When I wrote yesterday that I felt that I was on the cusp of a new era in my working life, I wasn’t expecting that to be confirmed so very quickly.
Earlier on, I discovered that the old Next Conference site, which I contributed to for over 14 years, was now redirecting to the homepage of Accenture in Germany. Given that the site only stopped publishing back in April, when a strategic change of direction led to the cancelling of this year’s event, that was much sooner than I expected. My work isn’t lost – I have multiple back-ups of my writing there over the decade or so I worked with them, over 1000 posts, in all – but it is gone from the web.
I survived my “strategic realignment” courtesy of a lamp post. My work didn't survive one decided by a budget-setter.
And that really hammers home that this feels like the end of an era — and reminds us how fragile online archives are.
My post-full time journalism career
Since I went self-employed in 2012, the vast majority of my writing has only appeared in a few places: this site, my more personal blog – and the NEXT Insights blog. The latter was my first client when I left RBI in 2011, and I worked with them for 14 years, with a small slow down in the early pandemic. To see much of that body of work just gone from the main internet is slightly shocking. Some of it can still be found on the conference’s Medium account. And, of course, the Wayback Machine has just about the whole site. But a body of work, swept away by (presumably) a corporate cost/branding decision.
The internet is both remarkably robust — you can still read almost everything I've written on this site over 23 years — and shockingly ephemeral, since a single decision can wipe work out entirely. Many of the blogs I launched at RBI back in the 2000s now only exist via the Wayback Machine. Years of work, by dozens of people, abandoned and scrubbed from the record.
And, unlike with paper publications, there won’t be copies stored in the legal deposit libraries for future generations to look back at.
Preserving the journalistic record
I’m a natural archivist. I think we should keep our journalism online and accessible for as long as we can – because we never know when that old story, that old quote, that old revelation could become relevant again. But, all too often, the closure or merger of a title leads to the loss of the archives.
My work for my first two journalism jobs only existed in paper copies, but would be findable with enough time in the libraries. The same would apply to my decade on Estates Gazette — but all of my work there was also posted online. Does that online content still exist given the sale of the title a year or so back? Difficult to tell, given that much of the content is behind a paywall, but I can find articles of mine going back to the 1990s, including what might well have been my first piece there, so I suspect it does.
It saddens me that publishers are withdrawing from having their work archived by the Internet Archive, because of worries over AI using it as a training backdoor. It makes the legacy of our online work all the more fragile. Keeping good digital archives is a service to the future of journalism. I wish more people paid attention to it.
For example, I wonder how many of today’s Substack users keep regular backups of their content there. How much of today’s discourse from the internet will be lost as *.substack.com sites evaporate at some future date, just as all the *.typepad.com ones did last year?
As one poster on the Facebook Archivists Think Tank group put it:
I was browsing online tonight and found out that Typepad is defunct when I clicked on a link in an article. Typepad was the hosting service for my late friend Marianna's blog. How much of it is archived and how much is lost forever I don't know. But it's a reminder not to assume that "the Internet is forever."
No, the internet certainly is not forever.
