Aspen Journalism honored with nine awards in 2025 Better News Media Contest

Aspen Journalism received nine awards in the Colorado Press Association’s 2025 Better News Media Contest, including four first-place honors, recognizing work produced across our local investigations, water, social justice, environment, data and history beats.

The awards, announced Aug. 29 at the Colorado Press Association’s annual convention, reflect a tremendous breadth of work, with honors for public service reporting, investigative storytelling, breaking news, politics coverage and infographics. The recognized work examined the concentration of wealth and influence in Aspen, the uncertain future of the Colorado River, immigration enforcement, public lands, education policy, stream access, efforts to reconnection with Aspen’s history and the sale of St. Benedict’s Monastery.

The honors went to reporting by Paul Andersen, Eleanor Bennett, Catherine Lutz, Laurine Lassalle, Heather Sackett, Curtis Wackerle and Kaya Williams.

Aspen Journalism received:

• Four first-place awards for Best Social Justice or Equity Reporting, Best Investigative Story Package, Best Series or Sustained Coverage and Best Informational Graphic
• Two second-place awards for Best Public News Reporting and Best Public Service Project
• Three third-place awards for Best Breaking News/Deadline Reporting, Best Data Journalism Reporting and Best Politics Reporting

As an independent, nonprofit newsroom, Aspen Journalism’s model is designed to foster the expertise and commitment required to produce impactful investigative journalism on the local level. Our mission is to publish authoritative reporting on consequential issues, sustaining that coverage over the long term. This reporting helps residents understand the decisions, institutions and forces shaping their communities while creating a lasting public record of the region.

“These awards affirm the civic value of a dedicated investigative news organization committed to doing the work of public-service journalism — attending the meetings, examining the records, analyzing the data, traveling to the communities affected and continuing to report long after the initial headlines fade,” said Aspen Journalism Editor and Executive Director Curtis Wackerle. “We are so proud to see the well-earned recognition for journalists behind this work, and grateful to the readers, donors, publishing partners and collaborating newsrooms who make it possible.”

That support allows Aspen Journalism to ask difficult questions, follow complex stories wherever they lead and provide in-depth public-service reporting free of charge across the regional media ecosystem and without a paywall.

Best Social Justice or Equity Reporting

First Place Editorial: Eleanor Bennett

Eleanor Bennett traveled to the Klamath River basin to document a historic 310-mile journey by Indigenous youths—the first full descent of the river following the removal of four major dams.

The expedition was organized by Paddle Tribal Waters, a program of Aspen-based nonprofit Ríos to Rivers that teaches Native youths river navigation, environmental stewardship and leadership skills. Bennett reported from the river as the young paddlers encountered returning salmon, changing river conditions and communities reconnecting with a waterway central to their culture and history.

The resulting multimedia story, which was supported by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism, explored what the largest dam-removal project in history could mean not only for the river’s ecosystem but also for the health, traditions and futures of tribal communities throughout the basin.

Best Investigative Story Package

First Place Editorial: Catherine Lutz, Laurine Lassalle and Curtis Wackerle

The influence of ultra-wealthy homeowners in the Aspen area is inescapable. The building and maintaining of palatial residential developments, and catering to their occupants, increasingly forms the bedrock of the local economy, but this sector often plays as an enigma. Seldom do we get to know who is actually driving the development trends. Similarly, there’s an overarching narrative that there are a lot of billionaires who own homes in and around Aspen. But just how many? Fifty? One hundred? One-twenty-five? And who’s counting? The assertions tend to be vague. Part of the reason why Aspen Journalism undertook this long-term investigative project, which was reported and published in collaborations with Aspen Sojourner magazine, was to stake out factual cairns in this obscured landscape. With The Aspen 80, refreshing an effort we first undertook in 2014, we dig through public records to see how many among the ranks of the world’s billionaires can also be tied to local property ownership. 

Best Series or Sustained Coverage

First Place Editorial: Post 2026 Colorado River Negotiations by Heather Sackett

Aspen Journalism Water Desk Editor and Managing Editor Heather Sackett has closely followed negotiations over the rules that will govern the Colorado River into 2027 and beyond with the expiration in 2026 of the river’s previous operating guidelines.

Her sustained reporting brought readers inside a highly technical and increasingly urgent interstate process involving water managers, federal officials, tribes and water users across the seven basin states all dealing with increasing strains on the resource. The recognized stories examined competing proposals for sharing shortages, worsening hydrologic conditions and the legal language at the heart of the divide between the Upper and Lower basin states. Informed by more than 60 water meetings Sackett attended in 2025, she provided singular coverage of perhaps the most challenging negotiations water managers in the basin have ever faced. We learned this summer that the federal government will impose its own solution where operating guidelines will be updated every two years, since the states failed to reach a deal on their own; that outcome has already prompted one Lower Basin state to sue. However, hope springs eternal that the states may still reach a more durable agreement. 

This award recognizes the value of keeping a reporter on a complex story over time — and how information turned over throughout a long process can grow in importance as events develop.

Follow Aspen Journalism’s continuing  coverage of the post-2026 Colorado River negotiations here.

Follow Aspen Journalism’s coverage of the post-2026 Colorado River negotiations.

Best Informational Graphic

First Place Photo and Design: Laurine Lassalle

First-place honors for Best Informational Graphic went to Aspen Journalism Data Editor Laurine Lassalle for visualizations accompanying Water Desk Editor Heather Sackett’s reporting on drought conditions in the Upper Colorado River Basin.

In February 2025, Upper Basin water managers warned that conditions could begin to resemble 2021, when a near-average snowpack translated into far-below-average runoff because drought and dry soils absorbed much of the melting snow before it could reach rivers and reservoirs.

Sackett reported on water managers’ request for monthly meetings with federal officials so they would not be caught off guard if emergency releases from upstream reservoirs were again needed to support Lake Powell.

Lassalle created visualizations comparing snowpack and Lake Powell water levels in 2021 and 2025. Her graphics illustrated why snowpack percentages alone do not tell the full story of Colorado River conditions, making the relationship among snowpack, dry soils, runoff and reservoir levels more accessible to readers.

See the award-winning graphics and read the story.

Best Public Notice Reporting

Second Place Editorial: Eleanor Bennett

Reporting for Aspen Journalism’s Social Justice Desk in collaboration with Aspen Public Radio, Eleanor Bennett examined how the Garfield Re-2 School District was responding to a new Colorado law requiring public schools to establish policies for honoring students’ requests to use chosen names. The law did not prescribe what those local policies should say. The awarded story covered the debate among Garfield Re-2 leaders over whether the school should be required to notify parents when a student requested a chosen name that differed from the student’s legal name and reflected their gender identity.

Bennett’s reporting presented the concerns of community members who supported parental notification alongside warnings that mandatory disclosure could further isolate transgender students or place some young people at risk. The story translated a statewide policy debate into its immediate implications for local students, families, educators and schools. It was awarded under a new category in the Better News Media Contest focused on reporting that originates from, is informed by, or is substantially advanced through the use of public notices, recognizing the essential role such notices — in this case school board meeting agendas — play in transparency, accountability and local democratic engagement.

Read or listen to the story

Best Public Service Project

Second Place Editorial: Paul Andersen

At a moment of renewed national debate over proposals to shrink federal land holdings, Paul Andersen examined the history, meaning and future of the public lands held in common by the American people. The concept of public lands as we know it today is the result of hundreds of years of conflicting human impulses playing out on an epic scale — at times brutal and greedy, but increasingly as the American project evolved infused with the will to preserve a legacy bigger than any special interest.  

Paul Andersen’s artful storytelling takes us through the earliest forms of western expansion when 13 British colonies became a new nation. Hordes of settlers encountered a landscape that may have seemed limitless, but which they soon learned could not be left to free-for-all exploitation, lest it become spoiled for future generations. That was the genesis of the U.S. Forest Service and National Forest System lands — that without a management authority to ensure land remained suitable for multiple uses, the treasures we hold as a nation might be lost. 

The stories take us through the creation and evolution of the White River Plateau TImberland Reserve, only the second reserve designated in the U.S. when it was established in 1891. Today, it is the largest national forest in Colorado at 2.3 million acres. In its final installment, the series examines the legacy of prior divestments of public lands, which continue to shape our communities today.

Andersen placed contemporary debates over the sale, protection and management of public lands within a much longer history of displacement, speculation, conservation and public stewardship. The project gave readers the context to understand not only how the nation’s public lands came to exist, but what may be at stake when their future is reconsidered.

Best Breaking News/Deadline Reporting

Third Place Editorial: Kaya Williams

When deeds recorded in December showed that St. Benedict’s Monastery had sold its 3,700-acre Old Snowmass property for $120 million, freelance reporter Kaya Williams was poised to break the news.

Williams had been following the monastery’s uncertain future for more than two years, first as the arts and culture reporter for Aspen Public Radio and later as an Aspen Journalism freelancer. That sustained attention allowed her to respond quickly and accurately when the long-anticipated sale was recorded and the Wall Street Journal subsequently identified the buyer as Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

The breaking-news report was the latest development in a body of coverage documenting the monastery’s history, its role in the community, efforts to preserve the property and the land-use and conservation questions surrounding its future.

The award demonstrates how long-term, long-form reporting strengthens deadline journalism: Williams could move quickly because she already understood the people, history, records and public interests involved.

Read the breaking news story

Best Data Journalism Reporting

Third Place Editorial: Eleanor Bennett

Aspen Journalism’s Social Justice Desk — a collaboration with Aspen Public Radio — analyzed federal immigration-enforcement data obtained by researchers at UCLA and UC Berkeley. The newsroom filtered the records to examine arrests and detentions in Pitkin, Eagle, Garfield and neighboring Mesa counties.

The analysis confirmed an increase in local immigration arrests during the first six months of the second Trump administration. It also revealed a shift in who was being detained, with a growing share of enforcement actions involving immigrants without criminal records.

Eleanor Bennett paired the data with the experience of a young Garfield County resident who had spent months in an Aurora detention center, connecting changing federal enforcement patterns with their consequences for people in the region.

The multimedia story was published in English and Spanish and produced for both print and radio audiences, making the findings available across communities and platforms.

Read or listen in English.
Lea la historia en español.
Lea la historia en español.

Best Editorial Special Selection

Third Place Editorial: Paul Andersen

In The Second Coming of Albert Schweitzer, Paul Andersen revisited the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial, the event that helped transform Aspen from a former mining town into an international center for culture and ideas.

The four-part series explored Schweitzer’s philosophy of “reverence for life,” the ambitions of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, the birth of the Aspen Institute and the origins of what became known as the “Aspen Idea” — the pursuit of a life integrating mind, body and spirit.

Andersen connected that history with a contemporary effort by Aspen residents to revive the humanistic principles associated with the bicentennial. In doing so, the series examined the ideals that helped shape modern Aspen and asked what relevance they retain in a community now more commonly portrayed through its wealth, celebrity and exclusivity.

Begin reading The Second Coming of Albert Schweitzer.

Best Politics Reporting

Third Place Editorial: Heather Sackett

Heather Sackett examined the unresolved tension between private property rights and public access to Colorado’s waterways — an issue that has generated conflict among landowners, anglers and boaters for decades.

The story followed a coalition seeking greater legal clarity around the public’s right to float and wade in streams that cross private property. It explored why Colorado’s laws remain unsettled, what advocates wanted state lawmakers to consider and how disagreements over access affect recreation on rivers throughout the state.

By explaining the legal and political questions beneath recurring stream-access disputes, Sackett’s reporting gave readers the context needed to understand a deceptively simple question: Who has the right to use Colorado’s rivers?

These awards affirm the civic value of reporting that remains with important stories: attending the meetings, examining the records, analyzing the data, traveling to the communities affected and continuing to report long after the initial headlines fade. This work is only possible thanks to the generous support of individual donors. Thank you for reading, and supporting, Aspen Journalism.