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To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

niemanlab.org

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Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#51

Post by dotancohen »

msephton wrote: post #50
dotancohen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I should have been clearer and mentioned that I'm on Debian )) But in any case, Safari's reader mode can be scripted from the CLI? That is good to know, maybe I'll try to find something similar for Firefox's Reader Mode. Thank you.

Yes. On macOS we would generally use osascript on the command line. Apple Script Editor shows which functions each app exposes. Very powerful combo.

That's great to know, I consider an Apple device every few years when I upgrade my current devices. Osascript sounds compelling.

Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#52

Post by ghaff »

jjmarr wrote: post #24
ThinkBeat wrote: post #8

I fully support the efforts. but are there not legal problems with this? (No I dont thik legal issues should prevent this) If I worked for CorporateMediaNews as a columnist and reporter for 10 years and they decide ot remove all of it. Does not CMN own the work and can (unfortunately) dispose of it if they so wish? I would not have any rights for the work? Thinking about my own career. I have written a hell of a lot…

Journalists are often judged based on their public output. You get bylines on published articles, and you can use those to apply for jobs. There's not much emphasis on secrecy because the goal of a news outlet is to be read by as many people as possible. Being unable to provide examples of your work is a career-killer if everyone else can point to stuff they wrote. Preserving your work isn't altruistic, it's required…

A ton of writing is done for (sometimes very expensive) paywalled and subscription-only publications--or internal-only at companies. Theoretically all my (pre-blogging) analyst work is in that category. That said, no one reasonable cares much that you display that several year old thing you wrote for someone (absent confidential or classified information). I put "greatest hits" on my website and everything is either from a company that no longer exists or it's years-old material from a news website. The situation isn't ideal but it works better than the letter of the law suggests it should.

Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#53

Post by ghaff »

Bluestein wrote: post #28
ThinkBeat wrote: post #8

I fully support the efforts. but are there not legal problems with this? (No I dont thik legal issues should prevent this) If I worked for CorporateMediaNews as a columnist and reporter for 10 years and they decide ot remove all of it. Does not CMN own the work and can (unfortunately) dispose of it if they so wish? I would not have any rights for the work? Thinking about my own career. I have written a hell of a lot…

Does that (not too often) not happen with "abandonware" turned open source?

It rarely turns open source. Someone releases it and no one cares enough to try to do anything about it.

Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#55

Post by nikisweeting »

sinkasapa wrote: post #7
shitlord wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archive.org can and does accept takedown requests, even if the requester wants to avoid public scrutiny. If you're writing about a contentious topic and want to preserve your links (tweets or whatever), there are better options.

What are some of those options?

- https://archivebox.io - https://archiveweb.page + https://replayweb.page / Browsertrix - SingleFile

Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#56

Post by remram »

HPsquared wrote: post #35
vasco wrote: post #30

A nice social attack is to create an internet archive looking website call it archive.newtld and use it to create social proof of things you didn't actually do. "Oh yeah the Washington Post did a redesign but here are my past 10 posts which I saved in archive: link " In post truth internet, proving archives is going to be tough and unless there's some other form of verification it's going to be useless fast for "prov…

Could this be solved by digital signatures on web content? (Or, a way to store those)

How do you obtain the key to check the signature?

Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#57

Post by jazzyjackson »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #37
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a book in 2010. It had a references section with links to about 100 websites. When I wrote the second edition only about five years later, 50% of those links no longer worked. What we're doing right now is borderline insane. We're putting all of this information on the web, but almost each individual bit of information is dependent on either a company or a human being keeping it online. It's inevitable that c…

That entity goes out of its way to hide information if you're friends with the owners.

All the more reason not to rely on it, hard to complain when no one else is willing to do what they do

Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#58

Post by remram »

Bluestein wrote: post #27
8bitsrule wrote: post #16

Too bad there's not something like DOI or ARK [0] available for anyone to use to give documents a searchable, permanent ID so that a location can be maintained. IME, the half-life of many URLs (5-10 years?) makes them unreliable. I recently was unable to find (by URL) an entire historical collection at a major southern US university until I discovered that it had been moved to a new server. [0] https://arks.org/about…

> the half-life of many URLs (5-10 years?) makes them unreliable. "Simple" enough experiment, on this very site: Use the "past" feature on the main menu to go back a step at a time, and tally the number of broken links from the external submissions the further you go back.- The amount of dead projects, expired domains, broken links, 404s, etc. is sad.-

Someone did that and found that only 5% of submitted URLs (200k/4M) were dead: https://blog.wilsonl.in/hackerverse/

Submitted 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307519

Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#59

Post by jazzyjackson »

remram wrote: post #56
HPsquared wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this be solved by digital signatures on web content? (Or, a way to store those)

How do you obtain the key to check the signature?

Keybase would have been a good solution, essentially a GUI for a pgp keyserver but with social proofs like "the owner of this account also controls the domain washingtonpost.com (as evidenced by publishing the fingerprint as a TXT record)". Too bad about the zoom acquisition, development stalled since then.

I also don't know exactly what bag of bytes you would be checking the signature against, the raw normalized text of an story? Maybe if news articles were distributed as PDFs this would be a solved problem, but news sites actually don't want their content to be portable, they want you to sign in to their domain to view anything.

Re: To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

#60

Post by walterbell »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #31
Bluestein wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archive.org is such a godsend.- The entire information 'substrate' of society is ephemeral , if digital, and none (at least not enough) seem to have noticed .-

I wrote a book in 2010. It had a references section with links to about 100 websites. When I wrote the second edition only about five years later, 50% of those links no longer worked. What we're doing right now is borderline insane. We're putting all of this information on the web, but almost each individual bit of information is dependent on either a company or a human being keeping it online. It's inevitable that c…

> references section with links to about 100 websites.

Books deserve a github repo with PDF web archives of referenced links, the same way that Wikipedia mirrors the content of cited links.

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