Customer Story: How an Investigative Reporter Used Visualping to Break a National Story
By Kayla Zhu
Updated March 24, 2026
How KOAA News5 Investigative Reporter Brett Forrest Used Visualping to Break a National Story
It was a Sunday. Brett Forrest, senior reporter and anchor at KOAA News5 in Colorado Springs, was checking his email before heading in for his evening shift.
Somewhere in his inbox was a notification from Visualping: a change had been detected on the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors website.
He'd set up the alert months ago, mainly to get alerts for upcoming board meetings, the kind of thing that never got a press release or announcement.
Then he opened it.
"Membership section updated to include new board members: Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Dan Clark, Doug Nikolai, Dina Powell, Erika Kirk, and Vacant."
"Right away, in my head, I'm like: okay, that's a big deal."
By that evening, Brett had wrote the story for KOAA's website and reported it on the evening broadcast.
The response cascaded quickly: local attribution on Monday, national pickup by Tuesday. What had been a quiet weekend change on a government website made headlines on national and international news in a couple of days
"Virtually every national outlet imaginable started writing about it, and even some international outlets. I was two days ahead of all of them. But also, I don't think any of them would have done the story had I not done it first."
That weekend scoop started with a single Visualping alert. Here's how it happened.
About Brett Forrest and KOAA News5
Brett Forrest is a senior reporter and evening anchor at KOAA News5, the NBC affiliate covering Colorado Springs and Southern Colorado.
A member of the Scripps News Group's national investigative unit, Brett has spent nearly two years building deep sourcing around the US Air Force Academy, one of the country's most prominent military institutions.
For a reporter on a beat like this, the news doesn't always arrive in your inbox. Committees update, agencies post new filings, oversight boards schedule meetings all on government pages that not many think to check all the time.
The Problem: A Beat That Never Slows Down
As any reporter knows, the job never really stops. There's always another page to check, another source to follow, another update that might matter.
For Brett, that means keeping tabs on a long list of government and agency websites: the Air Force Academy's Board of Visitors, state wildlife depredation records, accreditation bodies, the list goes on. Pages that updated quietly, on their own schedule, with no announcement to anyone.
His system, before Visualping, was simple: try to remember.
"I would just have to remember to check certain websites at certain times, daily probably, but that wasn't always happening because I'd always forget or get too busy."
Some days he'd make his rounds checking the pages for updates manually. Other days, a source would text him: hey, they posted a new meeting on the site. For a reporter juggling multiple investigations and stories plus anchoring the evening news, he knew there was probably a better way to stay on top of all of these updates.
"It's just impossible to stay on top of all that every day."
The Solution: Set It Up Once, Never Miss a Change
Brett first heard about Visualping through the Scripps national investigative unit group chat where reporters across the country exchange tools and tips for investigative work.
He was looking for a way to monitor a Higher Learning Commission accreditation page for the Air Force Academy, and a colleague suggested Visualping alongside a few alternatives.
He tried a few tools out, but Visualping stood out immediately.
"As soon as I saw Visualping, I thought: this is easy to use, it's intuitive, and I can figure out how to set up this data scraping for this one specific website. I've never done this before as a reporter, but I know it can be helpful."
From there, Brett was introduced to Visualping's Journalist Program, where working journalists get free, lifetime access to Visualping's Starter Plan (valued at $120/year).
With the increased usage from the Journalist Plan, Brett set up alerts across roughly 10 sites, including the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors page, a Colorado wolf depredation tracker, and a state-mandated WARN Act layoff listing.
His approach is simple: identify pages that often quietly update without announcements, set an alert, and let Visualping do the watching.
"I realize I'm not going to remember to check these sites all the time, and there can be really good stories here if changes have been made."
For the Board of Visitors page specifically, the original goal was simple: know when the next meeting was announced before anyone had to tell him. What he didn't anticipate was catching something far bigger.
The Result: A Weekend Alert That Became a National Story
The alert that tipped off a national story arrived on a Saturday, in Brett's inbox. Brett saw it Sunday morning, right before his shift.
The U.S. Air Force Academy Board of Visitors page is an official government website the kind Brett would cite directly in a story.
When Visualping flagged several new names in the "Appointed by the President" section, he didn't second-guess the source. One of those names was Erika Kirk, wife of the late conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, who had himself been appointed to the same board by President Trump less than a year earlier.
Now, President Trump had quietly appointed his Erika, with no announcement, no press release, no social post. Her name had simply appeared on the page.
Check out the exact change alert that tipped off the story here
"I open up the email and it says names added: Erika Kirk, Right away, in my head, I'm like, 'Okay, that's a big deal.' And this is an official source website.
Since the page is an official government source, and knowing it was a Sunday and he was unlikely to hear back from the Air Force Academy for a comment, he went ahead and filed his report on the same day, publishing to KOAA's website and leading the story on the evening broadcast.
By Monday, another local outlet, the Colorado Springs Gazette had picked it up, crediting KOAA as the original source.
By Tuesday, Brett was fielding texts from colleagues across the country asking if he'd seen the news about the Air Force Academy, not realizing he'd broken it 48 hours earlier. The story made its rounds in national and even international outlets.
What made it a scoop wasn't just the information, it was the timing. No formal announcement had been made. No press release. No social post. The update had gone live on the site with no fanfare whatsoever.
Without Visualping, the timing would have been very different.
"Would I have checked that page that week? Probably not. Maybe in another week or two. At that point, maybe they would have made an official press announcement. But no announcements came out at all for Erika Kirk. That's why I reported she was "quietly added", because she really was."
Whether a formal announcement was ever planned remains an open question, but Brett got there first either way.
"We can't say now because I broke the story before they could, and all that was only possible just because I happened to get that Visuaping alert. And the same goes for all the other reporters across the country clearly followed my lead once I reported that, because no one else is checking that website every day."
Read more about how Brett broke the Air Force Academy story on his LinkedIn post below.
Looking Ahead: Court Dockets, Legislative Bills, and More Scoops to Come
Brett now monitors around 10 pages with Visualping and says he's eager to add more pages. He's already identified his next frontier: court dockets. Tracking federal and state case filings manually means logging into systems like PACER, remembering case numbers, navigating court-specific interfaces, a process he describes, generously, as tedious. Visualping, he thinks, could cut through most of that friction.
"There are so many good uses for it. I just have to think of other ways to integrate it."
He expects more stories to come from alerts he's already running, and more still from pages he hasn't thought to monitor yet. He's already got his eyes open.
"I fully expect it to give me some other scoops in the future."
Would He Recommend Visualping?
For other journalists covering a beat, multiple investigations, and everything else they've got on their plate, Brett's answer is simple:
"We're so busy day to day trying to juggle so many different stories and projects and trying to stay on top of everything else while finding scoops at the same time. You quickly realize you can't do it all. Having a website monitoring tool like Visualping really helps take some stuff off my plate, but also informs me of scoops I would have otherwise missed. Absolutely would recommend it."
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Kayla Zhu
Kayla is the Public Relations Specialist at Visualping. Her background is journalism, communications, and marketing. When she's not finding new ways to tell Visualping's story, she's probably making a Spotify playlist or watching the latest movie.