A year ago today – Sept. 16, 2009 –Denver was the epicenter of the debate over the future of news in America.

Some 200 people packed the Colorado History Museum downtown that night, in the middle of a workweek, and spent three hours passionately talking about how to save the news.

Some were community leaders or journalists. Most were concerned citizens. Many who attended the event sponsored by Free Press were still reeling from the shocking closure six months earlier of one of the nation’s great newspapers, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News.

I was one of them.

My husband and I both had been reporters at the Rocky. I was the reporter in tears at the end of the documentary about the Rocky’s demise, apologizing that the newspaper was disappearing from the community that had depended on us for 150 years.

But on that night at the museum last year, the shock and sadness so many of us felt was turning into concern and then action.

I’m thrilled to update you on what has happened to the local news ecosystem in the year since that meeting.

This week, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced it would spend more than $300,000 in the next two years to fund an investigative news network in Colorado called I-News: The Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network.

I-News is different from many other efforts to save the news. For one, it’s a nonprofit. And instead of trying to draw an audience to a new website or any single place, I-News collaborates with news outlets to immediately deliver in-depth reporting to the many places citizens already look for their news.

I-News delivers multimedia investigative reports on issues of civic concern to the print, broadcast, Web and mobile platforms of existing, emerging and ethnic media across Colorado.

Each member of the I-News team has a special set of skills that are mostly lacking in today’s newsrooms. Using data-analysis, deep public records research and multimedia production skills, I-News can literally do stories that no other newsroom can do.

This might shock you: I hope I can’t say that in a year from now.

That’s because not only is I-News delivering content to all these news sources, we’re also training those newsrooms and individual journalists to use the techniques and technologies needed to produce this civic-minded journalism. So I-News doesn’t compete with other newsrooms; we boost their reporting power.

And perhaps most exciting is I-News’ collaboration with the citizens of Colorado. I-News’ team of veteran reporters can create a network of watchdogs by training residents on how to use public records, social media and other tools to better keep an eye on civic affairs.

The Knight Foundation grant comes on top of another major grant, this from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, which awarded I-News $100,000 earlier this year.

These funds have allowed I-News to launch half a dozen investigative reports already. The three that have been published and broadcast so far highlight a kind of collaboration that has never happened here before:

Take, for example, I-News’ first report – an investigation of sexual assault on college campuses and the laws that govern what’s shared with the public. The multimedia report was published in newspapers, such as the Fort Collins Coloradoan, broadcast statewide on Rocky Mountain PBS, and featured on the online-only Education News Colorado.

And because I-News was a founding member of the national Investigative New Network – a nationwide consortium of nonprofit news organizations – we also partnered with National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity on the stories.

So Coloradans got both the national perspective and the in-depth local coverage of an important public policy issue. And they could read the news online or in their newspapers, watch it on television and hear it on the radio.

Bob Moore, the editor of the Fort Collins Coloradoan, recently said this about I-News and the news ecosystem in Colorado: “I-News has helped generate a sense of optimism about the future of journalism, something that has been in rare supply of late.”

What a difference a year makes. Stay tuned!

This is a guest post from Laura Frank. Frank is director of I-News, the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network, a nonprofit investigative news service, and a founding member of the national Investigative News Network. She has nearly two decades experience at daily newspapers, radio and public television, most recently at the shuttered Rocky Mountain News. Her reporting has won top awards in both print and broadcast, and helped release innocent people from prison, protect abused children, and win aid for sick nuclear weapons workers.