What do historians lose with the decline of local news?
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
I do research for people trying to find answers for their relatives who were patients in the past. Some of these people have already checked ancestry.com and whatever historical newspapers they can get access to.
It's getting harder and harder to find any answers online. Newspapers.com seems to have LESS available every day. I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug.
/rant
I am personally so sick of copyright laws, but I always have felt that way. I just get upset when people are surprised that someone has pulled all rights to a publication on microfilm. The rats nest of legal issues involved basically means that we lose access to things we'd be willing to pay for. The only way for me to confirm a claim like "but it was on the front page of the Denver News" is to take a trip to Denver and try to find the microfilm.
rant/
Equally frustrating, this would prevent an amateur archivist (sometimes called a “criminal”) from storing and offering copies of such things.
(This isn't to say that it should be thrown out, but that the first step to archiving is to enumerate and cover the costs.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a...
<https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6...>
How widely it was used prior to that time, and what filmstock selection practices specific institutions followed I don't know, though I suspect these may have varied.
As for current polyester filmstock:
Black-and-white polyester film has a life expectancy of 500+ years under proper storage conditions.
(From the same source.)
I assume we are about to get a big lesson in this with Imgur removing all nsfw images and images uploaded without a user account.
I’m realizing the web isn’t a static thing at all, it’s just some wriggling ever-evolving snake we are experiencing and riding and watching the tail disappear and a new head born continuously. “You can’t step your foot in the same internet twice.”
I miss microfiche.
On the other hand, myspace profiles and Cartoon Network shows are already good examples of losing data. Cartoon Network is especially unfortunate because some of the shows weren't ripped, so illegitimate sources won't help you obtain them. The creators of other shows publicly tweeted how they had to pirate their own show for their kids, because it wasn't available to stream.
I believe the internet is good, but I have also been realizing that I made bad assumptions about how companies will handle data.
I hate corporate decisions. If this show lives on, it will be thanks to piracy. Thank the pirates!
That's a desire that IMO directly conflicts with society's desire to keep history. So as long as we have powerful groups that specifically want the ability to erase parts of history, historians will have a bad time.
I am sorry to report to you that even chunks of Usenet are missing. Specifically, significant chunks between the UTzoo archive and DejaNews are just... gone? There are posts, for instance, to alt.video.laserdisc to which I can find only replies and not the OP.
Digitizing large archives is pretty labor intensive, plus you need to get specialized hardware and software. All that for stuff only a small minority of people care about, and while funding is getting reduced...
As someone who has been involved in digitizing a college newspaper in the past, it takes quite a bit of effort and well >$10K even with a lot of volunteer labor. (Which may not sound like a lot of money but actually is for a volunteer organization in many cases.) And it's not just digitizing. It's having enough metadata that the result is useful to anyone other than the hardest core historian.
That's just awful and irresponsible. Someday someone's going to do something like that, blithely assuming there's another copy somewhere, but it will turn out they junked the last one.
Some random guy bought the domain years ago and didn’t have anything he wanted to do with it so he just redirected to Gruber’s site.
The only evidence I can find of it now is here:
While destroying the last microfilm copy is a tragedy, I'm less confident that the person is being irresponsible. Preserving culture legally is difficult to do. Some people have weird beliefs that the law is somehow advisory and common sense rather than the law.
Also, I'm an old man, no amendments written after I was born have passed.
The other option is to only sing music from before the turn of the last century.
At least in the US, there's a very longstanding practice of local libraries maintaining newspaper archives (as bound volumes* or microfiche/microfilm). I'd be super-super surprised if there was any legal issue to doing that.
* For pop-culture example, see Back to the Future 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfmdW3hiu8w.
If people are destroying the last copy of something, copyright was probably involved. That is what copyright does; stops people creating copies of things. Otherwise there'll be some eccentric acting as an archivist - look how hard the content creators have to fight to stop their work being publicly recorded on the internet. The system is designed to stop the sort of people who do that, which absolutely includes library archivists. They'll be in the crosshairs of some lobbyist.
I think you're trying to inject a copyright angle without any kind of evidence it's significant in this scenario. And it doesn't apply: https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/copyright/libraries.
I think (at least when it comes to public libraries), there are also other factors at play. For instance: a frequent self-understanding that they're not an archive (which is only somewhat true), and a motivation to "serve their customers" by focusing on "popular" services, and a misunderstanding of what the internet is.
It isn't like there is any shortage of people thinking that sort of record is worth preserving. Lots of people do. There is a shortage of people legally aloud to make copies. Because, as mentioned, copyright.
And of course libraries have succumbed to a kind of identity panic, "Who are we in the Age of Google?" Everything is online, so ... let's just pitch this stuff to make room.
Make room for what? Again the identity panic: maybe we are a community center, so let's set aside space for this and that and the other thing, which is still more pressure on the extant catalog.
And so those big shelves of microfilm just sit there, haven't been looked at in ages, might as well pitch 'em. It's all online now. Now. Maybe not later.
I worked in an academic library for a long time. These problems are endemic.
"Where it's easy for someone to edit. Do you by chance, have a copy of 1984 I can check out?"
I mean really, we're bound by a legal regime here that almost nobody wants but we're too collectively disorganized to break out of it. So let us embrace that which we cannot control.
It's time for mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world again. The centre is holding too long. It's time for things to fall apart. Create the crisis and don't let it go to waste.
Let's see Time Inc chase down Grandmothers with million dollar fines for sharing a copy of a 40 year old newspaper like the RIAA did with mp3s. Revolutions require battles and it seems to be the only way this stuff seems to get fixed.
Name suggestion: Hist-Hub
But due to having all the metadata, one of those parties going down wouldn't be the end of the world, you could just wait until somebody else reuploads it and retrieve it from there.
The main problem after all isn't storing the data, storage is cheap these days, but that the act of mirroring is so damn ugly and brittle. URLs don't last because they encode the storage location, not the content and that's something one could fix with such a metadata database.
They’re doing very well and are popular.
However my local news basically consists of reporting what crimes happened in my area (republishing the police's press reports) and the results of my local handball club I don't care about. No wonder I don't read my local news.
There's a similar free paper in my (suburban) area. They also include pretty thorough news about the local school districts: https://adamspg.com.
I don't know how well they're doing through, since they every once in a while send solicitations for donations to fund their operations (and I think they're a for-profit).
Somebody thought it was a one-time uplift and was done. Firstly, all data digital or mechanical or physical demands maintenance, Secondly, it's never done, as more materials always arise requiring archival assessment and inclusion.
That was the mindset back in the 00's - just put everything on a cd or hdd and it'll be there forever, then you can get rid of the bulky source material. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. lost backups, ransomware, incompatible media files....
I avoid news like the plague - all narrative, all emotion, all written by English majors, not subject-matter experts. If a current-ian has to avoid the news, what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time, given only a storm of past-due emotional clickbait?
Future historians can learn more from dispassionate recording of facts, not local news. They would be better served by databases that have lists of facts about current times in simple data formats. Stats, voting records, laws, commodity prices, demographics, weather data, boring (but low-key fascinating) things like that.
Those reasons are also the important bit of history, because they're what allow us to (hopefully, we're not doing a great job of it lately) avoid making the same mistakes our ancestors did.
Expanding on that thought: What hope do we have of understanding history a hundred years or longer ago? Right now today, with a huge amount of true information available for anybody who takes time to look a little, almost everybody around us is 100% propagandized and will believe the opposite tomorrow of what they believed yesterday if the TV tells them to.
Taking history as it is "taught" as any truth value is ridiculous, since we know that the rulers of each age have used history mostly as a tool for their own political goals. Even today, it is quite apparent that most historians go into the profession as political activists primarily and researchers secondarily, often having decided first what they want to "discover".
Find the remains of a huge ship where you didn't expect it? - Trying to impress neighbours.
Find fortifications in a place and from an age where you have no record of conflict? - Trying to impress neighbours.
The reason of course is because these historians all have gone to universities and live in this city where the inhabitants are infamous for their anxiety to impress their neighbours.
So historians might not root for any team anymore, but they see historical research as mainly a tool to justify and spread their own beliefs. Of course there are much more polemic examples than the one I gave above.
> what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time
It could be really insightful if it's possible to see how a specific wikipedia article evolved on an annual basis over the past 100 years, assuming it's still around.
E.g. for the most political topics, like "abortion", I imagine an annual snapshot and comparing the page between years/eras would provide a lot of historical insight on how "truth" shifts year to year.
Also, how do you plan to make investment decisions without considering emotion? Are you betting on perfectly efficient markets?
I'm saying newspapers are fundamentally incapable of giving unbiased and useful data that broader society can rely on. If you want a daily dose of outrage, perfect. If you want actionable information, look elsewhere.
Even if everything you say is true, such newspapers are still very valuable in a historical context because they preserve things like what the "daily dose of outrage" was about, its broader context etc.
Now they don’t even try.
That’s what people are complaining about.
What leads you to believe this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity#His...
I was also married to a (now former) WSJ reporter with a master’s in journalism.
To claim that journalistic objectivity was not a thing is so ignorantly wrong, it could only be a product of the modern clickbait propaganda that has taken its place.
And now that there are, the examples of American media fabricating stories, getting stories wrong, blindly repeating corporate or government propaganda or failing to look critically (or even intelligently) at the narratives they spread are so numerous that to assume we live in an anomalous phase of media corruption seems far less likely than that media has always been like this and people are only now aware of just how utterly rotten it all is. That's all the evidence anyone needs.
National news is also diminishing. There's considerably less hard news, and more touchy-feely background stories.
Unlike print media, internet sites are not required to submit their material to Library of Congress or similar government-run archives all over the world that have requirements on archival, durability and whatnot. Twitter used to have a firehose feed to LoC but IIRC it got discontinued years ago.
And that doesn't even touch the question of integrity - it's hard enough to vet actual local news sources if they're authentic (there was a scandal some years ago about a lot of "content mills" from the Balkans), and outright impossible with local bloggers, Nextdoor or whatever.
Maybe that content is on social media now, or wikipedia, or somewhere else, but there is more than ever out there.
This is nothing but FUD about FUD.
Articles sourced from Twitter threads and TikTok videos do not provide anything resembling objective reporting.
Edit: getting a lot of down votes but not a lot of discussion below. This isn't just a "whatever maaaaaan I'm not a part of this system" post. It's also not a thinly veiled attempt to push a political view. I really am talking about objectivity.
For example, even among publications that share my general bias, it is easy to identify that they are omitting information that could be relevant in the name of cohesion and persuasion.
I am not willing to ascribe a certain motive for it because there is truthfully a lot of potential motivations. But that doesn't change the fact that the bias exists, and we cannot call it objective as a result.
The problem is that the news business has largely failed, and for the few players left, objectivity is no longer the goal, whether that’s due to explicit choice to prioritize ideology over objectivity, and/or simply prioritizing survival. It’s expensive to produce good journalism.
Said another way: we can make 'logically' true statements easily, but struggle with anything physical.
Newspapers do the kind of in depth investigation as their bread in butter that other mediums rarely if ever participate in.
They've got a lot of clout and use their platforms to direct their audiences to attack anyone that criticizes them and the locals that do things they don't like. It's surreal.
That's not the kind of journalism that's constructive or informative, but it isn't boring like reading board meeting minutes in a local news article.
Right now a lot of journalism adjacent local reporting is buzzfeed style "list" videos where my town or county is mentioned. I am not sure where that falls, because it can highlight unique things about a place, but arguably not newsworthy. I don't think the incentives will ever there to cover local news in the way you are describing. On the other hand government twitter accounts have been genuinely useful for finding local events, my local news never did that for me.
People pay little attention to local news, and even less now that they can get continuous updates of momentous events from all over the world. The local news is much more relevant, but far less entertaining.
If they go under, or if rights-holders have their way with them, then we're left with a Myspace, Geocities or Vine situation where tomes of content will literally be deleted from what's left of the historical record as time goes on.
I backup my Twitter timeline[1], Fediverse timeline and Instagram posts but I appreciate that's an infinitesimal drop in the ocean.
[1] Also a whole bunch of other stuff like "favourites on twitter/instagram/flickr/etc" get IFTTT'd to Pinboard, Day One, Dropbox, Perkeep, etc.
My wife is a historian. A nontrivial amount of her work is reading about petty business squabbles from centuries past in various letters to state actors. Those letters contain narratives, biases, goals, and even just straight up lies. And dealing with this is a basic part of being a historian.
A historian who reads a postcard from a WW1 soldier and determines that it is a transparant depiction of everyday life without further analysis is the sort of person I'd expect to never get a faculty position.
Already the old Youtube videos on places seem corrupted.
I think the internet is going to have a rough long-term effect on history because, while information is easy to present online, preserving it can be nearly impossible.
In an ephemeral world, it's easier than ever to destroy the ephemera. That scares me. It should scare you too.
Of course there is the Internet Archive, but if one looks into the stewardship of that project, it is quite vulnerable in the long term. There are key people whose departures would compromise the viability of the project. Perhaps we need the digital equivalent of the Svaldbard seed vault for digital archives--a state-maintained facility storing the bulk of Internet history in a geologically stable server farm.
Like DamnInteresting, I literally work in this space. I see these issues up close. And I think that there is a real risk that we’re going to have echoes of what actually happened long-term because of link rot and similar factors.
I once did a piece about an early internet-era book in which, as an experiment, I tested to see if the links worked. Most of them were dead. But the book was still with us.
That is the real problem with internet culture. All the stuff from before 1995 or so will make it online because it is largely in physical form. We have already lost most of the good stuff produced after it, despite the Internet Archive’s best efforts.
Not very searchable, though. I think if future historians can search NextDoor and all the little neighborhood newspapers, they'll be better off. That's a big IF, considering the paywalls.
You clearly aren't getting my point.
I'm arguing for 100 biased-perspectives over 1 biased-perspective
They probably aren't even reporting the final numbers in the local council election.
Assuming NextDoor's dataset is around in 100 years (probably not) there will be some topics well represented. But you are going to have huge gaps in others.
How many historical nextdoors are you aware of? For me, none. But is that because they don’t exist or just that no record survived? Social media is secret society.
You will find no greater hive of scum and villainy than Nextdoor.
Contrast that with the common public, who will of course not waste their time writing about or discussing matters that they do not have any interest in.
The demise of local news is symptomatic of a less diversified, a de-localized digital society that practically operates in a single unified space.
Somehow we need to make sure there are healthy ecosystems of locally bound "screens" that capture the local affairs of people.
Does your "local news" not cover your local area at all? I highly doubt that.
If it does cover your local area at all, there is historical value to it. It doesn't matter if the stories are cookie cutter or not.
It's not the major news outlets' fault that local news can't be bothered to have decent websites/apps and actually maintain their archives.
The biggest issue is that local news used to be funded by classified ads, mostly. Since most of the functions served by classified ads migrated to the internet, no one has yet figured out an alternative funding model.
One unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
Obituaries that appeared in print newspapers during the 20th century were easily disseminated and decentrally archived (typically by loved ones and libraries), making them relatively rot-tolerant. In contrast, digital obituaries in the 21th century tend to be centrally archived and often behind paywalls, making them susceptible to digital rot and difficult for organizations acting in the public interest to archive.
The for-profit company Legacy.com controls a strikingly large share of the market for digital obituaries. Unfortunately, the newspapers and funeral homes themselves often don’t maintain their own copies of the obituaries. And while some of the deceased’s loved ones might print out hard copies of a digital obituary, others might simply bookmark the URL and assume that the content will always be there. What happens if Legacy.com or one of the smaller memorial sites goes out of business or experiences some sort of data loss? Because of the centralized nature of how these digital obituaries are stored, it’s possible that very few other organizations will have archived copies of the content.
Viewer now feels 'informed'.
At one point I realized that watching the news left me emotionally exhuasted, so I stopped watching it. Surprisingly my older relatives have done the same in the last couple of years. When I asked, they also called it too exhausting to watch. They are anxious about using technology, they aren't getting information through a different medium instead. They told me, "if I need to know about it, someone will bring it up."
I personally don't think local news still has the same value it did in a pre-broadband time. The primary source is now accessible directly, through social media. And in my opinion, a lot of powerful journalism and journalism adjacent independent reporting happens on youtube/twitter. This independence allows better and nuanced reporting that otherwise wasn't possible. Paper media is on a decline, paper news has been dead for a while. I imagine any paper that refused to embrace the internet is gone now.
A primary source that is social media based?
Well
let's just say I just wouldn't stake a large force on that information, and I wouldn't advise you do so either. If it actually counts, social media is not terribly reliable these days.