An Interview with Lee Ann Colacioppo, lead editor of the Denver Post - Part Two

This is a chat with Lee Ann Colacioppo, lead editor of the Denver Post and a holder of a Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award you can get in journalism, for her coverage of the 2012 Aurora Shooting. She started working for the Post in 1999 and assumed the position of lead editor in 2016. I sat down and had a talk about her, her career, and her hopes for the future of journalism.

I understand you were a principal part of covering the shootings that happened in Aurora in 2012, for which you won a Pulitzer Prize for the coverage the following year. Can you walk me through your mindset, being one of the frontrunners in covering such a tragic event felt nationwide?

Via The Denver Post: Becky Hogan, widow of former Aurora mayor Steve Hogan, places an American flag on the cross memorial for Jonathan Blunk, one of 12 victims who died at the 2012 Aurora mass shooting, at the Reflection Memorial Garden in front of the Aurora Municipal Center on Tuesday, July 19, 2022, a day before the 10th anniversary of the shooting.

Yeah, and of course, it was our second in a short time. Columbine happened before it, and I came to the Post right after Columbine. The story was still pretty raw. I came in September, and it had just happened in April. There was a lot in there. I, at the time of the Aurora shooting, was our investigations editor, and the person who was supposed to be running the day-to-day coverage in Aurora knew a person who had been killed. He just couldn’t work; it was too much. He ultimately stepped aside, and I moved in. There’s a lot in those stories that you don’t think about. One, is that you have to watch out for your staff. Our staff had already gone through Columbine, so we had people who were saying, “I can’t do it again, please don’t assign me to families, I did it before, I can’t do it again.” We needed to try to figure out how to cover it while also respecting what the staff went through. Because again, it was so many young people. It’s also super competitive; you need to make sure you have people who are driven in terms of news, who aren’t afraid to go in and ask those questions. That is not everybody, you gotta have the right people on that. We also learned pretty quickly that because of the time of day it happened, the older people on staff were all still asleep, and the younger staff had to be out in the field. Since they were trained up in the digital world, their interviews were almost useless for print. So many quotes that were like “I was scared” and they hadn’t followed through on things like “well, what happened then?” or “where were you?” and “what did you see?” and all the other things that make a deeper print. That younger team was a part of our breaking news team, and they were just used to getting the scoop and getting it out there. We learned the importance of sending in a mix of people to do those interviews and really talking through it with people before they go, that we are getting things for the web, but also are getting things for a bigger, deeper story that we publish for the paper. We ultimately created two teams, one person who was writing for digital and one person who was writing for print. Beyond that, it’s remembering that this is your community and stressing it to them. There’s a lot of frustration when people are saying, “It's too soon, I need some space.” The reporter can tell me what happened, and I can look up at CNN and see that very person suddenly doesn’t need any space at all and is just spilling their guts to CNN. Happens all the time, super frustrating. We try to tell them from the get-go that we are the local news, that their cameras are going to leave, and we are still going to be here.

You kind of were going into it there, that there was a divide in how you handle online media versus the newspaper. Is that a divide you are frequently thinking about?

What we do for the paper, of course, appears online, but there we can link them and update them and so forth. But you gotta be competitive, so that means you have to have a quick shell of a story up fast, and adding it as fast as you can with new facts, but it’s not necessarily beautiful. We cross-promote (online and the newspaper) both stories, and they both can perform really well, but they’re just different. 

Four years after you assumed your position, the pandemic started. Have the trials and tribulations you faced during the global shutdown trickled into the way you do things five years later?

Via The Denver Post: Protesters gathered at the Colorado State Capitol to oppose the state’s stay-at-home order and other restrictions implemented amid the COVID-19 pandemic on April 19, 2020.

Yes, I am obviously not in the office right now. We go back once a week, on Tuesdays usually. We also had another shooting at King Soopers in Boulder shortly after the pandemic started. That was the first time we had a major news event where we weren’t together. We were lucky that we all worked together for a while, because there’s a lot of shorthand’s you use in messaging that just doesn’t sound the same as your voice. It could sound crankier than you feel or shorter or whatever. We’d worked together, so we knew each other's personalities, so that helped. So we did that whole story remotely, and it taught us a lot on how to change our communication techniques and how clearly you have to say what you mean. Since then, there are things about that change that I take into account when I hire on now. Like how much I think the person is independent, because the support that you used to have is not inside the newspaper as it used to be.

So you’re saying chemistry in the newsroom is important?

Work culture and chemistry, to me, are very important. The industry is hard, right? It’s shrinking, and the workload is hard; it’s just difficult. If you can’t create chemistry inside your workplace that is productive and supportive, you’re lost. We had enormous layoffs in 2018; we lost a third of the staff. Another third of the staff left to either go to the Colorado Sun or The Athletic. We then had to hire fast. I have said many times that this (experience) wasn’t something I’d wish on anybody, but it created a better newsroom in the end because it created a better culture with people who really wanted to be there and be where we are right now.

With the rise of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT on the writing end and Synesthesia on the video end, how do you and the Denver Post take steps to ensure credibility in not only the articles you put out, but with your sources as well?

That’s a good question. At the corporate level, we have policies, but a policy only gets you so far. You can’t monitor what people are doing every second. I think that the vast majority of professional reporters don’t want AI taking their jobs. They believe in their own writing and their own style, that they wouldn’t, at least most wouldn’t, just feed their notes into a program and hope for a story to come back out. But we don’t have to look very far to find out that’s happened. We just missed being part of the mess that Hearst created by the skin of our teeth. I don’t know if you saw this, but they put out a summer guide, and we bought it. It was headed to our press, but it became clear that the writer had AI-generated copy in there, including a reading list of books that don’t even exist, like the books aren’t even real. It went out in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Sun-Times. The magazine quoted a professor at the University of Colorado as a “professor of leisure,” which doesn’t even exist. So, you know, that guy got fired, of course. He tried with the “well, I just did it this once” argument, which should just be kind of a never thing, right? I think that most people have enough pride that dealing with AI is not a daily battle. I think it’s more nuanced than that. I’ve heard the idea of just banning it, which is silly. There are ways to use it. I think back to Columbine, where I had reports so big I couldn’t fit them all on my screen, and to have had some way to kind of search through it, summarize, and find every reference to whatever you need to find. Right now, the Denver Post’s biggest uses of AI come with looking at your story after you post it and rating it. It’s based on things like “will Google like it?” and the originality of it. Also, our whole paywall is AI-driven, so we are using it a lot in the back-end, but we don’t use it to write at all. I do think people use it to organize their thoughts a little better. If I had found out a reporter used AI for their article, I would fire them on the spot. I’d deal with the union later, but they would be gone. I was editing some of my guest opinion material, and I read a couple that felt a little too good. One of them was by the former head of a school board. I sent it back in an email saying, “I have concerns if whether this is original writing, and unless you can assure me it is I will not post it.” They just sent back “thank you for your feedback.”

Unfortunately, local papers are on a decline. However, many social scientists believe that we are in a “disinformation era” of fake news and living in a post-truth world. Do you believe that there is a correlation there?

I think there’s a correlation. But that’s just one factor. I do think that there are fewer people out there who are actually trusting news sources, but then go get their information from god knows where. It’s a bad cycle, and you see it all the time. I hear it from the people who write me, saying, “You made this up.” No, we didn’t just make it up; this is my job. They actually are that far disconnected from how journalism works that they think that. I was distressed when there was a reporter from a competing paper a while back who was making up quotes. When all that was found out and we started reaching back to sources, they didn’t speak up because they just said, “We just thought that’s how all of this worked.” That’s not helpful for our industry. I think that it goes hand in hand with moving things to the web and paywalling things, and people wanted to go to free news sites. In many cases, those sites are not what people think they are. Most legitimate news sites nowadays want something. 

Via The Denver Post: Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, questions Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. during a Senate Finance Committee hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington, D.C. The committee met to hear testimony on President Trump’s 2026 health care agenda. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Thank you so much for your time, do you have any closing words for people such as myself trying to do this line of work in the future?

Working on that right now, Bennett, because I have a speech in a month for the Colorado Press Association, which the attendees are all college students or within their first 5 years of work. I’m working on what I want to say to them, and I will tell you that my general mission is around resilience. Journalism is going to beat you around, but you have to find your space in it. Know what you want to do, and be willing to round out your resume. I get frustrated with the people who are like, “Well, I want to start in journalism, but I’m not leaving Denver.” Like, really? You aren’t willing to leave Denver? I grew up in Denver, but I went to East Tennessee because that's where I could get a job. It’s a great experience, it broadens you. Lastly, be a part of the culture of whatever operation you are in and don’t be afraid to make it yours.