Journalism History, Web Archives, and New Methods for Understanding the Evolution of Digital Journalism

Abstract

Archived webpages are a critical source of data for understanding the current state of the news media industry, as well as how the industry has changed over time. Dramatic changes in the news media industry in recent decades have occurred in tandem with the evolution on the Web. Archived webpages are valuable records for understanding and analyzing how newspaper companies have adapted to technological changes such as social media feeds and sharing of news content via Twitter. This article outlines a methodological approach to utilizing Web archives as a means of examining change in the news media industry. Researchers have developed new tools to improve researcher access to archived Web data in order to advance studies of the Web, and to enable the tracking of changes in news media as they emerge over time. A case study examining local news in the United States is used to illustrate the methodological challenges and promise of working with these data, highlighting the power and potential of Web archives for journalism research. Finally, the closing sections discuss challenges associated with the scale and scope of archived Web data and point to new areas for future research.

Keywords:

• local news
• Web archives
• methods
• network analysis
• digital journalism

Notes

1 The complete archive is available at https://archive-it.org/collections/7520. Note that the actual archive today is larger than described in the text. The archive was created with specific boundaries for the purposes of this research, but the Internet Archive decided to continue the data collection effort on a monthly basis to maintain the record of local news websites.

2 https://github.com/mwe400/LocationMapper

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew S. Weber

Matthew S. Weber (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota, USA. Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Philip M. Napoli

Philip M. Napoli, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, USA. E-mail: [email protected]