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Preserving Online News In An Ephemeral Web

Forbes – A Look At Four Months Of Global Digital Journalism – “From the dawn of modern print journalism through the beginning of the web era, newspapers represented an archival medium. Once rendered into print, a news article was immutable and could safely be referenced for perpetuity without fear that a few days later it would say something very different. As libraries and other institutions collected and archived newspapers, their contents were also safely preserved for continued access by future generations. Multiple libraries all held independent copies of an article, ensuring that even if some copies were lost or modified, others survived. In contrast, in the web era, journalism has been largely transformed into live blogging, with articles wholesale rewritten or simply deleted. As online journalism has rapidly risen into a dominant distribution format over the past quarter century, what does its ephemeral nature mean for the archival and preservation of our societal record?…”

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