A Public Record at Risk: The Dire State of News Archiving in the Digital Age

A Public Record at Risk: The Dire State of News Archiving in the Digital Age. Sharon Ringel and Angela Woodall. Columbia Journalism Review. March 28, 2019.
     This research report looks at archiving practices and policies across newspapers, magazines, wire services, and digital-only news producers, to identify the current state of preserving content in an age of digital distribution. The majority of news outlets had not given any thought to even basic strategies for preserving their digital content, and not one was properly saving a holistic record of what it produces. Digitization and storage in a database are not alone adequate for long-term preservation. True archiving requires forethought and custodianship.

Staff equate digital backup and storage in Google Docs or content management systems with archiving, but they are not the same, and were unable to distinguish between backups and an archive. Backups are temporary copies for data recovery in case of damage or loss, while archiving refers to long-term preservation to ensure records will still be available even as technologies change in the future. They expect that other third-party organizations will have copies, such as the Internet Archive, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even if the IA has captured a website, what it collects may be limited to the first level of content and could exclude links, comments, personalized content, and different versions of a story.

There are news archiving technologies being developed; preserving digital content is not a technical challenge, but  a matter of priority and a decision that demonstrates intent. The findings should be a wake-up call to an industry which claims that democracy cannot be sustained without journalism to be a truth and accountability watchdog. "In an era where journalism is already under attack, managing its record and future are as important as ever."

The news organizations are interested in the present: “Who cares what existed 10 years ago? I need my thing now. And so, for better, for worse, if there was some value in [archiving], I probably got a better value out of the new thing.” In short, newsrooms are doing very little to nothing to preserve digital news. And none of the content creators interviewed made an effort to download and preserve the stories they produced.

Deletion is the opposite side of preservation and "news organizations, in certain cases, actively remove content from the public record", which raises questions about the role of journalism in society.

Some key findings of the news organizations participating in the research:

• 19 of the 21 news organizations had no policies or practices for the preservation of their content. Of the 21 news organizations in our study, 19 were not taking any protective steps at all to archive their web output. The remaining two lacked formal preservation strategies.
• Of the 21 news organizations, only six employed news archivists or librarians and their other responsibilities, took the focus away from the work required for preservation. 
• None of the digital-only outlets had a news librarian or archivist on staff. 
• None of the news organizations were preserving their social media publications. Only one was attempting to address the problem.
• Digital-only news organizations were less aware than print publications of the importance of preservation. Very little is currently being done to preserve news.
• Journalism’s primary focus is on “what is new” and preserving documentation of their reporting and what makes it accurate than preserving what ultimately gets published.
• News apps are at high risk of being lost because these new technologies become obsolete before anyone thinks to save them. 
• Partnerships among archivists, technologists, memory institutions, and news organizations will be vital to ensure future access to digitally distributed news content. Two questions to start with: What should be preserved? Who should preserve it?
• To enact lasting change, opinion leaders in the field must introduce to staff and management that archiving ideas make sense  positions, it has advantages, and is compatible with their priorities.

News organizations should care about preserving news for the future just as they care about integrity, reliability, and informing the public not just in the present.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Born-digital news preservation in perspective

Born-digital news preservation in perspective. Clifford Lynch. RJI Online. January 26, 2017. [Video and transcript.]
   The challenge with news and academic journals: how do you preserve this body of information. The journal community has working on that in a much more systematic way. There is a shared consensus among all players that preserving the record of scholarly journal publication is essential. Nobody wants their scholarship to be ephemeral so you have to tell people a convincing story about how their work will be preserved.

The primary responsibility for the active archive in most cases is the publisher, but there must be some kind of external fallback system so content will survive the failure of the publisher and the publisher’s archive. These are usually collaborative. Libraries have been the printed news archive, but that is changing. There is also a Keepers Registry so you can see how many keepers are preserving a given journal. The larger journals are well covered, but the smaller ones are really at risk, and a lot of these are small open source journals. "So, we need to be very mindful of those kinds of dynamics as we think about what to do about strategies for really handling the digital news at scale."

With the news, there are a few very large players, and a whole lot of other small news outlets of various kinds. Different strategies are needed for the two groups. We need to be very cautious about news boundaries. "Now in many, many cases, the journalism is built on top of and links to underlying evidence which at least in the short term is readily inspectable by anyone clicking on a link." But the links deteriorate and the material goes away and "preserving that evidence is really important." But it is unclear who is or should be preserving this. There are also questions about the news, the provenance, the motives, the accuracy, and these have to be handled in a more serious way.

"most social media is actually observation and testimony. Very little of it is synthesized news. It’s much more of the character of a set of testimonies or photographs or things like that. And collectively it can serve to give important documentation to an event, but often it is incomplete and otherwise problematic. We need to come to some kind of social consensus about how social media fits into  the cultural record.

We need to devise some systematic approaches to this because the journalistic organizations really need help; "their archives are genuinely at risk" and in many cases the "long term organizational viability is at risk". We need a public consensus. "We need a recognition that responsible journalism implies a lasting public record of that work." The need for free press is recognized consitutionally. "We cannot, under current law, protect most of this material very effectively without the active collaboration of the content producers." This is too big a job for any single organization, and we don't want a single point of failure.

Digital Preservation Matters.