Technology

Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you’re not aware, not very good for the public interest.

Four months later and Nieman Lab now notes that the number of news outlets blocking the archive has soared to around 340 organizations:

“Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global Capital.”

Many of these localities are already effectively news deserts, where most real local journalism was hollowed out and replaced by a smattering of local right wing broadcasters (like Sinclair Broadcasting) or a hedge fund run “local newspaper” that doesn’t do much in the way of actual local reporting. That’s generally also been terrible for informed consensus or shedding a light on local corruption.

Most of the work I've published has been removed from the web. Archival services help us retain history in an era where the physical local paper is not archived by libraries.