The Colorado Independent

» see coloradoindependent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

It started in July 2006 under a different name. Colorado Confidential was one site in a network of state politics newsrooms that David Bennahum ran out of Washington through the Center for Independent Media, on a theory that a lot of people held in 2006: local political coverage was collapsing, and a national nonprofit could seed cheap web replacements for it state by state. The Colorado site took the Independent name in 2008. The network renamed itself the American Independent News Network.

The theory held for about seven years. In 2013 the national parent ran out of money and started closing its state sites, and most of them simply stopped. Colorado did not. That September the operation was rebuilt locally as its own nonprofit, with Susan Greene as editor and John Tomasic managing it. The money came from Colorado now instead of Washington: the Gill Foundation and the Bohemian Foundation, plus individual donations.

The second version was a real newsroom in a way the first had not quite been. It ran out of the Open Media Foundation building in Denver's Santa Fe Arts District. Mike Littwin wrote the column and Mike Keefe drew the cartoons with a Pulitzer already on the shelf, while the reporting went at the statehouse and at the criminal justice system behind it. In a state where the number of working reporters fell by 44 percent between 2010 and 2018, a handful of people covering the legislature full time counted as a large investment.

On 10 April 2020 Greene and managing editor Tina Griego wrote to readers that the Indy would be joining the Colorado Press Association and the Colorado Media Project in a new nonprofit, the Colorado News Collaborative. On 13 December 2020 the site published that letter again, alongside a second post titled "Our next chapter", and then published nothing else. The banner that went up across the top of the site reads: "Thank you to the loyal readers and supporters of The Colorado Independent (2013-2020)."

~ the chronicle ~

~ steal our copy ~

Its republication policy was three sentences long and sat on the site for years: "Steal our copy, please. Post it far and wide. Give us credit." A nonprofit newsroom has no paywall to defend and no circulation to protect, so the only thing worth optimizing is how far a story travels, and the Indy said so in plain language while larger outlets were still writing syndication contracts. A statehouse in Denver is about as far from Ankara as a news site can get, but the question underneath it travels perfectly well: somebody has to pay for the reporter who sits in the legislature all day, and nobody has a durable answer.

~ the credential fight ~

When the Independent first applied for statehouse press credentials in 2008, the existing press corps suspected it was a front for the Colorado Democracy Alliance. The suspicion was about the money. The site's donors leaned Democratic, which in the eyes of the reporters already on the floor made it an advocacy operation wearing a newsroom's clothes.

The argument ran for years and was only settled in January 2015, when the Indy finally got floor access. It is a small fight with a large question inside it, because once philanthropy pays for political journalism, every funder's politics becomes an argument about whether the journalism counts. Every nonprofit newsroom founded since has had some version of this conversation.

~ where it lives now ~

Greene moved to COLab and kept reporting from there; Littwin's column went to the Colorado Sun. The site itself no longer serves anything of its own, and coloradoindependent.com now redirects to Archive-It, where the whole site sits preserved under a collection number, which makes it one of the rare dead publications whose owners pointed the address at the archive instead of letting it lapse to whoever wanted it.

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