Lynn Bartels, a venerable Colorado journalist for more than two decades who possessed a massive Rolodex that seemed to perpetually spin with the names of the state’s biggest — and not so big — players in politics, died on Friday.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our dear sister, Lynn Bartels,” her family . “We are heartbroken. We have been overwhelmed by the love that all of you have shared. It will lift us through the coming days and will stay with us forever.”
Bartels became known for her tenaciousness as a political reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, then went to work for The Denver Post after the News closed in 2009. She had undergone surgery to remove a large brain tumor, her family in late April, and her sister Kitty DiMartino said it was diagnosed as glioblastoma. She was 69.
Plans for a memorial service were pending, the family wrote.
“Lynn was a born reporter. Long after she’d left newspapering, she was sniffing out news and passing on tips,” said Lee Ann Colacioppo, The Post’s editor, on Friday. “It was part of her DNA. The Rocky, The Denver Post and Colorado journalism were lucky to have her.”
Bartels spent 22 years working at Denver’s two metro dailies — first at the News for 16 years, then at The Post for a half-dozen more until she took a buyout from the paper’s parent company during a round of staff cuts in 2015.
“She was a delightful human being, and her loss will leave a hole in the universe,” said former Mesa County Commissioner Rick Enstrom, who met Bartels nearly 30 years ago when he served on the Colorado Wildlife Commission under Gov. Bill Owens. “If anyone deserves to lie in state at the Colorado Capitol, it is Lynn Bartels.”
Gov. Jared Polis issued a statement Friday afternoon, saying he had known Bartels for more than a quarter of a century.
“Lynn’s infectious personality and ongoing quest for selfies made her someone that everyone wanted to know, and her sharp wit kept readers coming back for more,” he said. “I know that her passing will impact so many across Colorado, but we’ve all learned something from Lynn that we can carry forward in our lives.”
Bartels regularly spent time with — and wrote about — the luminaries of Colorado politics, including governors, U.S. senators, members of Congress and state lawmakers of all stripes — often holding them to account in blunt and unforgiving ways, but never dismissing their humanity.
“She might grill them on the latest turn of the news wheel, or even openly point out their hypocrisy — citing a month, year and issue when they took the position they were now opposing,” said Todd Hartman, a former colleague of Bartels’ at the Rocky Mountain News. “But in the very same conversation, she would ask about their kids.”
Bartels, he said, “knew their family members, kids, pets and hobbies, and she was sincere in seeing them as just people, flawed and mostly trying their best like all of us.”
Bartels’ influence on political reporting went beyond Colorado. In 2015, she was named a “longtime stalwart” by The Washington Post blog The Fix in its annual list of best state political reporters, according to . MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow, then a broadcaster on MSNBC, relied on Bartels as “her political attache for the inside scoop on the Colorado midterm elections” in 2014, the story said.
‘She didn’t play favorites’
Kevin Vaughan, an investigative reporter for 9News who sat just feet from Bartels at both The Post and the Rocky for 15 years, said his colleague was fiercely fair in her coverage.
“She didn’t play favorites. It didn’t matter what party you were in, or what issues were important to you — you were fair game,” Vaughan said. “It might mean she’d write a glowing piece about you. It might also mean she’d write a tough one — one you wouldn’t like.”
But she was always willing to face her subject the next day and hear out what they thought of her story, he said.
“Itap a big reason why she was universally beloved by people across the political spectrum,” Vaughan said. “Some of those people had been punched in the mouth by her in print, and they came to respect and love her anyway.”
Former U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican, that Bartels covered him when he was a state lawmaker and later a senator in Washington, D.C. Her work, he wrote, “defined Colorado politics, its leadership and the intrigue of power.”
“And Lynn was there every bit of the way — knowing where the ball was bouncing before any of us had even figured out there was a ball at all,” Gardner wrote. “She was the Grand Dame of Colorado politics and political reporting.”
Bartels, a native of Vermillion, South Dakota, grew up with two brothers and six sisters. She attended Cottey College in Missouri in the mid-1970s before moving on to Northern Arizona University to study journalism.
Her first newspaper job was with the Gallup Independent in New Mexico. She then moved two hours east to work for the Albuquerque Tribune, where she met John Temple, the eventual editor and publisher of the Rocky.
The year was 1984.
“I made her a columnist at The Tribune and she was incredibly popular,” Temple said. “People could relate to Lynn, which was one thing that made her such a great reporter and columnist.”
When Temple moved north, he hired Bartels as the night cops reporter at the Rocky, where she was charged with covering the shenanigans and hijinks of metro Denver’s after-hours dwellers.
“Nobody could believe it at the time that someone would give up being a columnist to become a night cops reporter, but Lynn loved covering cops, and I loved working with her,” he said.
Temple remembers the uniquely human touch Bartels employed in uncovering the details of a story.
“People trusted her. They would talk to her,” he said. “She was a people reporter. She wasn’t a documents reporter. Nor did she like to write think pieces. Lynn was a true news reporter.”
While she eventually made her name covering state politics, Bartels wanted nothing to do with it at first, Temple said.
“One funny thing, given how much Lynn became part of Colorado political life, was that when we first asked her to go to the Capitol to cover the legislature, she cried,” he said. “She didn’t want to go.”
Remembrances from across the spectrum
Mary Alice Mandarich, a longtime political operative who served as chief of staff for the Colorado Senate Democrats, had known Bartels for 30 years and had her over to her home for backyard pig roasts and Thanksgiving meals over the years.
She remembers Bartels making the trek to Kansas City to watch Mandarich’s son get married, talking easily with people she had never met.
“While being an iconic newspaper reporter, Lynn had an ability to lay that aside and be just small-town Lynn from Vermillion, South Dakota,” Mandarich said. “And I believe that background gave her the ability to engage effortlessly with people in many different walks of life.”
She remembers the two strengths that Bartels had that made her the reporter she was.
“First, she strongly guarded her sources, never betraying a confidence given on background,” Mandarich said. “Second, she immersed herself in the maelstrom of political and government events. She was not one to report off of press releases and press conferences.”
Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado Republican Party chair who managed U.S. Senate campaigns and Owens’ run for governor, said Bartels “knew something was going to happen even before the candidates and campaigns did.”
He recalled a moment in 2004 when he was considering whether to run the senatorial campaign of John Thune of South Dakota, who is now Senate Majority Leader. He kept putting Bartels off when she asked if he would be heading up the effort, not knowing if Thune was even running.
“When my plane landed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on a frigid January evening where I would start Thune’s campaign, I turned my phone on and sure enough, there was a voicemail from Lynn saying, ‘I know you’re in South Dakota. Call me.’
“Of course she knew,” he said.
He said Bartels always wanted to be in the middle of the action.
“Her idea of a good time was going on a bus tour of rural Colorado with a candidate. And because of that, she knew every county, town and wide spot in the road,” Wadhams said.
In a statement Friday, former Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat who served from 2007 to 2011, said: “Lynn was one of the best reporters I’ve ever worked with. I came into public service when she came to Denver. She was hard-working and she had great, top-notch integrity as a journalist. She will be missed terribly.”
Marianne Goodland, the chief legislative reporter with Colorado Politics, regularly crossed paths with Bartels at the state Capitol.
“Lynn was the consummate reporter, and I learned a lot from her — mostly her ability to stand up to the folks in power without hesitation,” Goodland said.
Bartels, she said, would head from the Capitol office to “check the traps.”
“That was code for talking to anyone — lobbyists, partisan and nonpartisan staff, and of course lawmakers — to see what was hot, what was coming,” Goodland said. “I started doing that when I joined Colorado Politics, and it has served me extraordinarily well over the past decade.”
Post-newspaper career
Bartels’ value continued after she left The Post in 2015, Goodland said, when she was a source for Goodland as spokeswoman for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.
She worked several years for Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican, after her newspaper career came to an end. She also worked more recently as an aide to state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican.
“I am heartbroken by the loss of Lynn Bartels. I loved that lady,” Kirkmeyer, who’s now running for governor, wrote in a statement Friday. “Lynn was a dear friend, trusted colleague and a buddy who worked alongside me at the Colorado Capitol after an extraordinary career covering Colorado politics.”
Bartels, she said, “brought intelligence, humor and an unmatched passion for public service to everything she did.”
At the secretary of state’s office, Williams said Bartels “transformed government communications, changing it from reactive to proactive and even publishing a blog about Colorado elections and election officials that became famous and revered.”
“She chronicled everything from conferences to elections to the day-to-day grist of the job,” he said.
DiMartino, Bartels’ younger sister by 13 years, called her big sister the “absolute ringleader of the family.” Bartels never married nor had children but she loved her nieces and nephews, she said.
“Lynn was everyone’s favorite sister,” DiMartino said. “She was there for every single birth of her nieces or nephews.”
DiMartino remembers feeling crushed, at age 5, as her sister headed off to college in Missouri. After Bartels’ freshman year came to an end, DiMartino recalled visiting her at her dorm and “running as hard as I could to jump into her arms because I loved her so much.”
Journalism for her sister, she said, became bigger than just a collection of facts to pass along to others.
“It allowed for her to be forever curious, to get to know people and to really know them,” DiMartino said. “And to use those relationships not for personal purposes but to provide information to people on issues that were important in their lives.”
“We have lost an outrageous sister, friend, colleague and human,” she said of her older sister. “Lynn was outrageously funny, outrageously loyal and outrageously talented.”
