<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/05/340-local-news-outlets-now-blocking-the-internet-archive/>
"Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers,
including
The New York Times,
The Guardian, and
USA Today Co., had
started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape
the nonprofit’s repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of
archival history, that is, in case you’re not aware,
not very good for the
public interest.
Four months later and Nieman Lab now notes that the number of news outlets
blocking the archive has soared to around 340 organizations:
“Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the
United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and
preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the
seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co.,
McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The
latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global
Capital.”
Many of these localities are already effectively news deserts, where most real
local journalism was hollowed out and replaced by a smattering of local right
wing broadcasters (like Sinclair Broadcasting) or a hedge fund run “local
newspaper” that doesn’t do much in the way of actual local reporting. That’s
generally also been terrible for informed consensus or shedding a light on
local corruption.
Some of the outlets blocking internet archive access have legitimate concerns
about protecting their hard work from being repackaged and resold without
compensation or citation. But an awful lot of the folks grumbling about the
Internet Archive were never in the journalism business to serve the public
interest in the first place."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
