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The Awl’s archives are gone, the editors of journalism collective Flaming Hydra reported this week: “Every original link to every single one of the thousands of pieces published at The Awl between its founding in 2009 and its demise nine years later is broken. Links from newspapers, from magazines, from blogs, Tumblrs and Instagram accounts; links from tweets, links in old emails, all are broken.” Portions of the site’s content can be found at the Wayback Machine or in a paywalled Medium archive, but the original links, in their original context, have vanished.
Of course, readers lose out in these types of situations, Hanaa’ wrote this week, but so do the journalists who wrote the stories, as well as the historians who might study the past couple decades of online journalism one day. She spoke with several journalists who have taken archiving their work into their own hands. It’s worthwhile, but a slog — even if you’re not considering the bananas-but-now-totally-plausible scenario outlined by Talya Cooper, former archivist for The Intercept and now a research curation librarian at NYU: “What happens when that information is baked into large language models and the source of that information is not live on the web anymore?…How will it be possible, in the future, to trace back some of the claims that will be made by ChatGPT if the content is no longer alive?”
— Laura Hazard Owen
From the weekThe transit beat is becoming the climate beat“A lot of times, people are not drawn in when climate is the top line. So I like to start with [a question like] ‘O.K., what’s affecting your daily life?’” By Neel Dhanesha. |
How Norway’s public broadcaster overhauled its climate coverageIn 2023, stories produced by the organization’s climate teams outperformed the average story on the website in 11 months out of 12, often dramatically. By Katherine Dunn. |
To preserve their work — and drafts of history — journalists take archiving into their own handsFrom loading up the Wayback Machine to meticulous AirTables to 72 hours of scraping, journalists are doing whatever they can to keep their clips when websites go dark. By Hanaa' Tameez. |
AI search engine Perplexity launches revenue sharing with six news publishersThe partner publishers include the nonprofit Texas Tribune and Wordpress.com owner Automattic. By Andrew Deck. |
There’s a 77% chance you’re gonna see more news betting in your news readingAre prediction markets “the best tool we have to fight back against bullshit, clickbait, and propaganda” — or “just a euphemism for online gambling”? By Laura Hazard Owen. |
How amaBhungane has redefined investigative journalism in southern Africa“I think the level of corruption and dysfunction and organized crime has grown. It’s much harder to decide — given our limited resources — where we put our efforts.” By Kate Bartlett. |
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