All My Blogs Are Dead
A couple of months ago, I pitched a feature on the music industry that I was totally qualified to write. But the editor questioned my experience: What exactly had I published about the music industry? By my count, over two thousand blogposts since 2009. But the links to my author pages bounced back because the websites had disappeared. Five of years work apparently evaporated from server racks somewhere in New Jersey, as if I had never written anything at all. Come to think of it, had I?
Despite the pervasive assumption that everything online lasts forever, the internet is inherently unstable. Jill Lepore’s recent New Yorker story on archive.org’s Wayback Machine notes the average lifespan of a website is “about a hundred days.” Sites vanish with no explanation, or get overwritten without any traceable history. Media outlets, even those with salaried employees and editorial budgets can and do suffer the same fate.
When a website dies, it’s usually the editorial that goes first: writers, both freelance and staff, then editors. Marketing and ad sales go next. Unlike print, where archive editions get filed away or become recycling, a website can be scrubbed out of existence because a company pulls it down or simply stops paying for hosting or domain rights. Modern Farmer went from National Magazine Award to pasture in a year. (Despite some assurances it will still be around, check back in six months.) Hipster Runoff owner Carles, rather than pull his dormant site down, just sold it to an Australian investor for over twenty thousand dollars. Remember The Daily? The internet doesn’t.
Most of the media outlets I’ve written for have folded and then were flat-out deleted. In 2009, I had started blogging for AOL Music’s Spinner and The BoomBox, averaging three posts per day about indie rock and hip-hop. By 2010, I was writing approximately two print features and twenty blogposts per month on local music acts for New York Press. After that, in 2011, I joined the boutique MP3 blog RCRD LBL as the site’s lead editor/writer, publishing five posts per day. None of these outlets exist in 2014 beyond stray citations, rotten links and Facebook apparitions.
Read the whole article at: http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/all-my-blogs-are-dead
= new reply since forum marked as read
there must be at least two or three federal snooper agencies that had it all archived for you.
