Yesterday
we discussed highways wiping out whole neighborhoods.
Today, let’s turn our attention to modern day
newspapers disappearing and possibly taking their digital archive with them!
Anyone who has done research into historic
newspapers knows that there are newspapers for which NO archives survive. Just the other day in a post What would you
put in a time capsule? I discussed the
discovery of an edition of an African-American newspaper for which there is no
known archive!
How
often do you look through the wonderful Chronicling
America U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present, and find only fragments of a newspapers run survive?
Maybe a handful of editions for a newspaper that existed for decades survive!
Sometimes
the one glimmer of hope is that I have found in the 1800s that it was not
uncommon for newspapers to share news published in other newspapers – I am
always thankful when I search a digital newspaper archive and discover a tidbit
of news published from another newspaper which I cannot access. Well, I could if I had a time machine.
I
bring this up since it’s easy to think of this as being as issue for just “old”
and “long ago” published newspapers. It’s
not. The Columbia Journalism Review
published Can
the Boston Phoenix’s digital history be saved? The article
is about a newspaper than was shuttered in 2013 seeking a home for its print
and digital archives.
How
many smaller circulation newspapers with print and/or web versions are not
planning for their possible demise?
All
too often it’s the smaller more localized newspapers that really give us
stories about our ancestors. The bigger
city and circulation newspapers have to cover a lot of territory. It’s the local newspaper that gave you tons of
social news, covered very event. In many ways, there were not news items too
small to publish!
We
still have the same situation today, though it might just be that it’s a
web-based news outlet we are reading ...
I
sure hope that those smaller and often alternative newspapers are preparing for
the future.
I
just now checked The Newtown Bee archive. The
online archive may only go back about 15 years and there were some older news
items (I imagine subsequently republished) from my high school years ... Phew!
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