The Rotting Links to Zombie Archives

Political doom scrolling gets old fast. The search for a new source of late-night dread has fed into a new obsession: researching media publication shutdowns. Whooo boy. After whistling past a graveyard of headlines, I started to pick up on a pattern: the post-sale archiving of shuttered publications is currently a technological shitshow.  

In a few instances, the publication’s body of work would be safely preserved, archived, and redistributed by the publication’s new owner—or, sometimes even by the plucky Internet Archive. More often, though, the road to archiving shuttered content libraries looked like a precarious zig-zag across broken links and patched-together fixes. 

As the CTRL+X team works to build a future where professional writers and publishers can easily archive, license, and monetize their content, we spend a lot of time researching, analyzing, and discussing these nightmare scenarios. Here’s a quick look at three publication shutdowns we’re currently deconstructing for forthcoming case studies. 

MTV News (May 2023)

MTV News was a youth-oriented precursor to today's TV/online/social multimedia news organizations, but was shut down in May 2023 as part of broader layoffs at Paramount Global. The closure sparked concerns about the fate of decades of cultural documentation. Michael Alex, MTV News' founding digital editor, emphasized the historical importance of the archives, stating they represent "a living record of entertainment history as it happened." Alex argued that while Paramount might legally own the content, they don't own the history itself, and called for the archives to remain publicly accessible. We’re especially interested in this shutdown as it  highlights the ongoing tension between corporate ownership of media assets and the preservation of cultural history.

Mic (November 2018)

Venture-backed digital news outlet Mic collapsed in November 2018 after pivoting heavily to Facebook video content, ultimately selling to Bustle Digital Group for a mere $5 million (down from a $100 million valuation). The company's overreliance on Facebook's "black box" algorithms and platforms proved fatal when Facebook changed its content priorities. The most significant content loss was Mic's Facebook video library, which generated billions of views but largely disappeared after shutdown. CTRL+X is especially interested in unpacking how tech platforms can harm digital publications, especially ones that share "little or no information about—or revenue from—projects,” per the Columbia Journalism Review,. 

LA Weekly Archives (2017)

LA Weekly, a renowned alternative newspaper, was sold in 2017 to mysterious owners who initially concealed their identities. Following the sale, the new ownership fired nearly the entire staff and significant portions of the archives became inaccessible. The crisis prompted the Freedom of the Press Foundation to capture a copy of the site for preservation. The Los Angeles Times reported that decades of arts and culture coverage became partially inaccessible following the restructuring, representing a significant loss of local cultural documentation. Of course, filling in memory holes is our jam at CTRL+X, so we’ll be taking a close look at this shutdown too.

Stay tuned as we continue to research, unpack, discuss everything that ails the media industry.

This essay was written by Terrence Russell and edited by Arikia Millikan.