Among the vanished stories: Spencer’s painstaking reconstruction of a 1959 plane crash that haunted central Virginia; a prizewinning investigation of the conflicts of interest driving up costs for the region’s water management program; a deeply reported feature on a 1982 fraternity road trip gone wrong and its devastating ripple effects over a quarter-century; and all the reader comments posted below each story, which in the years before social media could evoke the voice of the Charlottesville community, former staffers say.
A truly motivated researcher might find the dusty print copies of these articles in a library (or Spencer’s attic). But an average reader curious to learn about those subjects won’t find any of these stories when searching the web.
“Journalism is supposed to be the rough first draft of history,” said Sean Tubbs, a journalist who relied on the Hook’s old stories to build a database for the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society. “When someone ostensibly paid to kill the archive, they cut off a direct link for the public to learn from these articles.”
It’s a bit of “a murder mystery,” said McNair, who joined forces with Spencer, Stuart and other old colleagues from the Hook this summer to investigate what happened.
As catalogued on a Harvard University-hosted database called Lumen, the requests continued through late August and targeted 18 different webpages that reference alleged violent incidents at U-Va. The vast majority of the pages have one common denominator: the Ofori case.