You know, if you've listened to the show this week and before I went out for my little adventure and surgery, you heard me talking about a ridiculous and I mean ridiculous kerfuffle that was created by the Denver Post. The Denver Post, for reasons which no one is actually clear about, decided that they were going to get to the bottom of a social media account called at Do Better Denver.
And what they do is they post videos of the reality of Denver, and obviously that has made them very unpopular to the politicians running around city hall screaming everything is awesome. So the Denver Posts set about finding out who was behind at Do Better Denver and through a CORE request about core request, settled on three people as being the masterminds behind this social media account. The problem
is they are not the masterminds. They were merely contributors who either sent video or did a cor request and then forwarded that on to the master mind behind that do Better Denver, who still shall remain nameless because the Denver Post was unable to figure out who it was, which I think is hilarious. By the way, nothing says crack investigative skills more than that.
But that's neither here nor there.
Joining me today is one of the women that was outed in this article as being behind or a contributor to at Do Better Denver.
Jill Osa, Welcome to the show.
Heymany Thanks so much for having me on today.
So you and I have spoken pretty extensively about this, and as a non media person, what happened to you had to feel very shocking, but as a media person, I was surprised by none of it. So I want to kind of start at the beginning and let's go to the reasons behind your participation in any way, shape or form with that Do Better Denver. How did that all transpire? How did that come about?
Yeah, thanks so much for letting me get my story
out there and my why behind it. In August twenty twenty three, I received a text message from my tenant at the time letting me know that Mike Johnston, who I didn't even know who that was at that point, didn't know that he was the mayor of Denver, was starting a new initiative called the House one thousand Initiative, and his goal was to help house one thousand people who were experiencing homelessness by the end of twenty twenty three, and the message went on to say one of those
sites where they are going to be housed would be the property that shared a single that shared a fence line with my single family rental.
Home in Denver. And you can.
Imagine how shocked I was to find this out. So I started digging, doing a little research.
Is this legal?
What is zoning entail for this? And it was still unclear to me. So my husband and I and our kids flew to Denver and we were there for a number of weeks, going to the town halls about the micro communities and the shelters and trying to meet with
Mayor Johnston and his administration. But we were met with gaslighting and deceit, and we were not getting the answers that we were getting, And so I turned to Colora, Colorado Open Records Requests to try to understand how these sites were chosen, why the ones that went out ended up being the final list, and just the zoning details behind it.
And through that I believe.
Over the last two years, I've submitted about fifty core requests in total, and twelve of those requests I forwarded on to do better Denver and other news outlets because they contained information that I thought was important and that the community deserve to know about.
So let me ask you one question.
Because you've got a rental property in Denver, but everybody's like, you don't even live.
Here, why do you care?
But you were, actually you that house used to be your house, right, I mean that you lived in.
Correct, and I was.
My husband and I were both born and raised in Colorado in the suburbs, and after college, purchased a home in Denver lived there until I married my husband, at which point we moved away. But Colorado is still home to me. If you ask me where home is, that's my answer. And we hope to get back there someday.
And so it was, it's been.
Heartbreaking to see what has happened to Denver and to the place that we do call home.
So what happened to the information that you forwarded? You forded to do Better Denver and you forwarded to other news outlets.
What happened?
Some of those requests were posted on to Better Denver's Instagram page and possibly your Twitter page.
Quite honestly, I don't do Twitter.
I only logged into my Twitter to post my public statement.
But other than that Twitter's not my thing.
And to my knowledge, many of the premise reports, which are nine to one to one call logs that I pulled of the very shelters and permanent supportive housing locations in micro commun unities in Denver were shared pretty publicly, which I can't claim full credit for this, but Brian Moss actually ended up doing a story on the call logues to the shelters and the micro communities, and so yeah,
they were posted on Do Better Denver. It's unclear if they one hundred percent contributed to news stories or if they pulled their own premise reports to have.
More to date information.
Right, this story was about a month and a half after I pulled all the premise reports and they went out to a bunch of people.
It's it's hard.
It's hard to deny the impact that Do Better Denver has had. I mean, I know I have shared stories that I saw there first, So I do think it is within the possibility of reason that you're doing that and it being published on do Better Denver, and I actually shared some of those callogues on my blog at one point. I do think that that kind of stuff does inspire investigative journalism. By some of the better journalists in the area. So that's why I think Do Better
Denver is important. So you got caught up in this and you are, you know, minding your own beeswax, and all of a sudden you get a phone call. Tell me about that phone call with a reporter from the Denver Post.
Yeah, so last can you hold Jill? I got to take a break.
I just realized what time it is that we're in the third hour, So hold on, Can you hold on through a break for me? Okay, hang on, We'll be right back with Jill Osa for the other side of the Denver Post expose story. We're doing that next. Jill Osa one of the women that was quote outed by the Denver Post in They're incredibly whitey but they're a journalist article about the origins of a social media account
called at do Better Denver. Jill, I want to know what that conversation went like when the reporter calls you and says, hey, we.
Know it's you or whatever. How did that all pan out?
Yeah, So about two weeks ago, Shelly Bradbury called me on my cell phone and once she called, the doorbell actually rang, and I had a contractor showing up at my house, and so I said.
Can I call you back?
And she said, I'm I'm this is in reference to do Better Denver in the account and just.
So you know, I'm running this story regardless.
And I said, okay, I'll call you back because I wanted to know why I'm not do Better Denver and didn't know why my name would be associated with her story about do Better Denver And so fast forward an hour. I call her back and asked her what her article was about. She said, I'm writing about who do Better Denver Is? And I started questioning, what do you mean You're writing about who do Better?
Denver Is? Like, I'm not do Better.
Denver, So I don't really understand what you're going to be writing. So what is your piece about? And she said, I told you it's about who do Better Denver is?
You so tell you like you were in a circular conversation, like you kept saying I'm not doing Better And she's like, I'm writing about who do Vetter Denver Is and you're in the article. I mean, did it just stop stop making sense right away?
Yeah?
It didn't make sense from the get go.
I think when she called me there was a narrative that she wanted to have in her piece and write about, and it didn't really matter what I said.
To try and tell her otherwise.
So she began asking me questions about the core requests that I conducted, and why in the do Better Denver posts it said we or we obtained core request records? And I said, because do Better Denver always talks in a collective weed because the account is crowdsourced information. And so I said, there's one administrator. I don't know who she is. I couldn't pick her out of a lineup. She's never given me her name, and I'm thankful for
that because of situations like that. And if that person chooses to remain.
Anonymous, that is their right.
Yeah, And so she just kept coming back to well, why does it say we, why.
Does it say administrators?
And I said, you're going to have to ask the actual person that those are questions I can't answer for you because I don't write any of the content. I merely forwarded on some core requests that I thought were interesting, and she chose to publish them. I never thought I would hide behind a CORP request. I never thought my.
Name was secret. They're open records, and so.
You know, with that comes my name being potentially public from it.
But I never ever worried.
About that because I'm not the account holder and I don't write the content for the account, and I have never had any privileges on the account.
You you have some core requests in an ex post that I shared on my blog today. Why did you feel it was important to share the stuff that you shared on that post?
Was that the one relating to Denver and your dining room?
Yes?
Okay, so that was actually the first poor.
Request that I shared with do better Denver. I did that on my own because my community was fighting against the yo micro community, and so when the Yale micro community was taken off the table, and even before it was taken off the table, I felt that it was important to work with the other individuals across the city who were faced with the vaccame thing that I was and share the information that I had and also helped
them fight against what was happening in their neighborhood. And so one particular neighborhood, it was the Birch neighborhood, which is in Virginia Village.
They were also set.
To have a micro community in their neighborhood backing up to single family homes, which I felt was entirely inappropriate, because essentially, we're moving the problems that we see in encampments into these tiny home communities or into shelters. And I absolutely believe that something needed to be done in Denver. I just didn't think that this was the appropriate answer to that, right. And I don't know that I have the answer, but I just knew that this wasn't what
I thought was appropriate. And so the core requests that you shared and saw Mandy, and which had also been shared by do Better Denver, was about an initiative that the mayor's office decided to call Denver in your dining room. And that was a group of people, many of which you didn't live near each of the sites, that they were going to bring together in somebody's dining room. And I don't know if their objective was to try to convince the people near the.
Site that it was a good idea or what their plan was there, but they tried to frame it in a.
Way of, oh, you get a meet with other people in the mayor's office in this exclusive event, right, And to me, that's not appropriate if you're a mayre of transparency and honesty.
All of these conversations should be out in the open.
They shouldn't be happening in somebody's dining room with people who don't live that close to the site, with people like the director of Saint Francis being invited and a professor from CU Boulder who doesn't even live in Denver. It just wasn't appropriate, and so I shared it and they didn't bec see the invite list.
The Mayor's office didn't. That's fair game to in most people's email.
So Jim, let me let me. We're almost out of time. I want to ask you two questions.
The first is how much of your conversation with Shelley Bradbury was actually accurately represented in that news story?
Great question.
I would say the majority of the conversation was not represented in that news story. I gave her my why, which was related to the micro community site by our rental house. She did not share a single word of that in there. I also asked Shelley not to share our business information, which she made very clear to me, and the phone call that she knew how much we bought our house score and all those details that she did.
In her article, she misconstrued my words and said I do research and made it sound like I do research for the count Really, I said I do.
I do research because I like doing research. It's fun.
It's really important that we learn this stuff ourselves and not just rely on what we hear in the media, and so she made it sound like I'm the researcher for y I'm.
Not shocked by any of this, Jill.
I you know, I do think that the Mayor's office has its fingerprints all over this story, and I hope that us continuing to talk about it and have these conversations makes them more reluctant to try and do it again, because it's just becoming really patently obvious that do Better Denvers over the target and doing a great job in really exposing the things that the Mayor's office would rather us not know about and not talk about and not see. So I, for one, I have your back, Chill, I
have do Better Denvers back. We are all do Better Denver, and I hope that the website can do or I hope this social media account continues to do exactly what it's doing, because we cannot fix what we do not name, and that's all we're doing here.
Jill, I appreciate your time today, Thanks so much.
Mandy