7 ms·

Santa Barbara's collective memory, sold for kindling

279 points by shortformblog 3y ago

Ansaben10 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
olesya1979 3y ago
[dead]
shortformblog 3y ago
Hey all, just sharing this with a quick note. Recently, I was part of a small group of journalists/researchers who determined that the sports site Deadspin sold to investors with close affiliations with the online gaming affiliate industry in Malta. Eventually, it led to a story in 404 Media that tied specific names to the purchase and highlighted some of their M.O.: https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/ https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publish... It turns out that one of the key figures in the Deadspin purchase is also attempting to buy a bankrupt newspaper’s website, likely because the domain (NewsPress.com) has a lot of SEO value. That’s what the above story is about. This story is really important, because it is essentially putting a community’s history at risk. To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases.
- jonah 3y ago
  Thanks for digging into this and for sharing this article! I hadn't seen this latest twist. I'm friends with a number of the "paper’s staff who staged a mass walk-out". Very difficult times. Not mentioned in this article was the staff’s long struggle for union representation which they did finally get much to the ire of the owner. The independent.com (another great, "generic", domain name!) has been covering the saga for decades: https://www.independent.com/?s=santa+barbara+news-press https://www.independent.com/?s=santa+barbara+news-press
  - shortformblog 3y ago
    Sad tale. In its own way, as bad as the private equity management we’ve been seeing in chains throughout the country. There has to be a great story as to how these two news sites in the same town got such high-quality domains.
    - ryantgtg 3y ago
      What’s funny to me is that https://www.noozhawk.com/ https://www.noozhawk.com/ (along with others) took up the mantle when the SB News Press went downhill. That domain is not as hot.
      - topato 3y ago
        And Noozhawk's almost Fark clone design when it first launched was pretty good, I'm not such a fan of what it's become. And it feels like their reporting has gotten a lot more focused on north county, rather than the city of Santa Barbara itself. At least The Independent is still there for Santa Barbara, Goleta, and Isla Vista...
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  I chortled at the claim that deadspin is "beloved"
  - causality0 3y ago
    "Beloved" doesn't necessarily mean good journalism. The type of rage-bait that includes trying to publicly shame a Native American child for painting his face in team colors and wearing a family headdress to a football game is likely to make you quite beloved among a certain crowd.
    - shortformblog 3y ago
      To be clear, the “beloved” era (while noting its subjectivity) is in reference to the pre-G/O Media era, which was run under a different editorial direction. That team has since moved to Defector. The controversy you are referencing happened last fall, years after that team had left.
      - causality0 3y ago
        Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the information.
  - BoxFour 3y ago
    Among sports fans old Deadspin, specifically the previous iteration with columnists like Drew Magary, is pretty beloved. Currently Defector is trying hard to occupy the gap left by it.
- ntnsndr 3y ago
  One outcome of the Deadspin mess might be instructive—a group of journalists abandoned it and started Defector, a successful worker co-op. After Quitting Deadspin in Protest, They’re Starting a New Site https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/media/deadspin-staffers-start-defector.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gk0.3fzO.TCDEPWcmMmwb&ugrp=u https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/media/deadspin-s... For more context on cooperatives in journalism, see https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0007.203?view=text;rgn=main https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0007.203?view=text...
  - burkaman 3y ago
    404 Media itself is a similar collective of ex-Vice people, I think pretty directly inspired by Defector.
    - toofy 3y ago
      to add to this, i think 404media is also where Joseph Cox went (edit: i just checked, he is a part of 404) most people here will be familiar with his writing for motherboard.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Glad to see worker cooperatives popping up!
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I don't really disagree but be aware that many of those people working in journalist cooperatives would probably make more money working at McDonalds. (Of course I'm sure they find working as a journalist more satisfying.)
      - photochemsyn 3y ago
        McDonald's CEO made $17.8 million in cash/stock/options in 2022, so working at McDonalds must be a good gig. If entry-level workers made 1/100th what the CEO makes, that's $178,000 a year!
- eru 3y ago
  > This story is really important, because it is essentially putting a community’s history at risk. To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases. Huh? It's just a domain name. None of the history in none of the archives is going away.
  - shortformblog 3y ago
    From the literal article: > After all, the archive is our collective memoir, if we can keep it. No complete digital record seems to exist in any other one place — not the Santa Barbara Public Library, UC Riverside’s California Newspaper Project, the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, or the like.
    - eru 3y ago
      That's seems like a straightforward thing to fix, if people care. And has nothing to do with who owns the domain name.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases. Something that the iSCSI folks considered: - A date code, in yyyy-mm format. This date MUST be a date during which the naming authority owned the domain name used in this format, and SHOULD be the first month in which the domain name was owned by this naming authority at 00:01 GMT of the first day of the month. This date code uses the Gregorian calendar. All four digits in the year must be present. Both digits of the month must be present, with January == "01" and December == "12". The dash must be included. * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3720#section-3.2.6.3.1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3720#section-3.2.6.... So if there was a change of ownership, the IQN would change.
- araes 3y ago
  Is this a big trend lately? Buying old newspapers and then putting them back up as SEO shell farms with recognizable names? There was another story on here just a little bit back about an East coast lady that had her article stolen by a paper she used to work for, that then returned, zombified, under the same name, yet with different bylines. Similar to this article from Buzzfeed (2020) about pseudo-"local" news websites. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/these-fake-local-news-sites-have-confused-people-for-years https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/these-fa...
kjkjadksj 3y ago
It’s a shame these former voices don’t band together more often and just try and run a cheap to host site covering the same local topics. You don’t need to sustain the overhead to print and circulate or even rent an office anymore. I’d pay for that, I’m sure I’m not the only one either.
- jonah 3y ago
  There are other local, online-only news sources which now involve some of the previous Santa Barbara News-Press staff. https://www.independent.com https://www.independent.com https://www.edhat.com https://www.edhat.com https://www.noozhawk.com https://www.noozhawk.com https://www.montecitojournal.net https://www.montecitojournal.net etc.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Edhat is a long running local site.
Dalewyn 3y ago
I can't help but feel surpassing $250,000.00 at auction is no big deal for a city with ~88,000 residents, in this age of crowdfunding and otherwise asking for donations the old fashioned way. So this is less a question of whether the residents can pay, but rather whether the residents value this archive at all.
- Ansaben10 3y ago
  [flagged]
- gedy 3y ago
  Not to mention this is Santa Barbara which has a lot of monied residents.
- delichon 3y ago
  We'll find out a week from Tuesday. A last chance to win the day will take place at 2 p.m. on April 9 in room 201 of the United States Bankruptcy Court, 1415 State Street, Santa Barbara. There, a live auction will occur whereby the current price of $250,000 may be bested only by in-person bidding.
- goodSteveramos 3y ago
  Correct. I think the idea of this article is to raise awareness so the local residents can pony up the cash to save the website.
- smcin 3y ago
  Not really, who said the residents are the only potential bidders? Public or private museums or collectors might be interested. 1868-1990s covers almost the entire history of California as a state, the photos alone shoule be interesting. In the silent film era 1910-1922, Santa Barbara housed the then world's largest movie studio (Flying A Studios) until it outgrew the town and moved to Hollywood. Those years should be quite interesting.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
KennyBlanken 3y ago
> The paper declared bankruptcy on July 21, 2023. In a fitting final insult, the court filing listed more than $116,000 in company assets — an implausibly low valuation — as it was revealed McCaw had previously shifted the real estate property of the newspaper’s historic De la Guerra Plaza headquarters and Goleta printing plant into private LLCs under her control This is also a very standard play in the private equity field. The property (which is usually what they really wanted) is forked off to a different entity, and then that entity charges rent back to the original corp. This is how they kill off assisted living homes. They don't bother with cost-cutting; they just keep jacking the "rent" the property-owning corp charges the assisted living facility entity. In desperation to keep the home for residents, the staff cut every cost they can. Cracks in care quickly appear, everyone who can leave does which means lots of lost cash flow and expenses split among fewer residents...at some point there's just no more squeezing possible, the corp misses a rent payment...and that's that. It's also the classic plot for many stories; gang/army strong-arms a village and keeps asking for larger and larger takes of the village's crops, eventually leading to the villagers starving, etc.
- jmholla 3y ago
  It's nuts that this is legal. This is seems so fraudulent to me: giving away your assets to an entity so you can rent them back from that entity.
  - db48x 3y ago
    Why wouldn’t it be legal? They own both corporations, and have all the rights in the world to dispose of the property as they see fit.
    - MrVandemar 3y ago
      "Legal", of course, seldom equals "moral", "ethical" or even "right". In fact, "legal" often means "brazen thievery, but rich and entitled people doing it so that's okay".
    - 23B1 3y ago
ilamont 3y ago
Perhaps most disturbing of all, in just the past year, an industry trend appears to have kicked off in which a subset of SEO companies has begun to acquire the domain names and historical digital content archives of defunct small-town American newspapers for the express purpose of turning them into highly profitable backlink farms. Does anyone think that these backlink farms will have much value 2 or 3 years from now? This is not just about the role of AI providing better search results or answers to typical queries. It's also the longstanding decline in relevance of Google search queries gummed up with ads and SEO-optimized junk.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Doesn’t really matter. The people behind this aren’t interested in anything beyond quick dollars
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Money is money, and if the cost of making a million dollars is $250K and incinerating a town's entire historical record, apparently that's a fine price for some people. Throw this on the heap of systemic ethical transgressions of the advertising industry, along with list selling, poor targeting practices, ...
  - short_sells_poo 3y ago
    It's grotesque that this is not even the direct effect of the advertising industry, it is the side effect of Google's algo to sort results. Being ranked higher in the Goog results is sadly worth more than a town's historical records. I wonder if things were different if Google wasn't allowed to monopolize search.
    - ryukoposting 3y ago
      We face dozens of material problems that could be solved if the advertising industry had even a sprinkle of shame. Imagine the world we'd live in if list buying and backlink buying were taboo.
- 3y ago
giblfiz 3y ago
THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! SOMEONE SHOULD KEEP AN ARCHIVE OF OUR PRECIOUS CULTURAL HERITAGE. They could even keep in on the internet! We could call it the "Internet Archive" And with this amazing technology, there could even be a way we could go way back and look at things that were published before, right on the internet as well. We could call it the "wayback machine" Oh wait: http://web.archive.org/web/20220322003618/https://newspress.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220322003618/https://newspress.... Seriously though, three out of four times when I see someone crying "but our precious cultural heritage" it's something that has already been taken care of by archive.org, or that it would be trivial to have them help out with, instead of trying to force the hand of some corporate giant. Did you know that archive.org even has a special legal exemption to ignore copyright law for archiving software?
- shortformblog 3y ago
  Relying on an underfunded nonprofit to protect information incompletely is never going to be as good as having access to the original information source. I could point to many reasons for this, but let me start with just one: The internet has been around as a mainstream entity for just 30 years. The newspaper has 155 years of archives. Those archives have not been put on a number of vintage newspaper archive sites, making this information impossible to access. Have you ever dealt with newspaper archives? Morgues of old content? They are often complex to manage and digitize. The Internet Archive, being asked to manage the literal history of the internet, has a massive backlog. It would be significantly better if someone who actually was up close and had an organizational interest in managing it could do it instead, because that makes the lift far easier to deal with. The Internet Archive is an important tool, but it is not the silver bullet you think it is. It is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It is the recovery option of last resort, and it puts a lot of pressure on the organization to treat them as a simple replacement for content that should just be online. Any researcher worth their salt will tell you that.
  - dr_kiszonka 3y ago
    Is the Malta-based company vehemently against giving archivists access to the newspaper's archives? I can't imagine they would have any good use for it.
ajmurmann 3y ago
What parts of this problem aren't solved by archive.org?
- shortformblog 3y ago
  We shouldn’t rely on the Internet Archive when we don’t have to. It is a nonprofit that has faced significant legal challenges in recent years, and it has many other priorities. It’s a backup in case of disaster and a historical record, not a replacement. I love it and its value is immaculate, but it is asking too much of it to clean up every mess like this. There’s also the print archives, which are not available online.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Then that's an issue for the Library of Congress or whoever. It's completely unreasonable to expect any private business to somehow maintain a record of their archives ad infinitum especially if they're no longer in business and there aren't any employees. Certainly non-journalistic corporate records of all sorts die with the company unless someone else has kept and shared a copy.
    - shortformblog 3y ago
      There’s a concept called corporate responsibility, and this fits neatly into it. It is irresponsible if you deal in information as a business and you do not have a plan to protect what you’re building long-term. It’s kind of what you signed up for when you started running a newspaper or news website.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        >It’s kind of what you signed up for when you started running a newspaper or news website. No. I didn't actually. I probably signed up to produce (hopefully) quality journalism. But I didn't sign up to be an archive for the ages. And I'm not sure how I would even do so after I'm no longer there and have no revenues or employees. I can donate paper copies to the local library but that's basically just kicking the can down the road given that local libraries don't have infinite resources or space to maintain collections and, in fact, routinely sell off books that aren't checked out.
_xnmw 3y ago
For me, the real story here is not about losing some newspaper archives. The real story here is to show how broken the system is right now. Is this even a human society anymore? Where SEO link farms and AI-generated junk replace local community history, where prime real estate is gutted by private equity firms, and all of this is done through shadowy foreign-registered businesses that have no stake in your collective well-being. And there are some who defend this as capitalism. The market decided what is worth keeping, they said. Except "the market" isn't human, and what it has decided to keep isn't something I, as a human, want to be a part of.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pizzaknife 3y ago
Hey i worked there for several years during the wendy drama. glad to see people are interested in this sb treasure
heliodor 3y ago
A lot more people would be interested in bidding for a domain name than for a company that owns a domain name. The domain name should be auctioned off separately but the bankruptcy court is more interested in completing the task in the easiest way possible for them instead of doing things right.
avipars 3y ago
is it possible to work with archive.org to mirror the last version of the site?

279 points by shortformblog 3y ago

Ansaben10 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

olesya1979 3y ago

[dead]

shortformblog 3y ago

Hey all, just sharing this with a quick note. Recently, I was part of a small group of journalists/researchers who determined that the sports site Deadspin sold to investors with close affiliations with the online gaming affiliate industry in Malta. Eventually, it led to a story in 404 Media that tied specific names to the purchase and highlighted some of their M.O.: https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/ https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publish... It turns out that one of the key figures in the Deadspin purchase is also attempting to buy a bankrupt newspaper’s website, likely because the domain (NewsPress.com) has a lot of SEO value. That’s what the above story is about. This story is really important, because it is essentially putting a community’s history at risk. To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases.

jonah 3y ago
Thanks for digging into this and for sharing this article! I hadn't seen this latest twist. I'm friends with a number of the "paper’s staff who staged a mass walk-out". Very difficult times. Not mentioned in this article was the staff’s long struggle for union representation which they did finally get much to the ire of the owner. The independent.com (another great, "generic", domain name!) has been covering the saga for decades: https://www.independent.com/?s=santa+barbara+news-press https://www.independent.com/?s=santa+barbara+news-press
- shortformblog 3y ago
  Sad tale. In its own way, as bad as the private equity management we’ve been seeing in chains throughout the country. There has to be a great story as to how these two news sites in the same town got such high-quality domains.
  - ryantgtg 3y ago
    What’s funny to me is that https://www.noozhawk.com/ https://www.noozhawk.com/ (along with others) took up the mantle when the SB News Press went downhill. That domain is not as hot.
    - topato 3y ago
      And Noozhawk's almost Fark clone design when it first launched was pretty good, I'm not such a fan of what it's become. And it feels like their reporting has gotten a lot more focused on north county, rather than the city of Santa Barbara itself. At least The Independent is still there for Santa Barbara, Goleta, and Isla Vista...
KennyBlanken 3y ago
I chortled at the claim that deadspin is "beloved"
- causality0 3y ago
  "Beloved" doesn't necessarily mean good journalism. The type of rage-bait that includes trying to publicly shame a Native American child for painting his face in team colors and wearing a family headdress to a football game is likely to make you quite beloved among a certain crowd.
  - shortformblog 3y ago
    To be clear, the “beloved” era (while noting its subjectivity) is in reference to the pre-G/O Media era, which was run under a different editorial direction. That team has since moved to Defector. The controversy you are referencing happened last fall, years after that team had left.
    - causality0 3y ago
      Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the information.
- BoxFour 3y ago
  Among sports fans old Deadspin, specifically the previous iteration with columnists like Drew Magary, is pretty beloved. Currently Defector is trying hard to occupy the gap left by it.
ntnsndr 3y ago
One outcome of the Deadspin mess might be instructive—a group of journalists abandoned it and started Defector, a successful worker co-op. After Quitting Deadspin in Protest, They’re Starting a New Site https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/media/deadspin-staffers-start-defector.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gk0.3fzO.TCDEPWcmMmwb&ugrp=u https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/media/deadspin-s... For more context on cooperatives in journalism, see https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0007.203?view=text;rgn=main https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0007.203?view=text...
- burkaman 3y ago
  404 Media itself is a similar collective of ex-Vice people, I think pretty directly inspired by Defector.
  - toofy 3y ago
    to add to this, i think 404media is also where Joseph Cox went (edit: i just checked, he is a part of 404) most people here will be familiar with his writing for motherboard.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Glad to see worker cooperatives popping up!
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I don't really disagree but be aware that many of those people working in journalist cooperatives would probably make more money working at McDonalds. (Of course I'm sure they find working as a journalist more satisfying.)
    - photochemsyn 3y ago
      McDonald's CEO made $17.8 million in cash/stock/options in 2022, so working at McDonalds must be a good gig. If entry-level workers made 1/100th what the CEO makes, that's $178,000 a year!
eru 3y ago
> This story is really important, because it is essentially putting a community’s history at risk. To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases. Huh? It's just a domain name. None of the history in none of the archives is going away.
- shortformblog 3y ago
  From the literal article: > After all, the archive is our collective memoir, if we can keep it. No complete digital record seems to exist in any other one place — not the Santa Barbara Public Library, UC Riverside’s California Newspaper Project, the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, or the like.
  - eru 3y ago
    That's seems like a straightforward thing to fix, if people care. And has nothing to do with who owns the domain name.
throw0101c 3y ago
> To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases. Something that the iSCSI folks considered: - A date code, in yyyy-mm format. This date MUST be a date during which the naming authority owned the domain name used in this format, and SHOULD be the first month in which the domain name was owned by this naming authority at 00:01 GMT of the first day of the month. This date code uses the Gregorian calendar. All four digits in the year must be present. Both digits of the month must be present, with January == "01" and December == "12". The dash must be included. * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3720#section-3.2.6.3.1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3720#section-3.2.6.... So if there was a change of ownership, the IQN would change.
araes 3y ago
Is this a big trend lately? Buying old newspapers and then putting them back up as SEO shell farms with recognizable names? There was another story on here just a little bit back about an East coast lady that had her article stolen by a paper she used to work for, that then returned, zombified, under the same name, yet with different bylines. Similar to this article from Buzzfeed (2020) about pseudo-"local" news websites. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/these-fake-local-news-sites-have-confused-people-for-years https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/these-fa...

kjkjadksj 3y ago

It’s a shame these former voices don’t band together more often and just try and run a cheap to host site covering the same local topics. You don’t need to sustain the overhead to print and circulate or even rent an office anymore. I’d pay for that, I’m sure I’m not the only one either.

jonah 3y ago
There are other local, online-only news sources which now involve some of the previous Santa Barbara News-Press staff. https://www.independent.com https://www.independent.com https://www.edhat.com https://www.edhat.com https://www.noozhawk.com https://www.noozhawk.com https://www.montecitojournal.net https://www.montecitojournal.net etc.
selimthegrim 3y ago
Edhat is a long running local site.

Dalewyn 3y ago

I can't help but feel surpassing $250,000.00 at auction is no big deal for a city with ~88,000 residents, in this age of crowdfunding and otherwise asking for donations the old fashioned way. So this is less a question of whether the residents can pay, but rather whether the residents value this archive at all.

Ansaben10 3y ago
[flagged]
gedy 3y ago
Not to mention this is Santa Barbara which has a lot of monied residents.
delichon 3y ago
We'll find out a week from Tuesday. A last chance to win the day will take place at 2 p.m. on April 9 in room 201 of the United States Bankruptcy Court, 1415 State Street, Santa Barbara. There, a live auction will occur whereby the current price of $250,000 may be bested only by in-person bidding.
goodSteveramos 3y ago
Correct. I think the idea of this article is to raise awareness so the local residents can pony up the cash to save the website.
smcin 3y ago
Not really, who said the residents are the only potential bidders? Public or private museums or collectors might be interested. 1868-1990s covers almost the entire history of California as a state, the photos alone shoule be interesting. In the silent film era 1910-1922, Santa Barbara housed the then world's largest movie studio (Flying A Studios) until it outgrew the town and moved to Hollywood. Those years should be quite interesting.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

KennyBlanken 3y ago

> The paper declared bankruptcy on July 21, 2023. In a fitting final insult, the court filing listed more than $116,000 in company assets — an implausibly low valuation — as it was revealed McCaw had previously shifted the real estate property of the newspaper’s historic De la Guerra Plaza headquarters and Goleta printing plant into private LLCs under her control This is also a very standard play in the private equity field. The property (which is usually what they really wanted) is forked off to a different entity, and then that entity charges rent back to the original corp. This is how they kill off assisted living homes. They don't bother with cost-cutting; they just keep jacking the "rent" the property-owning corp charges the assisted living facility entity. In desperation to keep the home for residents, the staff cut every cost they can. Cracks in care quickly appear, everyone who can leave does which means lots of lost cash flow and expenses split among fewer residents...at some point there's just no more squeezing possible, the corp misses a rent payment...and that's that. It's also the classic plot for many stories; gang/army strong-arms a village and keeps asking for larger and larger takes of the village's crops, eventually leading to the villagers starving, etc.

jmholla 3y ago
It's nuts that this is legal. This is seems so fraudulent to me: giving away your assets to an entity so you can rent them back from that entity.
- db48x 3y ago
  Why wouldn’t it be legal? They own both corporations, and have all the rights in the world to dispose of the property as they see fit.
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    "Legal", of course, seldom equals "moral", "ethical" or even "right". In fact, "legal" often means "brazen thievery, but rich and entitled people doing it so that's okay".
  - 23B1 3y ago

ilamont 3y ago

Perhaps most disturbing of all, in just the past year, an industry trend appears to have kicked off in which a subset of SEO companies has begun to acquire the domain names and historical digital content archives of defunct small-town American newspapers for the express purpose of turning them into highly profitable backlink farms. Does anyone think that these backlink farms will have much value 2 or 3 years from now? This is not just about the role of AI providing better search results or answers to typical queries. It's also the longstanding decline in relevance of Google search queries gummed up with ads and SEO-optimized junk.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Doesn’t really matter. The people behind this aren’t interested in anything beyond quick dollars
ryukoposting 3y ago
Money is money, and if the cost of making a million dollars is $250K and incinerating a town's entire historical record, apparently that's a fine price for some people. Throw this on the heap of systemic ethical transgressions of the advertising industry, along with list selling, poor targeting practices, ...
- short_sells_poo 3y ago
  It's grotesque that this is not even the direct effect of the advertising industry, it is the side effect of Google's algo to sort results. Being ranked higher in the Goog results is sadly worth more than a town's historical records. I wonder if things were different if Google wasn't allowed to monopolize search.
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    We face dozens of material problems that could be solved if the advertising industry had even a sprinkle of shame. Imagine the world we'd live in if list buying and backlink buying were taboo.
3y ago

giblfiz 3y ago

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! SOMEONE SHOULD KEEP AN ARCHIVE OF OUR PRECIOUS CULTURAL HERITAGE. They could even keep in on the internet! We could call it the "Internet Archive" And with this amazing technology, there could even be a way we could go way back and look at things that were published before, right on the internet as well. We could call it the "wayback machine" Oh wait: http://web.archive.org/web/20220322003618/https://newspress.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220322003618/https://newspress.... Seriously though, three out of four times when I see someone crying "but our precious cultural heritage" it's something that has already been taken care of by archive.org, or that it would be trivial to have them help out with, instead of trying to force the hand of some corporate giant. Did you know that archive.org even has a special legal exemption to ignore copyright law for archiving software?

shortformblog 3y ago
Relying on an underfunded nonprofit to protect information incompletely is never going to be as good as having access to the original information source. I could point to many reasons for this, but let me start with just one: The internet has been around as a mainstream entity for just 30 years. The newspaper has 155 years of archives. Those archives have not been put on a number of vintage newspaper archive sites, making this information impossible to access. Have you ever dealt with newspaper archives? Morgues of old content? They are often complex to manage and digitize. The Internet Archive, being asked to manage the literal history of the internet, has a massive backlog. It would be significantly better if someone who actually was up close and had an organizational interest in managing it could do it instead, because that makes the lift far easier to deal with. The Internet Archive is an important tool, but it is not the silver bullet you think it is. It is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It is the recovery option of last resort, and it puts a lot of pressure on the organization to treat them as a simple replacement for content that should just be online. Any researcher worth their salt will tell you that.
- dr_kiszonka 3y ago
  Is the Malta-based company vehemently against giving archivists access to the newspaper's archives? I can't imagine they would have any good use for it.

ajmurmann 3y ago

What parts of this problem aren't solved by archive.org?

shortformblog 3y ago
We shouldn’t rely on the Internet Archive when we don’t have to. It is a nonprofit that has faced significant legal challenges in recent years, and it has many other priorities. It’s a backup in case of disaster and a historical record, not a replacement. I love it and its value is immaculate, but it is asking too much of it to clean up every mess like this. There’s also the print archives, which are not available online.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Then that's an issue for the Library of Congress or whoever. It's completely unreasonable to expect any private business to somehow maintain a record of their archives ad infinitum especially if they're no longer in business and there aren't any employees. Certainly non-journalistic corporate records of all sorts die with the company unless someone else has kept and shared a copy.
  - shortformblog 3y ago
    There’s a concept called corporate responsibility, and this fits neatly into it. It is irresponsible if you deal in information as a business and you do not have a plan to protect what you’re building long-term. It’s kind of what you signed up for when you started running a newspaper or news website.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      >It’s kind of what you signed up for when you started running a newspaper or news website. No. I didn't actually. I probably signed up to produce (hopefully) quality journalism. But I didn't sign up to be an archive for the ages. And I'm not sure how I would even do so after I'm no longer there and have no revenues or employees. I can donate paper copies to the local library but that's basically just kicking the can down the road given that local libraries don't have infinite resources or space to maintain collections and, in fact, routinely sell off books that aren't checked out.

_xnmw 3y ago

For me, the real story here is not about losing some newspaper archives. The real story here is to show how broken the system is right now. Is this even a human society anymore? Where SEO link farms and AI-generated junk replace local community history, where prime real estate is gutted by private equity firms, and all of this is done through shadowy foreign-registered businesses that have no stake in your collective well-being. And there are some who defend this as capitalism. The market decided what is worth keeping, they said. Except "the market" isn't human, and what it has decided to keep isn't something I, as a human, want to be a part of.

deleted 3y ago
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pizzaknife 3y ago

Hey i worked there for several years during the wendy drama. glad to see people are interested in this sb treasure

heliodor 3y ago

A lot more people would be interested in bidding for a domain name than for a company that owns a domain name. The domain name should be auctioned off separately but the bankruptcy court is more interested in completing the task in the easiest way possible for them instead of doing things right.

avipars 3y ago

is it possible to work with archive.org to mirror the last version of the site?