Five Things: August 8, 2024
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_ONE
To preserve their work — and drafts of history — journalists take archiving into their own hands | Hanaa’ Tameez
Once, when Azzi was working on a story related to women’s hockey, she needed to find information about a lawsuit. A reporter named Meg Linehan had worked for a women’s sports publication called Excelle Sports and was the only person to cover the lawsuit in-depth at the time. But Excelle Sports shut down in 2017 after just two years of publishing and its stories were no longer online.
This is a great read for anyone who’s been involved with digital media for more than 5 minutes, especially for noting the challenges facing “niche” sites that may be the only sources of coverage for specific topics and/or individuals.
When Pop Culture Shock shuttered, I lost so many articles and interviews I wrote and/or edited, most spotlighting POC creators and comics that few sites were covering back then, particularly from 2005-2007 when I was running the comics side of the site. While I’ve preserved some of my better articles under the PCS tag (and the Wayback Machine captured a bit more), the vast majority of everything we published there was lost forever — some in a botched update, then everything after the shuttering — diminishing (and in some cases, erasing) the full impact some of those people and comics had, along with all of the comments from our small but engaged community.
The same thing happened years later with Digital Book World when it was sold to new owners, and thanks to my own ill-fated experiment with Joomla, my short-lived literary e-zine, Spindle, exists only on the Wayback Machine.
tldr: Own your own domain, post all of your key articles there in full (after a reasonable period of time, either as private or public posts, depending on your rights), and back it all up on a regular basis, especially before running an update on your CMS. Separately, save a copy of everything you write to a local hard drive, including original drafts and final edits, and consider printing out and archiving hard copies of the good stuff. The cloud is just someone else’s computer, and they can decide to turn it off without notice at any time.
PS: Of all the frustrations with disappearing online content, I think LLMs not being able to cite “legit” sources is the least concerning one. They could surely archive everything they’ve scraped and make it available via a search portal, and probably will for the stuff they belatedly license. Some publishers will even thank them for doing it because they never learn from their mistakes!
__TWO
High Noon Showdown: AI Content Theft | Paul Gerbino
Media companies, by offering ‘open web access,’ inadvertently fostered the perception that online content is free. While readily available, this content was never truly free. It cost money to create, curate, and host – often subsidized by advertising. However, weak enforcement of copyright notices and terms of use – and the media’s own mistake by referring to their web content as ‘free’ – created a gray area that AI companies are now exploiting.
So many current media problems go back to the initial mishandling of the internet in the earliest days, and “inevitability” continues to be the boogeyman driving bad business decisions. Watching media companies belatedly sign deals with unscrupulous AI grifters for content they’ve devalued themselves for years is kind of appalling, especially knowing almost none of that revenue will find its way back to its original writers nor fund the writing of new content by fairly paid humans.
I’m also skeptical of book publishers making similar deals, especially for content they potentially don’t have the rights to share with these grifters, and no clear way to compensate individual authors for their contributions.
NOTE: I met Gerbino while attending a disappointing AI webinar on LinkedIn several weeks ago and have been enjoying his insightful thoughts on AI and copyright ever since, which appear in Creative Licensing International’s twice-monthly newsletter.
___THREE
Libby and hoopla Changes Coming September 2024 | eLibrary
We are happy to report that our Libby and hoopla collections are popular! The use of all of our digital collections has continued to increase year over year, increasing by 64% since 2019. This is wonderful news! But with increased use comes increased costs.
I’m treading lightly with this one since it references a couple of day job competitors, but after writing about libraries’ reluctance to use their power to shape the demand curve and adjust their approach to digital acquisitions earlier this year, I’m glad to see a large library system proactively publicizing the exorbitant costs for digital licenses, while adjusting hold limits to help optimize their spending.
Patrons need to help libraries put pressure on publishers for fair, affordable access to ebooks, and libraries need to inform their patrons about how they license digital content — and how much they spend on it — instead of just promoting everything as free resources. That approach not only devalues their own work, but it also devalues the books themselves.
____FOUR
The mining of the public domain | Jessamyn West
I wish, sometimes, that library and archive websites were better looking, more showy and appealing. But more than that, I wish that sites like these honored the work that goes into sharing these images, because the internet is richer highlighting the work of all of us.
I hadn’t heard of Public.work before reading West’s insightful take on it, and I’ll probably avoid it now that I know what it’s about. Whether it’s already hit your radar or not, though, West is always a must-read and this is a good one.
So many online experiences leverage the uncredited work and expertise of librarians — directly and indirectly — but get presented with a layer of polish few library-centric products can afford to offer. I still cringe whenever I hear the “Netflix of…” claim, because what they’re actually describing is almost always just a library with a slick UI and private funding that’s focused on mining and monetizing your data rather than providing free, equal, and equitable access to information.
_____FIVE
New ‘Battery Belt’ Opens Organizing Front in the South | Ben Carroll
This breathtaking EV development is an acceleration of longstanding trends. Auto and other industries have been steadily increasing their footprint in Southern states for several decades. They’re drawn to a reactionary, pro-business climate with the lowest union density, lowest wages, and the most stringent anti-labor laws in the country. With strikes and organizing on the rise nationally, local politicians are underlining this selling point more than ever.
Some people seem to think I’m anti-EVs because I regularly surface articles that spotlight the various challenges involved in hitting some of the ambitious targets that have been set for the transition from combustion engines. I fully support EVs, in theory, but I remain unconvinced that we’re on the right track for them to realistically and sustainably overtake ICEs in a way that doesn’t simply trade one environmental problem for another.
Carroll’s breakdown of where EV investment is happening in the US and what’s actually driving those trends is People’s Exhibit 207g for why we’re more likely to find a way to make things even worse over the next 10-20 years. Capitalism doesn’t actually care about the environment, and replacing cars with different cars simply focuses on one of the symptoms rather than the actual disease.
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It’s funny how the meme is, “the internet is forever” (alternatively, “the internet is an archive”), when in reality, things keep slipping through the cracks into nothingness. I’m not a journalist, but I have seen multiple (personal and publisher-sponsored) blogs go poof! over the years, taking with them the hard work of people who had no say in the decision to nuke their intellectual property.
On large corporations ceding their own intellectual property rights to AI without any understanding of the consequences: the paying job fired the long-serving IP lawyer and her team, then hired a couple of interns to run that department, and now there’s no one who knows their ass from their elbow minding all that IP’s copyright. It’s a time bomb.
Libraries pushing back: fingers crossed it works, and that more libraries join the fight.
It’s funny how quickly people go for the EV as the solution to transportation problems when better planned and properly maintained public transportation has been proven, over and over, to work–elsewhere. But of course, the ever-present toxic “but that can’t work here, because we are special/exceptional/unique” and “rugged individualism” myths have trained people in the U.S. to never look at the larger picture, only at both what solves their own needs and what they alone can do. Collective action is mostly anathema to them (though recent gains on that front are so very encouraging).
Interns managing IP and legal?!? WTF?!?!
American Exceptionalism is definitely a disease that manifests in a variety of ways, and cars representing independence and freedom is among the worst.
In doing my occasional check of links on my website last year, I was horrified to find that the magazine I’d appeared in the most – including the cover – had quietly gone out of business. None of my work existed anymore. Luckily, I found an editor who had pdf copies of some of the issues I was in, so I was able to access some of the work.
At the same time, I found out that the website of a dear friend and terrific author who died in 2022 was no longer in existence. Knowing her family, I was not surprised that they abandoned it as ‘not worth their time’. But there were many years of her work and dozens – maybe hundreds – of other authors who were lucky to guest blog for her.
I’m sharing this with everyone I can think of. And it’s a good reminder to tighten up my instructions for my daughter, who will take control of my work after I’m gone.