Maybe you heard that Vice Media shut down a couple of months ago? After declaring bankruptcy last May, the media company (which was once worth almost $6 billion) was sold to private-equity lenders Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management for $350 million.

And that was the beginning of the end. In February, Vice laid off hundreds and ceased publishing on vice.com. A shell of the company will continue operating its business-to-business media arm, including its production studio and creative agency, but the journalists and the stories they uncovered are done.

Other once-solid brands reducing operations, stopping publishing magazines, or shutting down entirely include BuzzFeed, The Messenger, Jezebel, Popular Science, National Geographic, Washington Post Magazine, and Sports Illustrated.

It’s not just big-name brands, though. Local newspapers and magazines have undergone a traumatic shift in the past 10 years as well. You can’t help but notice that first they go all-digital, and then they’re just…gone. My local paper, The Watertown Sun, reported on local, national, and even some international news from 1921 to 1997. Seventy six years of sporting the tagline “Always Boosting Watertown’s Industries” and then just, poof.

Sometimes some of the best information I have found in my research was from local papers or specialty magazines. A local magazine like Sacramento Magazine (RIP) might highlight a local rare automobile collector. The Sun used to interview business owners all around the western Boston suburbs that flew well under the Boston Globe’s radar (until they didn’t).

So why am I talking about this?

When a magazine goes bust – especially a web-only magazine – all of those articles cease to exist when the last person leaving the building pulls the plug on the server.

Articles from larger newspapers and magazines may be retained in hard copy or on microfiche by libraries, or in electronic form by aggregators like Newspapers.com and Lexis Nexis, but what about the periodicals, zines, and web-only titles that were never archived?

When Vice told its staff that it was closing down, the journalists scrambled immediately to archive their stories. They did it because it was their clippings file – their resume – and they grabbed them onto their own computers. So thousands and thousands of articles are now each on disparate computers, where nobody can search them.

Except…

However, many of those journalists turned to Archive.org, aka The Internet Archive. Archive.org is a nonprofit, and it has been around since May 10, 1996. It opened its archives to the public via “The Wayback Machine” in 2001, allowing all of us to search back issues of everything, including previous iterations of websites.

According to blessed Wikipedia, “As of February 4, 2024, the Internet Archive holds more than 44 million print materials, 10.6 million videos, 1 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.8 million images, 255,000 concerts, and over 835 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Its mission is committing to provide “universal access to all knowledge.””

I mean, seriously, that’s amazing.

But wait, there’s more.

While not without controversy (they do archive lots of books and copyrighted material which tends to make publishers mad, after all) the Internet Archive preserves special collections from universities, public libraries, the US State Department, scientists, museums, rare collections, and much more in their Collections area.

And it’s not just that. Wired Magazine reported last month that the Internet Archive is going to be the repository for the most important documents and artifacts for the country of Aruba. You read that right – an entire country is trusting its most precious archives to the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive is now home to the Aruba Collection, which hosts digitized versions of Aruba’s National Library, National Archives, and other institutions including an archaeology museum and the University of Aruba. The collection comprises 101,376 items so far—roughly one for each person who lives on the Island—including 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, and seven 3D objects.”

As we lose precious media resources, as search engines remove their cache feature and start saving links with lesser worth, the Internet Archive grows in its importance on a minute-by-minute basis. If you haven’t used it yet yourself, let me give you a few examples of how it’s helped me and my team:

• It was there that I found a video interview with a prospect detailing how his philanthropic interests had made an abrupt shift 6 months previously. That led me to suggest him to a frontline fundraiser supporting that area of the university who began a long philanthropic relationship between him and the university.
• It was at the Internet Archive that I was able to find a bio on a prospective donor from 4 years previously. The company had updated the page which had taken the bio off their website when the person retired, but Archive.org had saved a copy of the page. It was the only source I found for information about the person’s volunteer affiliations, family, and their very expensive hobby.
• The Internet Archive is the only place you can find a tiny gold nugget of information that leads a researcher in a whole new direction on a prospect that we formerly used for our HBG test profile. Finding that nugget told us how tenacious and creative the candidate was in locating information.

What you can do!

Did I mention that The Internet Archive is a nonprofit? It is. You can join me in supporting it.

But one of the other key things you can (and must!) do is save articles and web pages to the Archive. (It’s easy! It’s free! It takes 1 second and no effort beyond a click! Also, it’s important.)

Here’s how:

• Download your browser’s Wayback Machine widget/extension so you can archive on the fly.
• Find a great article/video/page with information that deserves saving.
• Click on the cute little Wayback Machine icon on your browser and BOOM, you’ve saved that for posterity.

That’s really it.

The Internet Archive holds a great deal in a small space: Multum in Parvo. As key commercial resources disappear at the pull of a plug, this small nonprofit is making sure that important information is preserved.

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Further reading:

⇒ Don’t miss this article from Current Affairs by Nathan J. Robinson: “Gated Knowledge Is Making Research Harder Than It Needs to Be.”

It scared me, doing the research for Myth, just how ephemeral the internet is. I quoted from something an academic said in a YouTube video at one point, for instance, but if the video were taken down tomorrow I don’t know how I’d prove he ever said it.”