As regular readers know, I am a big fan of the historic Colorado Transcript archive--it's where I find most of the stories that I relay in my daily history articles. They have almost every issue from December 19, 1866 through March 16, 1969. I love the fact that every issue is a snapshot of life in Golden at that moment in time--the issues that City Council is discussing, the ads by local businesses, society news, etc.
In 1969, the Colorado Transcript became the Golden Transcript. Those issues are available through April of 1995. They cover some events that I observed firsthand, such as the rebirth of downtown, the creation of the kayak park, the rec center, the golf course, the "new" County Courthouse, and the 1% growth limit. There again, it's so useful to be to be able to check exact dates and recall who was saying what at the time.
Golden is incredibly lucky to still have a local newspaper (and it's still the Golden Transcript!), but I have worried about news archives in our increasingly digital world.
There are digital news organizations all over the country (and Canada!). I have long wondered--what happens to our collective archive when our hosting companies go broke, change hands, or shut down?
When I learned that the Internet Archive, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and the Poynter Institute were launching a program to address this very issue, I wanted to be part of it. I applied and was accepted into the first cohort of Today's News for Tomorrow. They plan to "crawl" my site once a month and make it permanently available.
They did their first crawl on March 30th, and the results were impressive. They captured not only the events of March 30th, but every newsletter going back to March of 2024!
I look forward to seeing the technology advance and the number of participating news organizations expand. Check out some of the other news organizations in the inaugural cohort! Note that the sites marked "No captures found for this URL" were archived, but the owners use paywalls and don't want free versions available until sometime in the future.
I like to think of my counterpart, 100 years hence, using the archive of GoldenToday to see what was happening in Golden in 2026.
