milwaukee journal sentinel 2016 archives

#MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL 2016 ARCHIVES ARCHIVE#

The commenting service I used back then is already dead, and none of the tens of thousands of comments posted to my blog exist anywhere that I'm aware of. I personally worry about what Google finds profitable at any particular moment, because I have more than a decade of writing lodged deep in the belly of Google's Blogger and services. Useful and necessary, sure – but Google, even with its 'Don't Be Evil' mantra, is a for-profit enterprise.

#MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL 2016 ARCHIVES ARCHIVE#

The Google News archive project itself, which digitized the Journal and Sentinel archives and made them searchable, was abandoned in 2011 because it wasn't terribly profitable. Journalists write the first draft of history, they say, but if those drafts are inaccessible to those who follow, they are as worthless as the missing paper (or pixels) they were originally printed on.įurther digging by the Urban Milwaukee folks suggests the Journal Sentinel archive's disappearance is just a temporary hiccup as the paper is folded into the Gannett mothership.īut the story is a large and stunning reminder of how, as historian Erik Loomis put it, 'anything online can disappear in a blink.'Īs much as we like to think these things we create and adore and use frequently are permanent, all it takes is one decision in a boardroom somewhere for things to disappear. Nor may it matter to the staffers of the paper today, who presumably have access to whatever they need internally.īut for people like me who rely on internet news not just for self-congratulatory columns like this one but also for education or research purposes, access to new, recent and old news is critical. This may not matter to 99 percent of the Journal Sentinel's subscribing customers or occasional visitors. You can't even easily find all of today's stories at, let alone find past stories through searching. In the last few years, after reporter and editor buyouts, a sale to Scripps and the most recent sale to Gannett – publisher of USA Today, the McDonalds of newspapers – quality on the page slipped and, now, its website has the ugly, unmanageable Gannett cookie-cutter template. Its website, even in the early days of newspaper websites, was easy to navigate and search, besting almost any other medium-market newspaper web edition in usability and aesthetics both. Its beat and investigative reporters were dogged and, even if not first to a story, willing to dig until there was no dirt left to turnover. While the city's merged daily paper was never perfect, when it was owned by Journal Communications, it was a remarkably good paper for a city of this size. Milwaukee needs access to the Journal, the Sentinel and the merged Journal Sentinel content, but not at the cost of almost all the library's annual acquisition budget. Not only are the archives gone from Google, but NewsBank, the company which now controls 120 years of historic of Milwaukee newspaper archives, attempted to sell it for $1.5 million to the Milwaukee library system, even though that library provided much of the original archived content to Google in the first place.

This change came without any advance warning and still has no official explanation.' 16, the Milwaukee Journal, Milwaukee Sentinel and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel listings vanished from the Google News Archive home page. As Michail Takach wrote for Urban Milwaukee, 'On Tuesday, Aug. Last month, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel made headlines across the country when its archives disappeared from Google News.

Milwaukee journal sentinel 2016 archives