Tedium - In The Age Of Culling ✂️

A shot of CNET’s studios, circa 2014. (Nan Palmero/Flickr)

CNET pruning its content is a harbinger of something bigger

To be clear, I am not a fan of CNET removing its content from its website in this way. It favors the present to the past, and removes important dots of context that future generations of researchers and journalists can use to tell important stories. And CNET owns perhaps the most complete archive of an important period of technology—the 1995 to 2005 period where the internet first took off, disrupted industries, and reshaped our relationship with the world.

But let’s be clear here. CNET is not a unique case. I am going to tell you right now that CNET is not the first website that has removed or pruned its archives, or decided to underplay them, or make them hard to access. Far from it.

Often, what I have noticed over the years is that websites will often go through major redesigns and decide not to pull certain types of content over. A lot gets lost in the process, and there are many reasons to not put in the work, including time, complexity, and resources.

Or maybe they will just not put in the work to make that information accessible without a lot of legwork.

To offer a few examples:

1. USA Today is 40 years old, and has been online for 27 of those years. Its sitemap only goes back to October of 2012, when it conducted a major redesign. While its content is archived in print from elsewhere, that means essentially half of its digital history is just not there. Older content, when accessible, appears to be buried at the subdomain usatoday30.usatoday.com, but that redirects to the main page and is hard to search via Google.

2. Newsweek is prominently celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, but its archive page only covers issues dating back to 2013, the year IBT Media bought the company from IAC, the parent company of The Daily Beast. The content from its legacy years (most famously this piece) is still there and can be searched, but it is not obviously organized.

3. PC World, unlike its longtime competitor CNET, does not offer an easily accessible sitemap for its content, but it a little digging around uncovers the fact that it once did, and many of the articles in the sitemap are no longer accessible. The oldest article in the PC World archives is from 1997, and odds are it was likely missed in the pruning process, because it is one of only three articles currently on the site from the 1990s.

4. People.com, while its archive appears to be online, does not make it easy to access said archive, because of the way the site is designed. There is no user-accessible sitemap or easy to use pagination, and its search functionality includes no visible date on the articles.

5. Pitchfork has strong historic archives at this point, in part because search is a key reason why the site works, but it has been known for removing reviews in the past, including old reviews that didn’t reflect its later editorial sensibility. It notably faced a particularly odd situation around the time of its purchase by Condé Nast: A onetime reviewer became a very loud critic of the site, at one point making legal threats, and the site responded by removing that writer’s entire body of work.

Of these examples, the most egregious is easily USA Today, which as a national newspaper, fits under the “paper of record” category. One could argue that the company has a backstop in the form of online archives, but the company has literally decades of broken links inaccessible online. Poof.

Now, to be clear, I do not blame small teams struggling to keep up with the huge tide of content for being unable to maintain the past. It’s a lot of work, even in the best of circumstances. Moving from one CMS to another takes time and money, both of which are sometimes in short supply.

(Alan Levine/Flickr)

But I only bring up these failings to point out that, while CNET is clearly making a mistake here, it is one that many other sites make in ways big and small every single day. The difference in the case of CNET is that it appears to be intentional and not just an oversight or the result of institutional history going away. CNET intentionally put in the work to protect its historic content in the first place, and now it’s putting in the work to bury it.

CNET’s editorial practices understandably have a laser focus on them right now, in no small part because the outlet was the first to start publishing AI-generated content. But let’s not give the rest of the media world a pass because CNET was the one in the headline.

These articles help expose the past; they were the hard work of people who spent a lot of time building them.

I think an important distinction to make here, as I close this piece out, is that we should not expect the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to save us. Sure, it certainly can, and its affiliated archive.it site has collected much of CNET’s history.

But we should not expect it. The Internet Archive is an important resource, but it is a fallible one and an overworked one. These companies have the money and resources. They should be the ones protecting their own work. The Internet Archive is there to clean up your mess, not excuse your failings.

Ultimately, we should encourage better standards from publishers and other players in the content ecosystem. The reason why this content dies is because not enough work has been done to properly value it.

There are at least three distinct ways I could see other sites not fall down the CNET trap in the digital era:

I think CNET is making a mistake, but they’ve also identified a serious problem for the digital news ecosystem: Old content is a burden to carry, and intentionally or not, Google isn’t making that lift any easier.

I think as researchers, journalists, and SEO heads, we need to put our heads together to figure out ways to make maintaining historic content look less like a burden and more like an opportunity.

Our history is at risk if we can’t.

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