Here Today, Gone within a Month: The Fleeting Life of Digital News
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Halbert, Martin
Skinner, Katherine
Wilson, Marc
Zarndt, Frederick
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Abstract
In 1989 on the shores of Montana’s beautiful Flathead Lake, the owners of the weekly newspaper the Bigfork Eagle started TownNews.com to help community newspapers with developing technology. TownNews.com has since evolved into an integrated digital publishing and content management system used by more than 1600 newspaper, broadcast, magazine, and web-native publications in North America. TownNews.com is now headquartered on the banks of the mighty Mississippi river in Moline Illinois.
Not long ago Marc Wilson, CEO of TownNews.com, noticed that of the 220,000+ e-edition pages posted on behalf of its customers at the beginning of the month, 210,000 were deleted by month’s end.
What? The front page story about a local business being sold to an international corporation that I read online September 1 will be gone by September 30? As well as the story about my daughter’s 1st place finish in the district field and track meet?
A 2014 national survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) of 70 digital-only and 406 hybrid (digital and print) newspapers conclusively showed that newspaper publishers also do not maintain archives of the content they produce. RJI found a dismal 12% of the “hybrid” newspapers reported even backing up their digital news content and fully 20% of the “digital-only” newspapers reported that they are backing up none of their content. Educopia Institute’s 2012 and 2015 surveys with newspapers and libraries concur, and further demonstrate that the longstanding partner to the newspaper—the...