Nows and Forevers

How can I make my words on the Internet last? Is that even possible?

I didn’t used to worry about this. For most of my journalism career, I rarely thought about the future of the newspaper stories I wrote. I worried about getting the story first, right and well-written. The next week, month or years into the future weren’t mine to consider. Print-era newspaper editors and reporters tend to think of today’s edition to be tomorrow’s bird-cage liner or recycling. It’s just the way it is.

Maybe once in a while I thought about what an historian might think of a story I wrote, uncovering it the next-generation archive, just as I wonder sometimes about my journalistic predecessors when I look at stories in old newspapers. But that was it, other than clipping most (but not all) of my stories.

Along the way, the daily newspaper mentality heightened to hourly, and then to moment-by-moment as the web and then social media came along. The pace of the news quickened, and with it, the ephemeral nature of scoops and stories. I didn’t have any expectation that stories of mine in the print-only era would be preserved, outside of a few microfiche rolls. But the web, ever-growing, would be different. Those stories, they would always be there.

Except they weren’t.

The dozen or so years of stories of my current employer remain online, and always will. They have a strong and good archive system. So are the archives of a former employer, Mediapost, where I was senior editor for three years in the early 2000s. A few of my newspaper stories remain online at the suburban New York daily newspaper I worked at in 2001 and 2002, the oldest of my stories to remain online.

But a large part of the work I’m most proud of, when I was a TV and media reporter at The Hollywood Reporter, has been wiped from the archives. Also missing are the stories in some of the syndicated partners, Reuters and Yahoo, where our stories were republished. Most of my stories from late 2006 to 2010 appear to be on the THR.com archives, although with the byline of “Associated Press” instead of The Hollywood Reporter. (That irks me, since I was on staff. Looks like a computer glitch.)

But all the work I did, several stories a day, between 2004 and mid-2006, they’re gone.

I’m not bringing this up because I care about my deathless prose. I’m proud of my work, but a lot of its value — most of its value — came in the hours and days after the stories were published. But I also believe in a record, expanding as it does every day, of what has happened in this world and why. How many other publications and writers’ work have been wiped away, either through a change in websites (like I think happened with THR.com) or when the outlets themselves closed? One magazine I worked for no longer exists, and all that work is gone.

I have copies of my Hollywood Reporter stories, so I’m not missing anything. But the cover stories I wrote for about eight monthly magazines, they’re gone and won’t ever come back. I don’t have physical copies of any but one. I guess I always thought they’d be there.

It makes me worry about the future. Whole publications, and work of writers and journalists and bloggers, have disappeared. And they won’t ever come back, and I am full of sorrow. Some of those writers, including people I know and love, have passed from this world. I wish their legacy, the voices they left behind, weren’t stilled too.

The past few years, I’ve tried to protect my own work, at least as much as I can. I long ago lost my published articles from the late ’80s into 2000, never making one of my many moves. I’ve been able to reconstruct some of them, thanks to visiting the library in Norwalk, Connecticut, where there’s microfilm of The Hour where I worked for a lot of that period. I’ve also been able to find about a year and a half’s work at other newspapers. But there’s a lot that I have no physical or digital copies of, and it’s probably not going to happen. One newspaper I worked, since closed, apparently has no archive anywhere. Another is collected in only one place I’ll probably never get to.

And my work at my first newspaper, in Connecticut near the New York border, is available on microfilm at a library or two. But how much time do I have to go through three or four years’ worth of daily newspapers?

I don’t.

What I do, from time to time, is work to collect what I can and save it digitally. Authory is a website that I pay for gladly, an archive of currently published material that can go back into online archives to extract and save journalists’ stories and even blogs and social media posts. I’ve done that for as much as I can, knowing that the first decade and a half of my career, that’s not possible. I’ve also been scanning articles here and there that are only available offline, and then putting them into Authory. It’s a massive job if you’re prolific, and one that I don’t have a ton of time to work on.

Authory is oh-so-worth it, in my opinion. It also creates a digital offline archive if wanted. I’m thankful that there’s such an option as Authory, and I’ve been pleased with the fast and perfect customer support.

It’s the only tool I have to try to preserve the past.