Why archiving is essential to media independence

The web has amplified journalism's reach tenfold but also weakened its memory. Exposed to technical hazards, political and financial pressures, years of work can vanish without a trace. In this context, archiving becomes an act of resistance.

Over the years, I've worked in newsrooms where finding an article meant digging through filing cabinets, sorting through dog-eared or yellowed issues, sometimes miraculously intact. When my pieces were printed, I could keep a copy, and even today, I know they exist somewhere. Finding them again may be laborious, but they truly belong to me and can only disappear through my own carelessness. For my articles published online, it's a different story. While a few keywords typed into a browser are enough to bring most of them back up, their fate is completely beyond my control. Stored on hard drives humming away in servers whose location I couldn't pinpoint or whose owner I couldn't name, they can vanish without a trace. This is a problem for me as a journalist, but also for press independence and the right to information.

Silent disappearances, massive losses

We always think this only happens to other people… until it happens to us. Media outlets like Game Informer and The Messenger have shut down abruptly, taking years of journalism with them. When Vice was on the verge of shutting down, its employees rushed to use the “Save as PDF” feature to save whatever they could, as reported by the Nieman Lab. Not out of nostalgia, but to preserve the fruits of their labor. Because without an archive, there’s no portfolio—and therefore no leverage to bounce back once they’re back on the job market.

Yet the risk doesn't lie solely in buyouts or bankruptcies of news outlets. A cyberattack, a computer failure, or even a simple software change can be enough to make large quantities of content disappear. The threat is also political. In 2023, El Periódico (Guatemala) ceased publication following political and economic pressure. Its website remained online for only three days, lacking the resources to keep the servers running. In the United States, Donald Trump's executive orders led to the deletion of thousands of pages from federal websites, some of which contained crucial information about public health or climate change. If publicly vital information (since preserved by archivists) can be erased with the stroke of a pen, why should the press escape the same fate?

Archiving for Independence and the Right to Information

The web gives the illusion of permanence. A deceptive belief that is far from harmless, diverting us from practices essential to preserving our digital content, which is far more vulnerable than we care to admit. Organizing a book burning is laborious, noisy, and discreet. Unplugging a server, on the other hand, is simple, radical, and invisible. As researcher Megan Sapnar Ankerson points out: "It is far easier to find a 1924 film than a 1994 website". We would not entrust Amazon with managing and preserving all our books, newspapers and magazines for the future, yet we carelessly store our articles in digital warehouses over which we have no control. A dangerous dependence creating precarious tenants, accommodating this organized dispossession. In this configuration, archiving becomes an essential condition for independence.

Archiving is also a fundamental duty to readers, essential actors in independent journalism through their engagement, subscriptions, and donations. Can we deprive them of the content they made possible, simply because a website closes or a company changes its priorities? Can we condition free access to information in the public interest on commercial decisions, technical constraints, and purely capitalist logic?

A concrete emergency

Archiving is not just a problem for the future. It already affects us today. The phenomenon of "link rot" is already threatening our digital heritage. According to the Pew Research Center, one quarter of web pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are now inaccessible. A study on the New York Times revealed that 25% of the links used in its articles directing to a specific page were broken. Archiving concerns the entire web ecosystem, not just media. It is about preserving the long-term value of journalistic content, which loses credibility when its references disappear.

As Vladimir Tybin, head of the legal deposit digital department at the BnF, explains regarding archiving Skyblogs: " We don't know what will interest researchers in 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now." From anecdotal posts to in-depth investigations, anything can become an archive. Journalism is not limited to articles published on a website either: Instagram carousels, TikTok videos, X threads, newsletters… These formats play a crucial and growing role in the dissemination of information, but they are also the most vulnerable, hosted on private platforms subject to commercial logic and arbitrary, volatile moderation policies.

A neglected issue, a responsibility to take on

While the internet enabled an unprecedented explosion of new media outlets, it also created the most fragile collection of reportage, investigations and interviews. A 2019 study by the Tow Center showed, for example, that 19 of the 21 newsrooms studied had no preservation measures in place. The reason: a persistent illusion of digital permanence, coupled with the belief that hosting on a CMS like WordPress or in a Drive was enough to ensure content longevity. Yet storage is not archiving. Archiving requires implementing rigorous protocols and a long-term vision to guarantee sustainable access, resistant to technological upheaval and erasure attempts motivated by political or economic interests. While initiatives like Internet Archive accomplish fundamental preservation work, they cannot bear alone the burden of digital memory as the organization notes in its latest report. Web archiving requires broad, active and collective mobilization.

How to do it?

Below, we have listed some recommendations to start implementing an archiving policy:

Establish transparency protocols for article removal or modification
Make sure you are included in BnF collections or request to be.
Don't leave a blank 404 page when an article is deleted: explain why it's no longer available.
Plan for an early site closure and communicate it to your readers to explain what will happen to the site's contents if it ever closes.
Designate a reference person for archiving matters.
Install the Internet Archive extension to quickly and easily archive pages.
Test your ability to find your own content internally (videos, photos…)
Use permalink tools for external sources.