Inside a 6th floor studio apartment kitchen area with stairs leading to the loft bedroom in the Art Studios at 1200 Lincoln St. in downtown Denver. Each room was retrofitted with at least one window that can open. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The Sunriser logo

Good morning, dear readers!

It’s the first day of a new month, and in keeping with the theme of fresh starts, we’ve given coloradosun.com its first big makeover!

My first job in journalism was an entry-level page design gig for the Rocky Mountain News, laying out editions of the weekly hyperlocal section. In the crucible of that sub-basement newsroom, I was taught the golden rules of how to turn a whole bunch of words and photos into a clean, organized layout that an average reader could scan over their coffee and quickly absorb the news.

Now almost two decades later here at The Sun, our staff is keeping the spirit and style of those tabloids and broadsheets alive to help make the fast-paced world of digital news as easy to enjoy as a paper hitting your front steps. The best part is that you don’t have to do anything special to enjoy it! Just go to coloradosun.com, start scrolling — it looks great on everything from phones to your biggest screen — and you’re bound to find something worth reading.

This new look is just one of the ways we’re continuously working to make The Colorado Sun better, which we can only do because we don’t report to profit-driven investors or a far-off parent company. As a nonprofit, we report to you, the people of Colorado who read and support our mission to keep this beautiful state informed.

So as we switch gears to talk about today’s lineup of news, please consider becoming a member if you haven’t already. Just head to coloradosun.com/join and pick your level to join thousands of your neighbors in investing in a well-informed community. (And if you’re already a member, we appreciate you more than any tossed off sentence in a newsletter can say!)

OK, folks, let’s get to the news, shall we?

P.S. — I have to shout out my team, UX design lead Kevin Jeffers and presentation editor Danika Worthington, for making this great design and putting a ton of thought into how to make our news as pretty and user-friendly as it can be.

The Art Studios at 1200 Lincoln St. in downtown Denver opened in the fall of 2023 with 192 studio apartments. The 10-story building had previously been home to the Art Institute of Colorado, and before that, it was office space. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Big office buildings are posting record-high vacancies, just as Colorado’s housing crisis is hitting a fever pitch. While converting some of the excess office space into housing seems like a slam-dunk solution, Tamara Chuang reports on how previous conversion processes are progressing and the physical limitations of turning a space designed for cubicles into livable homes.

READ MORE

Natural Hydrogen Energy drilled the nation’s first well explicitly seeking geologic hydrogen in Nebraska in 2019. (Provided by Viacheslav Zgonnik)

The dream of hydrogen-powered vehicles has been decades in the making, but the often-dirty manufacturing process requires more energy than using the fuel puts out. But back in 1987, the discovery of underground reservoirs of hydrogen shifted the thinking about hydrogen’s potential as a fuel source — and could ignite a new gold rush in Colorado and beyond. William Allstetter has more on how the Front Range has become a hub for the new search.

READ MORE

Barista David Jepson during his shift at the recently-opened Purple Door Coffee on March 27 in Denver. Jepson, 34, spent years being homeless as a teenager. About 45 people, some still living on the streets, have gone through nonprofit Dry Bones’ job readiness program to enter the workforce at the coffee shop and elsewhere. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

Many of the baristas you’ll see at Purple Door, the new cafe at 16th and Sherman in Denver, have overcome more than barista training to make your coffee. Jennifer Brown writes about the coffee shop that’s an extension of Dry Bones, a nonprofit that helps young people who are homeless train for jobs, among other services.

READ MORE

Colorado Sunday cover

For this week’s Colorado Sunday, I decided to look at both the advantages of cultivating a creative district and the challenges the statewide program faces as a whole, as it tries to wrangle an extremely diverse set of communities into a single program.

The main thing I learned from reporting this story is that culture doesn’t just happen by accident. There are a lot of people working really hard to catalyze creativity and a creative industry. But what that looks like in Sterling is different from what it looks like on Santa Fe Drive in Denver. In the following weeks and months I’ll visit the districts and pick out some highlights for you to learn about, or, hopefully, check out for yourself. And if you know of anyone doing cool things in a creative district, write to me at parker@coloradosun.com.

READ MORE

🔑 = source has article meter or paywall

The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy and submit columns, suggest writers or provide feedback at opinion@coloradosun.com.

Thanks for kicking off your day, week and month with us. And as always, we value the thoughts of our readers and members about everything we do, including this new look. So send us a note at newsletters@coloradosun.com and let us know what you think!

Have a great day and may you avoid any and all pranks set in your path today. See you tomorrow!

— Eric and the whole staff of The Sun

This story was updated at 2:20 p.m. on April 1, 2024, to remove an outdated link from The Colorado Report.

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.

This byline is used for articles and guides written collaboratively by The Colorado Sun reporters, editors and producers.