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.