This is something I deal with all the time. I volunteer at our local historical society and also at the museum of our state hospital (insane asylum) museum.
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.
> 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.
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.
Here in Australia I once saw a community choir shut down over the combination of copyright and public liability. I haven't seen a second choir so I don't know how common that is.
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.
> 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.
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.
I was also surprised. Australia has a long tradition to community choirs. Most cultures do, in fact.
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 (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.
And yet, by the magic of there being only one way it could happen, the day that someone destroys the last copy of the microfilm will be because copyright prevented the people who wanted from keeping a copy from doing so.
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.
Music licensing is an absolute bitch, which is why many MANY church choirs all sing from the same book, because that book has been vetted and they have performance licenses.
The other option is to only sing music from before the turn of the last century.
This would be the US Constitution as interpreted by a half dozen corrupt weirdos who were selected for their partisan bona fides and can't be dismissed for any reason, right?
Libraries are under continual space pressure. Books come in, the buildings stay the same size. Thus, "weeding."
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.
It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance.
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.
What I'd like to see is a global repository of just pure metadata, file hashes, descriptions, thumbnails, everything you can get away with under the current law. That way you could organize all the data freely and publicly, while you could leave the retrieval to other, potential illegal, parties (torrent, IPFS, random websites, ...).
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.
It takes a lot more space than bits on a hard drive. I am curious though why libraries didn't have their microfilm digitized before getting rid of it. Maybe a case of thinking "well it must be online somewhere" and that's what everyone thought...
As I surf more and more of the old internet and broken links though, I’m realizing how precious that microfiche and film is.
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.”
The internet is big enough and has been around for long enough where both complete loss and complete preservation exists. I am young enough to where I "discovered" the existance of news groups within the last year. More accurately, I discovered the google groups frontend to newsgroups. It's fascinating seeing discussions about things I find interesting from before I was born. Someone has cataloged and uploaded various K-mart, a now bankrupt retail chain, in-store tapes to archive.org . There's traing videos and tapes, and reel to reels going all the way back to 1947. I enjoy listening to the christmas mixes. The internet is not static, but with proper management and motivations, data will stay forever. My local library had a microfiche machine that they took out last year, I wish I got to try it before they did but for the last few years, there was a "out of order" sign on it. It wasn't really out of order, they just didn't want people to touch it.
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 mean, big media companies (e.g. Disney or Nintendo) specifically seem to believe that copyright should give them the right to basically rewrite their own history however they please - e.g. by "un-publishing" old movies or shows when they would conflict with a planned re-release of the same franchise.
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 young enough to where I "discovered" the existance of news groups within the last year.
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.
Usenet was never completely saved. https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ (And it's in relatively good shape compared to BBS messages, the vast bulk of which are long gone.) And who knows what has been lost since Dejanews given that Google did its usual lost interest in thing.
Thank you for posting the Kmart tape. I pressed play and I thought it wasn't working and hopped in the shower. Then it started playing and I was awash with Nostalgia and I was in Kmart at Christmas in 1990 again. Thank you.
That's... horrible. How much does it take to keep streaming the show you already paid to develop? It seems malicious to downright delete it and remove it from the digital libraries of people who purchased the show.
I hate corporate decisions. If this show lives on, it will be thanks to piracy. Thank the pirates!
Many shows now on streaming services have different music or even parts clipped out, because they only had the license for the song for TV, or for 20 years, or ???
Most certainly a case of "ain't got no money for that".
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.
I'm not confident in this, but: if microfilm/fiche is anything like ordinary film, it's somewhat annoying and costly to archive: the film itself physically degrades ("vinegar syndrome"[1]) and might be hazardous to store in bulk (depending on the age and type of film stock).
(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.)
Microfilm doesn't use cellulose acetate, and is stable for centuries with minor storage requirements (room temperature, low humidity)-- the same that are required by books.
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.
It’s one thing to keep a single copy for all of society locked up in a box. But having it retrievable means staff, and maybe in a bunch of places if you want local access.
In Texas there is an excellent local news outlet that has a paper for each major suburb/city of each metro area. They focus on detailing business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments.
"Business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments" is exactly what I would want from local news.
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.
> In Texas there is an excellent local news outlet that has a paper for each major suburb/city of each metro area. They focus on detailing business openings, events, and upcoming industry and infrastructure developments.
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).
There has been a kerfuffle in the Australian National Library over continuance of funding for digitisation of the records.
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.
> Somebody thought it was a one-time uplift and was done.
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....
… Low resolution scans using older image processing technology… black and white only scans of photocopies… shakes fist at several publicly accessible US government department archives
This reminds me of the old articles I ran into at some point from the 80s and maybe early 90s where the writers talked about how many floors from a library you could fit on a hard drive or a floppy disk or a maybe a cd. Of course, that’s just text…
I'm an investor. To make that work, I'm not a historian, but a current-ian.
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.
Historians need both those things. The hard facts on weather data, commodity prices, and voting records say exactly what was happening, but they can't tell a historian why it happened. The reasons behind voting records are inherently emotional, subjective, messy things which can't be boiled down to a series of hard facts.
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.
I'm sorry, have you ever spoken to a historian? Are you under the impression that they study the past by finding "unemotional" texts written by subjects matter experts about the current affairs of their day? What era do you think was full of these "dispassionate recordings of facts" for historians to peruse? What decade do you think local newspapers stopped being peer-reviewed journals?
Also, how do you plan to make investment decisions without considering emotion? Are you betting on perfectly efficient markets?
Where do I say newspapers have ever been good, or that historians do in fact study dry facts?
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.
You wrote: "future historians can learn more from dispassionate recording of facts, not local news."
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.
> 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?
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".
They might not care about the teams anymore, but even going to antiquity, modern historians are always busy trying to shoehorn in their beliefs and ideology. A large non-English history publication I follow has in recent years started to explain every new archeological find with "they were trying to impress their neighbours".
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.
Not that I would call Wikipedia the epicenter of truth, but...
> 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.
In this universe, who will do things like uncover the Watergate scandal (originally Washington Post) or the Theranos scandal (Wall St Journal collaborating with a whistleblower)? Journalism is much more than a ticker tape of data or clickbait headlines.
Listen to the podcast The Past Times (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxZpxxEwKUI). Newspapers were fucking insane, ridiculous, just bizarrely biased and terribly organized. But they did record how, like, judges and lawyers would regularly get shitfaced in a pub and decide cases until 3 in the morning. So maybe it's more useful than we think.
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.
You (and I) lived through an era when media was tightly controlled by a few corporations and influenced by CIA propaganda operations. People think it was objective because there were no alternatives available to compare it to.
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.
I do not have the faith that the overwhelming majority of people who complain about lack of objectivity in news know anything about the history of journalism.
As an aside, when I was in high school in the late 80s/early 90s, microfiche was heavily pushed by the school/teachers/librarians as the information medium of the future. There was a tremendous amount of information stored on microfiche, and it would be an absolute travesty if this was lost.
Printed has obviously declined, but the quantity of local information has vastly increased thanks to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, hyperlocal news sites, etc. The unknown is how much of that data will be accessible, say, 100 years from now.
Except there isn't much to begin with, and what's there is very selective, it isn't continuous, it is hidden in a gigantic pile of muck, and it isn't verified, nor written in an accessible way. Civil journalism doesn't exist at the correct scale and organization required, and never will. That was one of those ridiculous internet pipe dreams.
National news is also diminishing. There's considerably less hard news, and more touchy-feely background stories.
> Printed has obviously declined, but the quantity of local information has vastly increased thanks to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, hyperlocal news sites, etc.
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.
I would argue that the problem goes much deeper than for historians. By focusing on the most FUDed national/international news all day, people are collectively incensed all day long for no reason. Doesn’t matter that it won’t affect their daily lives, but they are forced to read it by having it shoved in their face…
There's a magic red button with a cross at the top right or top left of every screen that can make the disappear into thin air. Nobody is forced to read anything.
Again, the point of this post is that the blizzard is still primarily the same non-local news. Needles existing in a haystack doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss the problem with having an ever-increasing haystack.
Those sources are ephemeral, and don't have the same incentive that organizations might have to preserve or archive their work for the future. We basically have The Internet Archive as the sole method of archival for those sources, but they only capture a fraction of the material those sources make accessible.
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’ve started to do this for podcasts… it’s quite shocking when seven years of content “breaks” and it’s just gone while your mid way through listening to something…
There is a positive trend of independent journalism on Youtube. Some of the my favorite stories were presented and investigated by a single person, Coffeezilla.
In my area there isn't, but there are a handful of "independent journalists" who have been harassing the school district and teachers to expose them for being "woke".
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.
My local news didn't cover those things either. But I did find that my high school athletics department made a youtube channel, and they have short interviews with coaches, specific games, and season highlights for certain sports. Another channel has been making highlight cuts for various high school sports. My county has a decent youtube channel that covers holidays, events, mail-in ballot instructions/voting information, and a short video about the "state of the county" executive summary. It links back to the county website. I found out the local historical society has been uploading documentaries online, about things like the constuction of the middle school. I found hour+ interviews/videos about people, who towns, roads and schools, were named after.
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.
Eh. Historians live for this random shit. A huge amount of interesting stuff in the archive is just stuff. It wasn't created to be historical or documentarian. I imagine that historians hundreds of years from now will be happy to dig through mountains of these sorts of materials rather than focus on documents created to be historical.
Historians have a reasonably good sense of the authenticity of "random physical shit" from 1923, in stark contrast to "random digital shit" from 2023. The digital chain of custody is super-weak, and everybody is far more media-savvy, self-aware, self-filtering, and self-promoting, which means social media doesn't give us the sense of everyday life that we might have got from, say, a postcard sent home from a WWI soldier.
Only because they've developed techniques for reasoning about documents. That'll happen for other material too. No historian reads a letter from 1923 and forgets that it was written by a person who has opinions, biases, and narratives.
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.
Archiving digital communications is an interesting problem. I'm sure that over time a very large amount of digital communications will be lost to time. But that's true for the archive already. The large majority of communications from 500 years ago are also lost to time, but we can still do history. We'll still be able to do history in 500 years even if only a small portion of Twitter ends up being archived.
I wonder how well youtube and tiktok will do let's say in 20 years when material has gone through a few rounds of re-encoding as someone considers saving few percentage of storage space.
Already the old Youtube videos on places seem corrupted.
But local nightly news programs often don't post the entire program. Even if they post segments I have found that stories from a few years ago have missing video. If archive.org doesn't have it then it is gone.
Sincere question: why do we consider "news" objective in this context? By any other measure it isn't.
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.
Nobody can ever be perfectly objective, but trying to maintain objectivity gets you a lot closer than rejecting the ideal outright.
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.
While I agree with the goal of 'good journalism' I also want to posit that striving for objectivity is importantly distinct from being objective - which I think you agree with based on this most recent comment.
As far as I can tell, it doesn't, but having many records with the same bias over a significant period of time (as newspapers tend to do, though not always only one - Each columnist may have their own, but that's why there are bylines) can help you distill that out.
It’s probably good to look at everything you think you know about history through that filter. History is a small number of people trying to build coherent stories from a random assortment of source material. 99.99% of everything that happened is left out of the stories, and what is left is told through those few people’s personal lens.
all news is biased. all discourse is biased. That's why you have multiple voices, multiple sources you need 2 consider always. There's no such thing as objective truth. source: English major.
The issue with objective truth in the platonist sense is that no one can know what it is without total system knowledge, which is physically impossible (if you disagree with that last bit, Heisenberg would love to know your location to hbar/p precision).
Said another way: we can make 'logically' true statements easily, but struggle with anything physical.
Yeah, gathering facts, presenting both sides of the argument, and determining what the facts are is dramatically different than expressing your opinion on the internet, or taking a cursory glance at the info to argue for your opinion.
I worry about this a lot, given that my newsletter Tedium relies on old newspapers to tell stories and we've effectively gutted the farm system in interest of big business.
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.
I am likewise a historian/author who relies on newspaper archives for a lot of my research. I have been maintaining my site for 17+ years, and if one visits my older writings, many of the source links are long dead.
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.
It’s disappointing to see that my comment was voted down. I wasn’t trying to self-promo, but rather trying to highlight that my point of view was valuable to this discussion.
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.
I've been doing some research on early 90s videogame industry and so much of the stuff on early websites is just gone because it was before archive.org started or it was things like proto-podcasts recorded to real audio that archive.org didn't capture. Interviews with creators of games and beta screenshots are just gone.
I had a subscription to newspapers.com for research in Inventing the Future. It was pretty valuable. You could also see how the LA Times was raking in the advertising bucks back in the day. 30 pages of story crammed into 200 pages of paper.
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.
I've noticed news sites have some of the most horrendous dark patterns and third party cookies I come across on the internet. Nothing frustrates me more than the video pop up on sites like CBS news. It makes me have a lot less sympathy for news organizations.
Facebook and Nextdoor at least has voice of the people, however wrong it is. It truly has both sides opinions. It captures the zeitgeist. I'll take that over any elite-class, university-brainwashed, liberal arts people writing about stuff through their biased lenses
I have some bad news for you. “Elite-class, university-brainwashed, liberal arts people” write about stuff through their biased lenses everywhere, including Nextdoor.
I think you're missing the point, both of you. It's not people's opinions I'd be interested in 50 years from now; it's just what they were talking about. Everyone might have an opinion about some event, but it's the event itself I'd want to know.
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.
The point isn't that those people aren't contributing, it's that you get multiple perspectives, even if all of them are skew. You can get extremely accurate positions with many highly unreliable datapoints. because even if they're individually highly inaccurate, where they overlap (and/or where their centroid is) is more accurate than any individual measurement.
Except that 100 people are Nextdoor are not doing the "oversight of courts, local councils and school boards" except in exception circumstances.
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.
Newspapers will make and publish stories and reports a lot of times without an agenda because their profession is publishing news, and there are stories where they just don't have any personal interest and therefore no agenda to tout. If you were tasked with writing a story about something you really have no interest in, then you'd write it without an agenda.
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.
I think that level of historically fidelity was a historical anomaly. We can see it through history where the narrative is mostly dominated by the great power of the time, yet I'm sure there was far greater diversity than what we can see. It biggest and loudest drowns or everyone else, and we are just returning to that status quo.
Here's the thing, local news produces cookie cutter stories and just swaps out the basic facts and injects a little of the mainstream narrative into everything. There really isn't any value in it, which is why they are dying in the first place.
> Here's the thing, local news produces cookie cutter stories and just swaps out the basic facts and injects a little of the mainstream narrative into everything. There really isn't any value in it, which is why they are dying in the first place.
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.
I don’t know where you live, but at least in the US, local news is almost extinct. I used to work for a chain of local newspapers - we had one or more reporters for each one, and we would go to every town and school board meeting and cover what was happening. That chain was bought up by a national, half the papers were shuttered outright, and the rest are run by one editor who doesn’t have time to do in depth coverage, and basically just parrots press releases. A few “local” replacements have cropped up that are little more than propaganda mills, without even an attempt at impartiality.
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.
I live in South America. My city has ~400k citizens and 4-6 local TV channels. The newspaper is pretty much dead and has gone down from 60 pages per day to maybe 5-10 pages (I don't know if they even print it anymore), true, but TV seems to be doing fine and embracing more social platforms. I think the main media outlet has at least 3-4 hours of local news mixed with content from their parent company (national). Their local website is garbage though so once a news ir aired, it's pretty much gone... which brings me back to my initial point, there are news but they are not properly managed/archived.
For more than a century, local newspapers served as the primary medium through which obituaries were published. But nowadays, more and more families are opting to memorialize their loved ones with a digital-only obituary.
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.
Local news is staffed by the same prettyface, knownothing anchors as mainstream network. What’s lost? What’s gained in what bullshit passes the censors in online comments these days? Most are inorganic anyway.
I agree with most of what you said, but you aren't being honest or charitable to the news anchors and you didn't present your argument in a respectful way. I remember this compilation of a bunch of news networks saying the same talking points in a similar cadence. These kind of mandatory talking points undermine the value and purpose of local news reporting.
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.
I don't know much about journalism, but I do know a bit about information gathering.
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.
I agree, but I specifically meant in the context of local news, people are accessible in a way most weren't pre-broadband. Even the largest news organizations and presentations have started using zoom call recordings in segments. I agree with you that social media is terrible at meaningful filtering and aggregation. Verifying a source will always be a necessary part of journalism, regardless of medium.
Yeah but it's true. Daily program breakdown:
1.)Daily national propaganda piece.
Local car dealer commercial.
2.)Regionally Local piece on what's being done or not done about potholes.
Pharmaceutical commercial showing active and happy people
3.)Traffic.
4.)Weather.
Regional bathtub installer commercial
5.)Sports.
Pharmaceutical commercial showing active and happy people
6.)Regionally Local person goes to court and/or prison
Fast food commercial
7.)Feel good fluff piece about a puppy that got saved from traffic.
I also hate how emotionally charged the music has become in certain segments or transitions. Watching a story on mute with subtitles, and watching it with sound is a completely different experience. There has also been an increase in labelling everything "breaking news" and "top story", and the stories themselves have become sensationalized and rage baiting. The audio transitions into "breaking" stories prime you to feel a certain way even before hearing the story. I stopped seeing positive fluff, those time slots are replaced by things that feel like ad/sponsored segments or actual ads.
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 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/