Post

Journalists are thanking the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of news and history and for being an important resource for journalists. This letter is coming at a time where many major media outlets are questioning whether to allow the Wayback Machine to continue to preserve journalism.

“IA is a necessary tool for writers and journalists, because it archives original articles — this enables us to check for reporting errors and cases of plagiarism. And we need an archive of previously published material that does not require us to make trips to libraries and physical archives that might be hard to access.” — Yasmin Nair

“I cover news within a larger news desert in New York’s Rockland, Sullivan, and Rockland counties. This means I need to heavily rely on archival data of old news articles from now deceased, or zombie-fied, media outlets. Without the Internet Archive, my would would be incredibly difficult to do.” — BJ Mendelson “I regularly find articles no longer available as well as help identify imposters by identifying the age and trajectory of their website. The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine are priceless.” — Catherine Austin Fitts “The Internet Archive is an incredible resource and an essential tool for journalists, it enabled me to read up on decades of independent journalism from Cambodia across publications that have long since been shut down or bought up by the government. The transition to digital-only news has left us all vulnerable to the whims of dictators and autocrats, many of which have sought to scrub the record clean and whitewash history. The Internet Archive is one of the best efforts to push back on this and preserve facts that authoritarian governments would prefer we forget. Thank you for helping to make my career as a journalist by keeping such intimate records of Cambodian journalism.” — Gerald Flynn “The Internet Archive is critical for reporting in the public interest. In my own journalism, I have used archived webpages to help trace a potential source’s connection to Luigi Mangione and contextualise reporting around the alleged motives authorities identified leading-up to the December 4th, 2024 shooting. In that reporting, I used preserved online material not to sensationalise, but to verify timelines, map relationships, and preserve public evidence that would have otherwise disappeared.” — Christine Savino “I often use the Wayback Machine in my health journalism to access historical content about HIV treatment and activism.” — Liz Highleyman “I’ve worked as an editor, researcher, journalist, and photojournalist, and have use the Internet Archive in many ways. I was online editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian which was later sold & shut down. Issues of the print newspaper are being digitized & archived on the Internet Archive. Many online versions of stories as well as stories & columns which were only online & promoted in the newspaper are only available through the Wayback Machine.” — Steve Rhodes “As websites disappear and evolve, preserving the history of the internet and the news and discussions it has enabled is vital. I’ve had entire bodies of work removed from the internet, creating massive holes in my CV – an issue that only the Internet Archive can solve.” — David Hollingworth “As a government and politics reporter, Internet Archives helps me hold government officials accountable by preserving press releases, documents and calendars may show a changed position, a deleted post, or a cancelled public meeting. This resource must be defended and protected to allow the public to know what their elected leaders often wish would stay hidden.” — Stephen Caruso “I was researching the secret ‘Corona’ satellite program from the 60s for a article few years ago, but half of the links to relevant web pages were either dead or simply wrong…. Then, I remembered the Wayback Machine, and found tons of detailed articles from the late 90s…and also… riginal docs from CIA archives that were related to the ‘Corona’ program.” — Ivan Trajkovic “The Internet Archive is a vital tool for journalism, particularly journalism tracking state censorship and propaganda.” — James Griffiths “I’m a pioneer of the earliest days of web publishing, so my relationship with the Wayback Machine goes way back … to 1995. There’s something deeply Orwellian about the idea that we need to dismantle an archive rather than tackle the root cause of the problem: the theft of copyrighted material to train AI models.” — Graham Lovelace

“I have used the Wayback Machine innumerable times in my reporting on New York City politics. It’s an essential resource!” — Theodore Hamm “When Jack Dickey & I were reporting the Manti Te’o fake-dead-girlfriend story, it was an archived xanga.com page on the Wayback Machine that served as the missing link between the photos of the supposedly dead girlfriend and the very real (and alive) person whose photos had been taken to portray her.” — Timothy Burke “The Internet Archive is a critical tool for examining the history of websites. With Google and Bing pulling their cache web page services, the Internet Archive stands as the lone repository of the Internet’s historic record.” — Matthew Keys “The Internet archive is crucial for Internet history. Without it, we’ll lose all of the valuable data on how the world once was online. I use the Internet archive to hunt down old form posts and websites which helps me create videos on otherwise lost events that happened on the internet.” — Pezle “The Wayback Machine is one of the best accountability tools in journalists’ toolboxes. I use it all the time to monitor politicians changing positions, or to find past iterations of websites with relevant information. Losing it would be crushing.” — Ty Rushing “As Washington Post Fact Checker, the Internet Archive was essential to writing articles that debunked falsehoods. I could show how websites were changed and data was manipulated. When the Trump administration killed USAID and terminated its website, I could only examine their false claims about USAID with reports and data preserved by the Internet Archive.” — Glenn Kessler “Democracy dies in darkness. The Internet Archive provides much-needed historical transparency, especially in today’s world of ephemeral posts and claims of “fake news”.” — Carey Parker “I frequently use the Internet Archive to dig up and expose web pages that corporate interests have deleted to hide their malfeasance, and/or erase their past leadership who are engaging in corporate wrongdoing or lobbying and don’t want past evidence of their corporate relationships to remain online. It is also crucial for citing sources that are no longer online.” — Eric Brooks

“Let’s just be clear: without the Internet Archive, we’re bleeding history. And not just online history. At one point in time the Internet was just a small portion of the human experience: now it’s both a mirror and a running record of what the human condition actually is. Without the Internet Archive, the world is a poorer place to live and be in.” — Margaret Gel

Over the past 30 years, the Internet Archive has quietly performed an essential service for journalism. In a digital media landscape where articles disappear due to link rot, corporate consolidation, or cost-cutting, reporters frequently rely on the Archive’s Wayback Machine to recover pages that would otherwise be lost. Without that ongoing work to preserve the web, large parts of journalism’s recent history would already be lost. In previous generations, journalists would turn to the physical archives of a local newspaper or of a local public library to access historical reporting and follow the threads of the present back into history. With many newspapers closed, and no clear path for local public libraries to preserve digital-only reporting, the work of safeguarding journalism’s record increasingly falls to the Internet Archive.