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A couple of years ago, an OG journalist told me that being renowned as a journalist isn’t just about good work, but about your reputation for doing it. For some, it may be difficult to distinguish the difference. But the industry’s ongoing editorial erasure crystallizes their point: publishers didn’t upload print magazine archives online, and their generation’s work became a relic lost to time and corporate indifference. My generation is seeing our work disappear as outlets delete their archives. The history of culture writing is being cannibalized by cost-conscious millionaires who don’t think our work deserves to live online. All we have are ever-dwindling portfolios — and our reputations. BET.com recently deleted its 25-year-long online editorial archive, including over 190,000 stories. Their move follows outlets like MTV, UPROXX, HipHopDX, and others scrubbing their online archives in recent years. Thousands of writers are lamenting what was lost. So many of our early profiles, investigative pieces that developed over weeks of reporting, and interrogative op-eds are gone. As a writer, I have many moments when I sought to reference something I remember reading in The Source or XXL back in the day, but can’t because the issues aren’t online. The same is happening with the blogs and websites that housed our work. BET, like UPROXX and HipHopDX, deleted its archives without giving writers a period to retrieve their work before it was gone. Most of us have copies of our larger features and can repurpose them on Substack or other sites. But what about the news writers who wrote their posts directly in the website’s back end and no longer have them? Those stories were part of their portfolio to show outlets when seeking a new role, and now they’re gone. So many outlets are now prioritizing video content on their sites, if not housing their work directly on social media platforms. It feels like whenever publishing companies seek to save money, writers are the first casualties. The consequences don’t hurt writers alone. Our cultural documentation now suffers from critical breaches. While The Internet Archive is trying its best to preserve old sites, some moments just slip through the cracks. Music fans can no longer access work chronicling how their favorite artists’ creative perspective has changed over the years, or how landmark albums were received in the moment. We implore kids to know their music history, but their research base is shrinking. What will the future of music discourse look like with so much context disappearing? It’s disheartening that so much of this erasure is happening alongside Amazon buying up bushels of books to train AI models, and conservative lawmakers working to suppress “critical race theory” in schools. There’s a war on the dominion of knowledge, which includes the constant shuttering of editorial outlets. We don’t have much recourse over what Viacom or any other corporate behemoth chooses to do with our work. But they can’t expunge what they don’t control. For me, and the rest of the New Eyes Collective, this decimation of our cultural record reminds us how imperative it is to create our own spaces for criticism. We envision a media industry brimming with co-op platforms, independent magazines, and other collective efforts that leave our work, and our power, under our control.
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