The way CNN has framed this annoys me. I can't help but read an implicit "Don't blame us!" at the end of the headline. The article goes on to talk about how som

The way CNN has framed this annoys me. I can't help but read an implicit "Don't blame us!" at the end of the headline. The article goes on to talk about how some other news organizations are rebuilding the content in newer technology, or using an emulator to deliver it to modern platforms, and how CNN has no plans to do any of that. I am not sure that the blame lies with Adobe. If you publish software, then one day, eventually, the platform that your software originally ran on will either disappear or change enough that your software will no longer run. (The mainframe people are laughing at me now, but that's an extreme outlier.) Maybe the news organizations didn't realize it at the time, but once they started putting out interactive features, they become software publishers. I think maybe there's a disconnect here because news organizations have thus far been able to rely on librarians and archivists paid by other people doing all the work of preserving their content for them. Since they inadvertently became software publishers, there's an element of surprise to this: "what do you mean, the stuff we put out 20 years ago isn't viewable anymore?" Most of the media they work in don't have these kinds of problems -- text is highly portable; audio and video can be digitized and converted to newer formats. That binary blob in a proprietary format? Not so much.