Future history at risk in the internet age

AN OBVIOUS but often unnoticed consequence of the death of the local paper is that future history might be rather flimsier than today's.

I'm about to start work on my dissertation, which will delve into the Welsh workhouses of the nineteenth century.

An obvious advantage in trying to understand social conditions in this period - compared to say 1512 - is the increasing abundance of press coverage which offers insight into daily life at the level of local towns and villages.

While no source is infallible, print journalism was a form of record-keeping that tilted coverage much more firmly in the favour of ordinary people. 

Initially of course such outlets were not the platforms of community news they would later become but fast forward to the twentieth century and titles were undeniably offering your average resident a platform. School fetes, political rucks, footie matches, live shows and crimes were set in type and published.

One of the few joys of my brief stint as acting editor was to organise a "50 years ago this month..." column, which usually involved a trip down to Solihull Library's central archive to flick through editions from half a century earlier.

As social history the pictures and opinions and even the adverts are an invaluable resource. The ways in which life has dramatically changed - and the ways in which it very much has not - are laid bare in those black and columns. 

And yet it's a resource we might not be able to rely on going forward. 

The age of the smartphone - where almost everyone has a camera on their person and the ability to show their pictures to the world at a press of a button- paints a picture of an ever richer record of daily life. A bus crashes or a building catches fire and photos are filtering out on social media within the hour.

But digital news spreads fast and disappears quickly. Not a single shred of anything I wrote in my first seven-years as a general news reporter is still on an official website. 

Inevitably my entire output as a Local Democracy Reporter - several thousand stories, including an entire 18 months covering the pandemic at town-level - will only last as long online as the existing version of the website stops up.

And very little of that coverage ever appeared in print, following the closure of the Solihull News five years ago, which means when it disappears from the internet it effectively disappears forever. There is no back-up or master copy. To all intents and purposes the entire account - photos, typos and all the bits in between - vanishes.

This matters because in their old print incarnations, papers were more resilient than most things. "Paper of record" was a phrase which carried weight and archiving was an imperative of news outlets themselves and local authorities. My trips to the poor quarters of Carmarthen in 1841 or Knowle High Street in 1963 were possible purely because editions of old papers were at one time or other kept and catalogued in chronological order.

Anyone who has tried to find an old MySpace page or Geocities website or, as I've pointed out, a local press article from the middle of last decade, will note that the current information ecosystem is undeniably more fragile. 

Local publishers have had precious little to say about what efforts they're taking, if any, to conserve digital content. If anything reports of extensive print archives being shovelled into skips as offices downsize or close suggests even traditional record-keeping is at risk.

This is a sad loss of local heritage with the likelihood that the so-called first draft of history is unlikely to be accessible to anyone.