The Failed Promise of Digital Content: A roundup of concerns

The dawn of the internet promised many things including a vast library of always available content. But as the years have passed, that utopia has not emerged.
Link rot, copyright squabbles and other issues have created an incomplete, unreliable content library online.
I’ve documented a lot of these problems in my long-running series, “The Failed Promise of Digital Content.” What follows is a roundup of articles on various subjects having to do with that broader topic. Hopefully they won’t disappear any time soon.

Link rot and disappearing content

How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History (The New York Times Magazine; June 21, 2016)

Raiders of the Lost Web: If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can. (The Atlantic; Oct. 14, 2015)

Maybe The Best Place To Store Your Favorite Photos Is On Old-Fashioned Paper (The Huffington Post; April 30, 2015)

Amber, a new tool to prevent linkrot on websites, is out in beta (NiemanLab; Feb. 4, 2015)

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job (The Message; Jan. 28, 2015)

Missing content

Copyright Terms And How Historical Journalism Is Disappearing (Techdirt; Nov. 4, 2015)

Too many classic films remain buried in studios’ vaults (Los Angeles Times; Oct. 23, 2015)

False information online

How fake news sites frequently trick big-time journalists (Columbia Journalism Review; May 26, 2016)

Unreadable digital formats

How the father of the internet is trying to make the web last forever (Business Insider; June 20, 2016)

Threatened business models

Google’s Arbitrary Morality Police Threaten Us Yet Again; Media Sites Probably Shouldn’t Use Google Ads (Techdirt; June 15, 2016)

Photo: Abandoned and rotting boat on the estuary floor at Llandanwg, Wales. (Photo by William Warby)