter David Migoya decided 2024 was the year he was going to try to understand some of the questionable dealmaking for water rights going on around the state.

Fast-growing and ever-thirsty Aurora became the first municipality in Colorado to buy water rights from a shuttered gold mine. Ever since, however, troubles have stacked up like tailings, Migoya found. The producing and delivering of clean water from the mine has required several complex, multi-million dollar deals, thus far cost Aurora Water ratepayers more than $50 million and have the potential to top $110 million.

Our coverage of Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program kept up the pressure to make policymakers accountable for their actions. We highlighted missteps by the Polis administration and we welcomed a variety of voices in our stories, notably from the ranchers and farmers of the counties where the wolves now roam.

Our coverage of Miles Harford, the funeral director at Return to Nature Funeral Home that abused remains and kept them in his home and whom we dubbed as the “death broker,” led to a bill signed by Gov. Jared Polis to finally regulate the funeral industry in Colorado.

Beyond our accountability work, we made Sports, Arts and the Denver suburbs all high priorities in the last year as well.

We reorganized our Denver reporting structure this year so that we have correspondents in different geographic regions in Denver.

• Alex Edwards covers Denver

• Deborah Smith covers Jefferson County and western suburbs

• Noah Festenstein covers Douglas County and southern suburbs

• Kyla Pearce covers Aurora

This structure allows us to do compare-and-contrast coverage on things like homeless policy and approaches to crime and car theft: How is Aurora handling homelessness compared to Denver and Colorado Springs? What can the various jurisdictions learn from each other?

At a time when arts journalism has dropped precipitously elsewhere, we have redoubled our commitment to comprehensively chronicling the local cultural ecology. We have produced more than 800 arts and entertainment stories in the last year.

Our coverage is led by Senior Arts Journalist John Moore, who was recognized among the 2024 Arts Desk 100, a group that includes Dolly Parton, Bono and Leonardo DiCaprio and is described as “creators, thinkers, and voices who evangelize for a better world in a way that transcends their own success.”

Sports Columnist Mark Kiszla joined The Denver Gazette in the last year after 40 years of writing for the Denver Post, helping us take aim at making the Denver Gazette sports report the biggest and best in the city.

We have also hosted many successful Colorado Conversations in the last year as well, including town halls on immigration and the war in Gaza and debates in all of the most competitive Congressional districts.

We also have been punching above our weight on regional coverage, with an ambitious goal of covering big topics in the West, notably energy. We dispatched Scott Weiser to Arizona and the Grand Canyon to investigate how a Colorado company is at the center of the nation’s nuclear energy debate.

And There’s more to come. On Oct. 15, The Gazette will launch The Colorado Network, a digital platform that will enlist freelance journalists around the state to cover news for The Gazette. The Colorado Network will represent a new model for covering far more subjects in far more places all around Colorado, hopefully plugging some of the holes that have opened up in the coverage of issues important to rural areas.

That means in our fifth year, The Denver Gazette and its sister publications have even bigger dreams and greater ambitions as we look to become a truly statewide newspaper.

As this rocket of words and pictures continues to gain momentum, we can’t thank you enough for coming along for the ride.