Letter Sign-On: Journalists Applaud the Internet Archive’s Role In Preserving the Public Record
Journalists are invited to join a letter thanking the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of news and history and for being an important resource for their profession. 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.
Journalists, click here to sign this letter or scroll down to the embedded form.
For questions, concerns, or coverage, please contact Lia@FightForTheFuture.org
Letter text
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.
Without preference or bias, the Internet Archive preserves the historical record of our times. Journalists rely on the Archive as a resource in our reporting, and many digital investigations into issues like misinformation or censorship are possible only because it preserves material that would otherwise disappear. Meanwhile, according to the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine preserves permanent citations for nearly 5 million news articles referenced on Wikipedia.
We also recognize the efforts the Internet Archive is making to respect journalism as our profession grapples with the impacts of AI. Generative AI can provide complete narrative answers to user search queries about world events, which has significant implications for the field of journalism. We are thankful that the Internet Archive itself proactively partners with news organizations, and does not engage in paywall circumvention or irresponsible scraping. They value the work of journalists, and it shows in the care that they take to preserve it with integrity.
We commend the Internet Archive for its commitment to preserving journalism for future generations. We welcome its continued work to ensure that today’s reporting remains available to tomorrow’s journalists, researchers, and the public. Preserving this record is essential to protecting journalism’s legacy.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned