Microphone Box. National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The recent removal of the Comedy Central, MTV News, CMT, and TV Land online archives by Paramount Global has raised concerns about the fate of decades’ worth of valuable digital content. Paramount is not alone. As the Nieman Lab recently highlighted, the list of sites with worthwhile content gone dark is long, with journalists left scrambling to save their work and researchers left empty-handed.

It’s rare that a media company plans for its demise, and often too late by the time its fate becomes clear. But in today’s day and age, where content is digital and not sent in print form to libraries and other repositories, media companies have a responsibility to consider preservation as part of their operations.

Here, we outline the essential steps involved in digital preservation as well as those we advise media companies to take to ensure their content is preserved for future access.

The importance of digital preservation

Digital preservation ensures that vital information remains available for future generations. The content within media and news organizations is a treasure trove of cultural, political, and social history. Losing access to this material means the erasure of critical historical records, depriving future researchers, historians, and the public of valuable insights.

Key steps in digital preservation

  • Identification of valuable content: Recognizing and prioritizing content that has significant historical, cultural, or educational value.
  • Secure storage: Ensuring that digital assets are stored in a manner that protects them from physical and digital threats, including technological obsolescence.
  • Regular backups: Creating and maintaining backups to safeguard against data loss.
  • Access management: Implementing systems to manage and facilitate access to preserved content while respecting copyright and intellectual property rights.
  • Long-term sustainability: Establishing funding and resources to support ongoing preservation efforts, ideally with a third-party preservation partner.

What media companies can do

Comprehensive steps media companies can take to preserve their content include:

  • Backing up data: Ensuring that all content is securely backed up in multiple locations to prevent data loss.
  • Engaging experts: Collaborating with researchers and digital preservation experts to assess the collection’s research value and to develop a robust preservation strategy.
  • Being transparent: Communicating their preservation plans to stakeholders, including journalists, scholars, and the public, to build trust and accountability.
  • Exploring partnerships: Working with organizations such as Portico to leverage expertise and infrastructure for long-term preservation.

Portico’s commitment to preserving digital news

At Portico, we understand the critical role that the security and accessibility of digitized content plays in protecting the record of events that have shaped our collective history. This is why in 2023—along with the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri and the Columbia Missourian—Portico launched a pilot project to explore the preservation of local news content that may be at risk of disappearing due to economic pressures facing the industry. The goal of this project is to understand the technical, legal, and financial issues that need to be resolved to preserve valuable news content for the very long term.

Importance of collaboration

There is a great deal of work to be done: we need to identify at-risk news content, create a sustainable and scalable system for preserving it, and ensure that its creators trust that their content will be cared for with careful attention and long-term commitment. Portico has done this at scale for the scholarly community and today preserves more than 2.5 billion files, composed of 96 million journal articles, 1.6 million eBooks, and 8.2 million items from digital collections—totaling 560 TB. Portico’s news pilot project has significant potential for protecting the work of journalists and our cultural, political, and social history, much as we have the scholarly record.

Conclusion

The preservation of digital content is not just about safeguarding data; it’s about protecting our collective memory and ensuring that future generations have access to the rich tapestry of our cultural heritage.

Preservation is paramount, and it is a responsibility we all share.

About the author

Kate Wittenberg is the managing director of Portico. She oversees execution of a strategic vision for Portico that is deeply informed by the role of scholarly publishers and academic libraries and responds to demonstrated preservation needs of the international higher education community.

Working with the Portico team, she develops Portico strategy as shifts in scholarly publishing, higher education, or other sectors present new needs, opportunities, and challenges for publishers, libraries, college and university administrators, and government agencies in preserving scholarship.