The Wayback Machine's snapshots of news publishers' homepages have plummeted after a "breakdown" in archiving projects.
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We are the Nieman Journalism Lab, part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. We're trying to figure out the future of news.
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.
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.
It's not just news sites. Snapshots of government homepages are also affected.
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:
amaBhungane has fought off a "gag order" by a powerful South African businessman in court and its muckraking has led a president to resign.
Their tagline: “Digging dung, fertilizing democracy.” https://buff.ly/3WmQF7H
“This is supposed to be a site supporting writers, not market speculators, gamblers, false prophets and snake-oil sales persons.”
Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction betting platform, is launching a Substack integration. https://buff.ly/3zWGpve
The EU is threatening to fine Meta for saying Facebook is "free."
(What about the ~spiritual~ cost?)
1 million newsletter subscribers, 10 staffers — and no editors?
https://pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/ai-newsletters-publishers-trending-now/
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https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/22/24203924/slack-iphone-ipad-ios-ipados-widgets
