Nieman Journalism LabThe Wayback Machine's snapshots of news publishers' homepages have plummeted after a "breakdown" in archiving projects.
Nieman Lab analyzed the homepage URLs of 100 news sites (including the top 50 English language sites, top international news sites, and local news sites) and found an 87% decline in snapshots in the last 5 months of this year. Here are just a few examples:
Wayback Machine director Mark Graham told Nieman Lab there was “a breakdown in some specific archiving projects in May that caused less archives to be created for some sites."
He said article pages aren't affected. He also said some of the missing snapshots will become available in time.
Ultimately, "this points to a broader problem with how dependent we all are on a single, amazingly useful organization to try and cover the bulk of the work for web archiving,” @tjowens told us.