An exposé of Silk Road, the underground drug market.
Pulitzer-winning restaurant criticism in Los Angeles.
A tale of eating mozzarella sticks for 14 hours straight.
Journalists and readers have feared that gems like these could disappear from the internet if the wealthy owners of Gawker and L.A. Weekly wanted to eliminate what they deem to be unfavorable coverage elsewhere on the sites.
Hoping to neutralize the potential threat, the Freedom of the Press Foundation said on Wednesday that it would archive online content it deems at risk of being deleted or manipulated, starting with the two publications.
The organization, which protects and defends adversarial journalism, said it aimed to protect publications from what it calls the “billionaire problem,” or the ability of news figures to buy publications with the intent of taking them offline.
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Using Archive-It, a service from the Internet Archive, the foundation began by backing up the digital archives of Gawker, which went bankrupt and stopped publishing in 2016 but is currently for sale, and L.A. Weekly, which has new owners who initially concealed their identities. If the sites were to be wiped clean, their entire histories of content would still be available through the external archive tool.
In an interview on Wednesday, Parker Higgins, director of special projects at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said he hoped buyers’ inability to totally eliminate past coverage would discourage anyone from trying.
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/business/media/gawker-archives-press-freedom.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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