As the Pikes Peak Bulletin reported in December, when the website containing the online archives of the Colorado Springs Independent – a progressive alt-weekly known affectionately as the Indy – went dark in 2023 after a poorly executed website migration, an entire historical record disappeared into the digital night. Decades of award-winning investigative journalism, arts and culture reporting, and community voices: gone.
“We often hear about newspapers disappearing from communities and what that means for the future, but we should also be as concerned with what it can mean for the past when digital archives vanish,” said Corey Hutchins, who manages the Journalism Institute at Colorado College and writes the weekly Inside the News in Colorado newsletter. “We’re talking about decades of civic memory that is very important for this city. I’m sure there are plenty of fat cats and power brokers in Colorado Springs who would be pretty pleased to know that certain things the Indy reported about them are no longer readily available. Ask yourself who that serves.”
Starting in the spring of 2024, the Independent was owned by two prominent local businessmen – Kevin O’Neil and JW Roth – before folding again after about a year. Following the second closure, Colorado Media Group, owned by Dirk Hobbs, took over the Independent’s assets and rebranded it into a glossy, culture-focused publication called SoCo Insider that does not do investigative journalism.
Hobbs told the Bulletin in December he’d make the Indy archives available in January of this year – but those plans have collided with a harsh technical reality.
Currently, digital issues from 2023 are accessible with no paywall via socoinsider.com and housed on the reader platform Issuu. Individual issues may be searched, but there is no way to search the collection as a whole. And, of course, it’s only one year’s worth of material.
“The older Indy files from previous ownership teams and archivist that were given to us are a complete mess,” Hobbs told the Bulletin. “[It is] not necessarily anyone’s fault – since different and less capable technology was used during the former years and ownership periods.”
Hobbs said the “severely scattered files” spanned “nearly 7 [terabytes] of data in a file system that is not easily managed.” For reference, today’s desktop computers typically come with 1-2 terabytes of data storage.
“As a result, we’re now spending an inordinate amount of time piecing them together,” he said. “This is proving to be a massive undertaking since the files were not done in a consistent manner through the years and as technology evolved. There are numerous corrupt files as well.”
He said his team will continue to post additional, more recent issues – including from the year prior to Hobbs’ ownership.
When Hobbs took possession of the Independent’s assets, the content produced in the year the publication was owned by Roth and O’Neil was available on the Independent website, which now directs to the SoCo Insider site where individual stories of the new publication are accessible. Hobbs has taken the stories from the last year of the Independent down for now, though he plans to eventually repost reconstructed editions from that time period on the Issuu platform.
But one story that Hobbs said won’t be put back online is the cover story for the final print edition of the Independent in 2025 about a nonprofit organization, the Colorado Springs Community Cultural Collective, which folded amidst allegations of unpaid staff and vendors. (The Bulletin recently published “Collective employee prevails in wage complaint” which reports on the outcome of one unpaid wage allegation.)
The story disappeared without explanation from the Independent’s website shortly before the owners at the time, Roth and O’Neil, abruptly closed the publication citing a lack of “alignment between the leadership and the editorial direction of the papers.” Roth and O’Neil had made donations to the Collective. Neither previous owner commented on whether or how the deleted story figured into the news outlet’s closure.
When the Bulletin asked Hobbs if the piece would remain retracted or if an explanation for the retraction would be provided, Hobbs said, “CO Media Group and the succeeding publication (The SoCo Insider) were not responsible for decisions made regarding the retraction of anything owned, operated or delivered by any of the previous owners. So no, we don’t have nor do we owe an explanation for those decisions.”
Hobbs said his team can provide some assistance to the public in obtaining Independent articles.
“We will take reasonable requests for specific articles,” Hobbs said. “If folks can tell us the exact edition and article, we can help them get a hold of it. Otherwise, this is going to take some time. As we piece them together, they will go on our new platforms.”
But Hobbs advised those eager to access the full Indy archives to temper their expectations.
“All editions that are fully reconstructable will ultimately be available,” he said. “I don’t have a timeline and I don’t have any guarantee what editions the restoration efforts will yield.”
