Investigative Awards 1999-2001
Pamela White replaced Clint Talbott as editor in 1998. Setting out to return the Daily to its tradition of muckracking exemplified by Lange, she led the Daily to numerous prizes for investigative reporting.
The newspaper won several national awards for its reporting in 1999 on how University of Colorado President John Buechner arranged the hiring of a personal friend, Frances Raudenbush, to head a university-wide initiative. Learning that Raudenbush had been hired through a contract with the CU Foundation, a quasi-independent fund-raising arm of the university, the Daily requested records about her hiring and responsibilities from the university and the foundation but was told the records weren't public. The Daily sued the under the Colorado Open Records Act and gained access to more than 7,000 pages of documents, including Raudenbush's contract, as part of a settlement. The documents and additional reporting by the Daily showed that Raudenbush, who had no academic background, was paid a salary exceeding that of many university administrators and worked out of the president's office, where she spearheaded the "Total Learning Environment" initiative, an effort to re-brand the university and raise funds through corporate partnerships.
Throughout the Daily's months-long investigation, Buechner (pronounced BEAK-nur) refused to speak with Daily reporters about Raudenbush, the TLE, or anything else. Members of the university's elected board of regents downplayed the matter and accused the newspaper of shoddy journalism, with one calling the Daily a "supper-market tabloid" . At one meeting of the regents at the university's Denver campus, two Daily reporters were ejected by university police officers after confronting Buechner and asking him to comment on the matter. The rival Camera newspaper (then called the Daily Camera) published an editorial condemning the university's action, which also prompted the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado to write a letter of concern to the school, questioning whether it had violated the reporters' First Amendment rights. The university said the reporters had disrupted the meeting, a contention the Daily denied.
After being repeatedly rebuffed, the Daily took the unusual step of publishing a front-page editorial on September 28, 1999, listing the questions it sought to ask Buechner. Among the questions was one asking him to clarify the nature of his relationship with Raudenbush. In another unconventional move, the Daily prodded Denver's daily newspapers, which had until then largely ignored the controversy, to join its cause. This led to the Rocky Mountain News publishing an editorial on October 11, 1999, in which it said the "public deserves an explanation" of the Raudenbush matter. Shortly after the Rocky's editorial, on October 13, 1999, Buechner announced he would resign, citing a lack of support from the regents. He denied that the resignation was tied to the Daily's investigation and never answered the newspaper's questions.
A critical state audit of the CU foundation later found that Buechner had also assisted in securing an $875,000 CU Foundation loan to help Richard Byyny, then chancellor of the CU-Boulder campus, buy a house from Raudenbush in 1997.
In 2000, the Daily's investigation was awarded the Scripps Howard Foundation's Roy W. Howard Award for public service reporting. "The effort embodies what public service by a newspaper is and what persistence it often requires," the judges said in announcing the award. Additional awards were given by the Education Writers Association and the National Newspaper Association. Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) named the Daily's investigation a finalist in its annual contest.
The Daily also won a special citation in 2001 from the Education Writers Association for its reporting on the University of Colorado Medical School's "dog labs," in which medical students killed dogs as part of their studies. The investigation showed the school had obtained its dogs from a controversial animal dealer and examined the ethical arguments surrounding the killing of dogs, as well as the university's expulsion of a medical student for aiding animal-rights activists who were protesting against the labs. The Daily's investigation prompted state lawmakers to debate the use of the dog labs, which were later shut down.
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