Sign up for Journalism UK

A one-minute read, every weekday. Unsubscribe anytime.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Digital journalists increasingly turn to web archives like the Wayback Machine to follow how things on the internet break, change or disappear – from deleted posts to quietly edited pages.

The web has become not only a source of information but also the subject of media investigations, prompting journalists, researchers and activists to use digital archives to reconstruct timelines, verify claims, uncover hidden connections and hold powerful actors to account.

As online materials grow more fragile and prone to disappearance, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been critical in making "lost" web pages available – recently celebrating archiving over a trillion pages.

The Wayback Machine is an important resource for our work as media researchers, helping us to trace histories of digital media objects (for example, changes in ad tracker signatures of viral “fake news” sites over time).

In this piece we draw on the Internet Archive’s News Stories collection to surface practices and use cultures of the Wayback Machine amongst journalists and media organisations. We analysed a dataset of about 8,600 news articles, assembled by the IA via daily Google News keyword searches since 2018.

Drawing on a combination of digital methods, machine learning and lots of reading – we surfaced nine ways that journalists use the Wayback Machine in their reporting.

Following what is deleted

Shifting political alliances are a common driver of online footprint erasure. Deleted tweets have revealed past critics in current allies (here and here), and current career aspirations were juxtaposed with earlier conflicting stances in personal blogs and websites (here, here, here and here). 

Unannounced takedowns of collections or site sections on government websites often prompt investigations using archival snapshots. Examples include removed editions of presidential newsletters and deleted staff contact lists for........

© journalism.co.uk