Investigative Journalism

CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Prosecutors focused on “bullets, blood, brains and bodies” during Monday’s opening statements in the Aurora theater shooting trial, while defense attorneys predictably posited that defendant James Holmes was insane when he walked into the theater on July 20, 2012, for a midnight movie showing that ended with...

The world will be watching Colorado over the next few months as the Aurora Theater Shooting trial begins Monday in Arapahoe County, nearly three years after the July 20, 2012, shooting. In the first minutes of that morning, during a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” at Aurora’s Century...

COMMENTARY, NO BYLINE I heard today that one of the prosecutors working on the #theatershooting trial is so afraid of being recognized once things get heated, that he’s growing a beard. The prospective jurors were really worried about notoriety too. The judge, whose name is Carlos Samour, assured the jury...

In 2009, two teenage boys plotted to shoot the principal of Dove Creek High School and ambush the Dolores County Sheriff. They aimed to do serious damage. Law enforcement recovered seven rifles, some .22-caliber weapons and an M1 carbine from one of the boys’ homes. The teenagers’ plan might have...

Aiming to make sense of a relentless surge of political advertisements, journalistic fact-checking projects in Colorado reached large numbers of Front Range voters, who found those endeavors to be generally effective in this year’s midterm election season, a CU News Corps/Aspen Research survey found. Despite a one-sided ad-to-fact check ratio,...

Scott Ellis’ Facebook page looks different than those of a lot of his social media peers. Ellis, 43, is an administrator of the group “Don’t Vote,” one of many such gathering places on Facebook. His own newsfeed is speckled with notes encouraging his friends to join him in his voting...

This fall students at Colorado University in Boulder analyzed political ad spending during the 2012 election season. The CU News Corps received national coverage in a number of prestigious publications. Below is a list of articles relating to these efforts. The Columbia Journalism Review ran an article detailing the News...

One of the main supporters of the personhood legislation on Colorado ballots this November is Personhood USA. The group’s website hosts pages about Amendment 67 in Colorado and North Dakota’s Measure 1, another personhood issue up for vote. The Personhood USA page about Amendment 67 makes the following statement: “Last...

In his campaign to unseat Senator Mark Udall, Republican challenger Cory Gardner has called for a travel ban from the West African countries hit hardest by the recent Ebola outbreak. In doing so, he’s ignoring a strong consensus among public health experts on how best to deal with outbreaks of...

Paying male and female employers the same salary has been a central campaign issue for Democrats up and down the ticket across the country in past years. Sure enough, that discourse also made its appearance in one of the closest Senate races this fall – the contest between Sen. Mark...