Challenges of archiving and preserving born-digital news applications

Abstract

Born-digital news content is increasingly becoming the format of the first draft of history. Archiving and preserving this history is of paramount importance to the future of scholarly research, but many technical, legal, financial, and logistical challenges stand in the way of these efforts. This is especially true for news applications, or custom-built websites that comprise some of the most sophisticated journalism stories today, such as the “Dollars for Docs” project by ProPublica. Many news applications are standalone pieces of software that query a database, and this significant subset of apps cannot be archived in the same way as text-based news stories, or fully captured by web archiving tools such as Archive-It. As such, they are currently disappearing. This paper will outline the various challenges facing the archiving and preservation of born-digital news applications, as well as outline suggestions for how to approach this important work.