Something I stress with my journalism students is the importance of having your own home on the internet, either in the form of a newsletter or a blog, so that you have a repository for your work.
But you’ll notice I didn’t say “permanent” repository. Probably the two most widely used platforms, Medium and Substack, are owned by corporate entities that could disappear or change their terms in various onerous ways.
For Media Nation I use WordPress software with a hosting service, GoDaddy, which at least in theory is a safer bet. But something could go wrong with WordPress so that there would no longer be anyone to provide critical security updates. Or GoDaddy could Go Out of Business. The Internet Archive is invaluable, but it doesn’t scrape everything. The bottom line is that you have to stay on top of things if you want to keep the tumbleweeds from blowing into your digital homestead.
Which is why I was interested to read this interview with Brandon Tauszik, a fellow with the Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford, who is involved in designing low-cost ways for journalists to preserve their work.
As Tauszik told Poynter’s Tony Elkins:
A publication could just go out of business and take down whatever content they want. Your writing is not permanent. Your photography is not permanent. Anything you’re putting online is short-lived and will probably vanish. If I were to pass away tomorrow and my credit cards stopped, a lot of these projects of mine would just vanish, be gone for good and never come back.
As Elkins notes, this phenomenon is known as “link rot,” or “the gradual decay of URLs and websites as they become broken, inaccessible or deleted over time.”
Tauszik has experienced this himself. He discovered that a project he had put together for the International Committee of the Red Cross called Syria Street had disappeared, which he discovered when he went looking for it after being approached by a prospective client. Although it took some work, he was able to revive it. But it speaks to the ephemeral nature of all things digital.
Elkins’ interview includes Lindsay Walker, also of the Starling Lab. I found a lot of what they talked about to be above my tech pay grade, but essentially they’ve used various tools, including the blockchain (gah!), to come up with something called the Interplanetary File System that can cost as little as $10 a year to preserve an inactive website. He also recommends free tools like Webrecorder.
These solutions don’t really solve the problem of link rot. As anyone who links out while they’re writing knows, those links may stop working at some point. For the purposes of maintaining valid links, it doesn’t really matter whether the sites you’re linking to move to a different URL or disappear altogether. But certainly preserving a site at a new location is better than losing it.
The Philippines and the press
A remarkable story about freedom of the press is playing out in the Philippines, where the former president, Rodrigo Duterte, has been whisked off to The Hague. Duterte has been charged by the International Criminal Court with unleashing a campaign of assassinations that were supposedly aimed at drug traffickers. That campaign may have claimed as many as 30,000 lives.
Duterte’s departure from office made life easier for the Philippines’ most prominent journalist, Maria Resser, especially as a rift opened up between Duterte and his successor, Bongbong Marcos. And as Erika Page reports for The Christian Science Monitor, Duterte’s arrest has provided Resser with some degree of vindication as well.
“It took almost a decade,” Ressa told Page, adding that the arrest is a “reminder to the rest of the world that impunity ends, and accountability starts at some point. It will come for you sooner or later.”
Ressler won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work with Rappler, a digital news organization that she co-founded. She was also interviewed a half-dozen years ago by Al Jazeera about the harassment and threats faced by female journalists around the world.
Racism beyond the grave
Kudos to Task & Purpose, an independent news organization covering the military community, which broke the shocking news Friday that Arlington National Cemetery had taken down links from its website noting the achievements of Black, Hispanic and women veterans. Matt White reports:
[T]he cemetery’s public website has scrubbed dozens of pages on gravesites and educational materials that include histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery, along with educational material on dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and maps of prominent gravesites of Marine Corps veterans and other services.
Cemetery officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the pages were “unpublished” to meet recent orders by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.
Academic lesson plans were removed as well. White was told by a cemetery spokesperson that some of the materials would be restored. We’ll see.
The story was picked up by The Washington Post, The New York Times and NPR, among others. And it should be noted that the first person to reveal these reprehensible actions was Kevin Levin, a Civil War historian who wrote about it for his newsletter on March 8. In an interview with Task & Purpose, Levin said, “I’ll put it bluntly, this is a shitshow.”
An E&P boost for Belmont
Those of us who live in Greater Boston have benefitted from the rise of independent local news outlets to replace weekly newspapers either shut down or gutted by the Gannett chain. These projects, both print and digital, are mostly nonprofit, though there are a few for-profits as well.
Last week Gretchen A. Peck of Editor & Publisher profiled one of those projects — The Belmont Voice, a print weekly with a robust website that debuted in January 2024. The nonprofit Voice is on the larger end of such projects, launching with $500,000 in grants and donations and operating with a $200,000 annual budget. It’s also got a staff of four editorial and business-side people, headed by editor Jesse Floyd, a Gannett refugee.
“We are trying to make it feel like what a community newspaper felt like in the 1970s when you knew the editor, you knew the reporter, and these people were at all the town events,” Floyd told Peck. That presence in the community is exactly how local journalism can rebuild civic engagement, and it’s what’s missing from the AI-powered projects that have gotten (too much) attention recently.
I was especially impressed to learn that the Voice has signed up 2,100 subscribers for its weekly newsletter. There are about 10,400 households in Belmont, giving the Voice’s newsletter a 21% penetration rate, even though the print edition is also mailed for free to every home.
Not getting a mention in Peck’s article is The Belmontian, an older, much smaller news outlet.
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In preparation for the burial at Arlington last fall of my Uncle Dick, a retired naval officer, I did a lot of reading on the cemetery’s website. I thought it did a pretty good job of highlighting the valor of men and women from all backgrounds who had served our country, including many who died for it. I’m appalled that these stories are being taken down because Trump and Musk are bigots.