COLORADO MEDIA project TEAM
CMP’s mission is to support people, projects, and organizations working to build a healthier and more equitable local news and information ecosystem for all Coloradans. Day-to-day, these community leaders and their organizations carry the torch — catalyzing projects and leading working groups to build a healthier local news ecosystem.
Melissa Milios Davis (Gates Family Foundation) has served as Director of the Colorado Media Project since January 2020 and as an Executive Committee member since its inception in 2018. She provides day-to-day leadership for CMP’s strategy and funding portfolio. She is a former print, online, and public radio journalist and now Vice President for Informed Communities at the Denver-based Gates Family Foundation. Her decade as a journalist included award-winning education beat coverage for the Daily Breeze newspaper in Los Angeles, breaking news and digital content production for the Austin American-Statesman and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and public radio news production for the Voice of America in London and KCRW and KPCC in Los Angeles. She also has over 15 years of experience in nonprofit and government communications, public policy, fundraising, and nonprofit management. She serves on the membership committee for the national Media Impact Funders, on the public policy committee for Philanthropy Colorado, on the leadership team for ComNetDENVER, and was a founding board member for the Colorado News Collaborative. See more on LinkedIn and Medium.
Sam Moody (Colorado Media Project Associate Director) brings over a decade of social impact experience in strategic planning, organizational learning, local government policy, and philanthropy to the role. He has worked with global foundations, local governments, social enterprises, and community nonprofits across North and South America as a program and project leader, fundraiser, and strategic partner. Sam embodies the power of teamwork, and is passionate about building the capacity of communities to make audacious plans, assemble the resources necessary for success, and engage stakeholders in continuous learning. He is a native New Englander and holds both Bachelors and Masters degrees in International Development and Social Change from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. His love of photography, gardens and bikes feeds back into his work, as opportunities to practice awareness of how others see, grow, and move through the world.
Corey Hutchins (Colorado College) is a journalism instructor and a contributor to Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, and other news outlets. He writes case studies for CMP, and receives underwriting support for his column on media literacy and Colorado journalism runs bi-weekly in the Colorado Sun and is distributed statewide by the Colorado News Collaborative to its partners. He also writes a popular industry newsletter on the news behind the news in Colorado. (Sign up here for more Corey in your inbox.) He is a former alt-weekly reporter, was twice named South Carolina's journalist of the year by the S.C. Press Association, was a stringer for CBS news covering the GOP presidential primary, and was South Carolina's lead researcher and reporter on the State Integrity Investigation, a risk analysis for corruption in all 50 state governments published by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International. His graphic novel about Alvin Greene, The Accidental Candidate, was published by McFarland.
Tim Regan-Porter (Colorado Press Association) leads the state’s largest professional membership association for journalists, which is a co-investor with CMP in the Colorado News Collaborative. Tim is founding executive director of the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University in Georgia, a 2018 graduate of Stanford University's John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship, and was most recently a regional editor overseeing product development and innovation for McClatchy. Tim is a board member of COLab, and his experience leading multiple startups, creating coalitions, and launching revenue-generating local news products will ensure CPA remains at the forefront of statewide efforts with COLab, CMP, and many other allies who are working together to find innovative solutions to the challenges and opportunities facing journalism in Colorado. On Medium @timreganporter.
Laura Frank (Colorado News Collaborative) leads COLab, an independent, nonprofit resource hub and ideas lab connecting journalists from more than 150 news outlets across Colorado. CMP is a core funder and programmatic partner of COLab. Laura pioneered collaborative journalism in Colorado as the founder of I-News, the nonprofit investigative news organization that merged with Rocky Mountain Public Media in 2013, the first such merger in the nation. She led the journalism team there for seven years, and now leads 20+ newsrooms in collaborative reporting through the Colorado News Collaborative. She is a Denver native who spent 20 years reporting for newspapers, radio and public television around the country, specializing in investigative reporting and data analysis. She was a founding member of the Institute for Nonprofit News and now serves as its board chair. Her work has won awards in both broadcast and print, and led to changes in laws and lives.