{"id":4065,"date":"2017-11-27T22:56:18","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T21:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amdf-centre.org\/?p=4065"},"modified":"2026-07-05T20:06:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T19:06:39","slug":"here-are-three-tools-that-help-digital-journalists-save-their-work-in-case-a-site-shuts-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amdf-centre.org\/2017\/11\/27\/here-are-three-tools-that-help-digital-journalists-save-their-work-in-case-a-site-shuts-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Here are Three Tools That Help Digital Journalists Save Their Work in Case a Site Shuts Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

The abrupt shutdown of the Gothamist and DNAinfo local news networks\u00a0earlier this month<\/a>\u00a0was a stark reminder to digital journalists who want archives of their stuff: Back it up! Back it up!<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just that news apps and digital interactives won\u2019t last forever; as my colleague Shan Wang\u00a0wrote in September<\/a>\u00a0in a look at broader archiving efforts, \u201cso many pioneering works of digital journalism no longer exist online, or exist only as a shadow of their former selves.\u201d The problem is also that digital journalists, who will someday be looking for new jobs, will probably need to share samples of their previous work with prospective employers, and that\u2019s tough to do if the site you were working for is gone. Even if you\u2019re not job-hunting, you may want evidence, years down the line, that you, you know \u2014\u00a0produced<\/em>\u00a0something.<\/p>\n

Luckily for journalists who haven\u2019t had the foresight to be saving all along (i.e., most of us), a few solutions have emerged.<\/p>\n

Save My News<\/a>, launched this month by\u00a0Ben Welsh<\/a>, editor of the Data Desk team at the Los Angeles Times, lets journalists (about 300 of them so far) save their links to\u00a0Internet Archive<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0WebCite<\/a>. You can download all of the clips and archive links as an Excel spreadsheet.<\/p>\n

Welsh created the tool on November 6, two days after DNAinfo\u2019s shutdown. \u201cOn social media, I saw a lot of my peers panicking and outraged,\u201d he said. \u201cIt seemed like a powerful opportunity to raise people\u2019s awareness about the fragility of their work \u2014 that all the journalism they pour so much effort into could disappear from the internet, poof.\u201d Save-your-work services aren\u2019t new, Welsh pointed out. The Internet Archive\u00a0has tools that let journalists preserve their work<\/a>, but many people simply don\u2019t know about them. \u201cSo many people who work professionally on the internet really don\u2019t know, until too late, that their work is this fragile,\u201d Welsh said. \u201cAnd it doesn\u2019t take a villainous owner to lose your legacy. It could just be a site redesign.\u201d<\/p>\n

Welsh plans to integrate more archiving services into Save My News, but he\u2019s intent on keeping the service simple: \u201cI\u2019m hosting it for free on Heroku, and there\u2019s not any business model attached to this. I\u2019m trying to avoid broadening the scope too far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parker Higgins<\/a>, director of special projects at the\u00a0Freedom of the Press Foundation<\/a>, put out a call on Twitter to work with Gothamist and DNAinfo journalists to\u00a0preserve their work<\/a>\u00a0when it looked as if the sites might be gone entirely and archives would have to be re-compiled through services like Internet Archive. He began writing the code to do that, but then the sites went back online and he was able to make a more robust, quicker tool that could get people PDF archives of all of the work they\u2019d published on those sites in a couple of hours.<\/p>\n

That tool, \u201cGotham Grabber,\u201d\u00a0is now available as open source code on Github<\/a>. \u201cWith a few alterations, many journalists can use this tool to create an archived version of their entire portfolio,\u201d Higgins\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in a Freedom of the Press blog post. That requires some coding knowledge \u2014 and \u201cmost of the journalists I\u2019ve talked to who were working at these places aren\u2019t coders,\u201d Higgins told me. \u201cBut I hope to see people adapting this code to other sites.\u201d He\u2019s now scraped more than 50,000 articles, each as a PDF.<\/p>\n

Gotham Grabber returns work as PDFs because most of the journalists who\u2019d contacted Higgins wanted it that way.\u00a0\u201cWhen you have a portfolio and you\u2019re sending an attachment for a new job, PDF is the preferred format. There are better ways to archive if you\u2019re talking about archiving for readers or long-term storage, and ultimately, these pages are meant to be HTML and served from a database,” Higgins explained.\u00a0“I hope this prompts people to think about longer-term storage and access. I mean, man, with some of these Gothamist and DNAinfo sites, in particular,\u00a0these are the only records of local events in a lot of cases<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you prefer to set it and forget it, there\u2019s\u00a0Authory<\/a>, a service that launched in beta last year (with a grant from the\u00a0Google Digital News Initiative<\/a>; the company is based in Hamburg) and then to the public over the summer. (Disclosure: I started using Authory for free in exchange for providing feedback when it was in beta.) Eric Hauch, its founder and CEO, worked for Axel Springer and Financial Times Deutschland and started thinking that it wasn\u2019t easy enough to find out when his favorite journalists had published new stories.<\/p>\n

When he started talking to other journalists about a tool that might help with this, \u201cthey told me they didn\u2019t only have issues with updating their readers. They also had trouble keeping track of their articles themselves. It made a lot of sense to combine these new things.\u201d After initial setup, Authory automatically backs up all of a journalist\u2019s articles (no matter what site they\u2019re published on) and also lets readers \u201csubscribe\u201d to journalists, so that they can receive email notifications when one publishes something new. (Muck Rack for Journalists\u00a0performs a similar function on the notification side<\/a>, but doesn\u2019t back up journalists\u2019 work.\u00a0Byliner<\/a>\u00a0used to offer a similar journalist-following function.) \u201cThe idea of creating the backups for the journalists was basically something we added on top, but now it\u2019s the center of what we do,\u201d Hauch said.<\/p>\n

A two-week trial is free, and after that the service is $7 a month or $70 a year. Authory is in very early stages; right now, it has under 1,000 active users, mostly in the U.S. and U.K. It can scrape content from sites with soft and metered paywalls, as well some sites with hard paywalls like The Wall Street Journal when journalists log in. In the future, it will support more hard paywalls.<\/p>\n

Users can access the full text of their articles on their Authory page, or email hello@authory.com<\/a> to request the export of some or all of their articles as an XML or HTML file. Eventually, they\u2019ll be able to download their archives with a single click\u00a0and will also be able to download individual PDFs.<\/p>\n

This means \u201cyou don\u2019t need to rely on us to be around forever,\u201d Hauch said. \u201cSome people are a little bit scared that we might go bust, which we don\u2019t intend to do at all.\u201d But \u2014 well \u2014 this is the Internet, and so, you never know.