When the Rocky Mountain News was declared dead on Friday, February 27, after 150 years of publication, the remains included a Web site. Abandoned by the parent company, E.W. Scripps, rockymountainnews.com sits there just as the paper left it four months ago, a death mask of the Rocky.
That’s because on June 8 Scripps made the jubilant announcement that it was finalizing an agreement with the Denver Public Library “to ensure responsible stewardship of the storied newspaper’s archives and artifacts.” The library “would assume ownership of the Rocky’s voluminous archives, including all digital and paper newspaper clipping files, ” while the Colorado Historical Society would receive “such other artifacts as signs, photographs, special editions, artwork and other information that documents the history of the Rocky.”
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Griego expects this picture to change, and so do I. Newspapers that don’t police their sites will begin to—out of embarrassment, or because laws will be written to make them, or because some new form of newspaper will hold its readers to old-fashioned standards. And as for the bloggers—they may be a tide that’s already crested. In a June 7 story, “Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest,” the New York Times reported that about 95 percent of blogs are “essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web” just like the Rocky‘s Web site. These are private blogs, of course, but one reason they’re being forsaken must concern newspapers—they make hardly anybody any money. (The Tribune offers Chicago Now bloggers $5 for every 10,000 local hits—the cyberspace equivalent of carfare.)
McCargar has a rule of thumb that Groucho Marx would admire. A paper like the Rocky would be nuts to turn its data over to any library that offers to take it because the offer proves the library doesn’t know what it’s doing.
The snapshots are a little hit-and-miss, with plenty of broken links and material that doesn’t show up because it was hidden behind firewalls. Even so, the Wayback Machine, “such as it is, is the only effective archive of the Internet,” says McCargar.
