"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.

Researchers, historians, and citizens around the world rely on the web archives of local news sites to do their work.

“Blocking the Internet Archive’s web crawlers threatens one of the most effective ways that we capture and store news content for the long term,” Edward McCain, a journalism librarian at the University of Missouri, said. “In the present we may have some workarounds, but in the long run, it weakens a vital link in primary source materials that we need to understand where we’ve been and where we want to go.”

Working journalists are among the most frequent users of the Wayback Machine’s local news archives. Over the last month, online petitions have called for news media companies to allow the Internet Archive to preserve their journalism."

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/more-than-340-local-news-outlets-are-limiting-the-internet-archives-access-to-their-journalism/

#InternetArchiving #DigitalArchiving #News #Journalism #Media #DigitalPreservation

#InternetHistory #DigitalPreservation #InternetArchive #GoogleSearch #Google #InternetArchiving: "In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

How It Works
To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.

Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time."

https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access-archived-webpages-directly-through-google-search/

'Vanishing publications: we hear from the experts working on the preservation of online scholarship'

Today is World Digital Preservation Day and in honour of this important day, I have spoken with a range of experts who are working on the preservation of online scholarly content. Contributions from Alicia Wise of CLOCKSS; Rebekka Kieswetter and Miranda Barnes who work on the Open Book Futures (OBF) project; and James O'Sullivan of the C-21 Editions project. We close with insights on University College Cork (UCC) journals from my library colleague Paul Davidson. Check out the latest blog series on UCC Library's The River-Side Blog:

https://theriverside.ucc.ie/2023/11/02/preservation-online-publications/

Image: ‘Erasing’ by plasticsparrows via Flickr. CC BY 2.0

#DigiPres #WDPD2023 #InternetArchiving