Has any of your journalism vanished from the public?

[shukla7789]

Do you have any examples where you’ve been looking for something and it’s been missing?

Yes. One of the challenges is that multimedia content has often, in the past, been overlooked. There are old news reports that I’ve been unable to find because they’re on video in the era before there was a lot of accessibility and transcripts. Therefore, yes, there are certainly things like that which come up with some regularity. Also, particularly in the era of 2005 to 2015, there were a lot of independent sites that had useful news reports—particularly since we’re talking about the cast of political characters that have been around in the public eye at that point in time. It’s often the case that it’s hard to track those things down. Or if you’re trying to track down the original source or verify a rumor, you might need to dip into the Archive. There are a lot of sites photo restoration service that era of “bespoke” blogs that the Internet Archive often captures.

How does limited access to historical data or previous coverage impact you as a journalist?

It is hard to say, because relatively speaking, I am advantaged by the fact that I live in this era. If I were doing this in 1990, [I’d use] basically whatever was at the New York Public Library and on microfiche. It is far better than it used to be, but the amount of content being produced is also far larger. It is both a positive and a negative that it is far easier to do that sort of research here from my desk at home than it would possibly have been 30 years ago. In fact, I was working on a project where I relied heavily on a local newspaper in a small town in Pennsylvania that wasn’t available online. I literally had to hire someone in the town to go to the library, find [coverage from] the particular date and the local paper and to get the scans done. It cost me hundreds of dollars, but that was the only way to do it. You can see how getting these things done is problematic and challenging.

When Paramount deleted the MTV News Archive in June, there was a lot of dismay, but some say it was frivolous, disposable, and kind of meant to be thrown away. How do you feel about that?

My first writing gig online was at MTV News in college, so that actually had a personal resonance for me. I was at Ohio State in the early to mid 1990s, and I got this little internship with MTV News. I wrote one piece about this band called The Hairy Patt Band. It ended up on the MTV News website. I was very excited. I haven’t seen that in 30 years. It’s one of those things where I wondered what ever happened to that story or if it exists anywhere, in any form. So, that [news] actually had resonance. It’s a bummer. Is it as important to maintain the archives of MTV News as it is The Washington Post? I’m biased, but I would say, no. But it is still a loss of culture—and it is a unique loss of culture. This was a unique and novel form of information that was emergent in the 1990s and now is lost. In the moment, its very existence captured the culture in a way that is worth preserving.