When Salon launched in 1995, the web was still finding its voice. One of the first major publications born on the internet, Salon helped define a new kind of digital journalism, bringing together politics, culture, criticism, and ideas for a generation of online readers.
After 31 years, Salon has announced that it is ceasing publication. But thanks to web archiving, the stories don’t have to disappear.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been preserving Salon for nearly three decades—the online publication has been published over time at salon1999.com, salonmag.com and, since 1999, salon.com. Today, more than 250,000 Salon articles can be discovered through the Wayback Machine, representing a record of digital journalism and the conversations that shaped our culture since the earliest days of the web.
To make exploring this web archive easier, we’ve also launched an experimental Salon Explorer, a new interface for discovering Salon’s archived journalism. Browse more than 250,000 articles and explore the work of over 20,000 writers using filters that make it easier to find stories and discover writing you may have missed.
The theme for this year’s annual celebration was “Democracy’s Library: Tools for Participation”: putting a spotlight on the ways people can use Internet Archive’s tools to participate—from saving and contributing materials to exploring government records, researching history, and building new tools with the collections and APIs.
Book digitizers and DWebbers represent! Left to right: Elizabeth Macleod, Eliza Zhang, Young Wong, and Andi Wong.Simon Close of WNYC digitizing a book with the method the Internet Archive has been using for 20 years.Elizabeth Macleod ofDigitization Servicesshowing what happens after the book has been imaged.Tracy Jaquith and Roger Macdonald sharing the latest from theTV News Archive.Bob Stein, Dan Visel, and Ben Vershbow demoingTapestries.Mek Karpeles and Drini Cami ofOpen Libraryshowing off new features.TheDWebstation welcoming guests, with zines and DIY button makers.Akhilesh Thite demoingPeerskyto Wendy Hanamura and Dani Shavit at the DWeb station. Christian Tschudin giving a demo ofTinySSBat the DWeb station. TheArchive-Itteam sharing information aboutCommunity Websand other services.Colleagues fromEveryLibraryran a fun trivia wheel game aboutOur Future Memory.Jennie Rose Halperin at theLibrary Futuresstation.Jennifer Waits speaking to a guest aboutDigital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC)archives.Local neighbors from theWestern Neighborhoods Projectsharing local history.Internet Archive’s beloved donations van, Tony Vanza, here used to bring out the Airstream!The Airstream trailer where lightning interviews took place throughout the evening. Inside the Airstream trailer where people came to share their archive story with our resident oral and Web historian, Marc Weber. (Stay tuned for a dedicated blog post with highlights from the interviews.)Next to the Airstream, a station to send a postcard from the Wayback Machine!The hangout lounge and chalk-drawing station.A wide view of the street fair in front of Internet Archive’s headquarters.The Open Library station in front of Internet Archive HQ.
Merrilee Proffitt and Andrea Mills on stage talking about the urgency ofDemocracy’s Library.Playing along in the kazoorchestra. Left to right: Internet Archive’s Policy Counsel, Lila Bailey; House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi; Head Digital Librarian Brewster Kahle, Director of Library Services, Chris Freeland; Senior Executive Assistant, Caitlin Olson.The band performing on the front steps of the building.Following the main event inside, we capped off the evening with live music and danced into the night.
We invite filmmakers, artists, and creatives of all skill levels and backgrounds to celebrate Public Domain Day, by creating and uploading a short film not exceeding 4 minutes to the Internet Archive.
This contest offers a chance to explore and reimagine the creative treasures entering the public domain, especially works from 1931 that enter the public domain on January 1—classic literature, early sound films, cartoons, music, and art. Participants are encouraged to use materials from the Internet Archive’s collections to craft unique films that breathe new life into these cultural gems.
Top entries will be awarded prizes up to $2,000, with winners announced during our in-person Public Domain Day Celebration on January 27, 2027. All submissions will be featured in a special Public Domain Day Collection on archive.org and highlighted in a January 2027 blog post.
Join us in this creative celebration of cultural heritage and timeless art!
Guidelines
Make a short movie up to 4 minutes max using at least one work published in 1931 that will become Public Domain on January 1, 2027. This could be a poem, book, film, musical composition, painting, photograph or any other work that will become Public Domain next year. The more different PD materials you use, the better!
Note: If you have a resource from 1931 that is not available on archive.org, you may upload it and then use it in your submission. (Here is how to do that).
Your submission must have a soundtrack. It can be your own voiceover or performance of a public domain musical composition, or you may use public domain or CC0 sound recordings from sources like Openverse and the Free Music Archive.
Also check out items from WNYC’s 2026 Public Song Project hosted in the Internet Archive’s collections. Note that not all submissions in this collection are licensed for re-use, so please verify that the song is properly licensed before using.
Note: Sound recordings have special status under Copyright Law, so it’s important to note that while musical compositions from 1931 will be entering the public domain, the sound recordings of those works are not entering the public domain. Sound recordings published in 1926 will enter the public domain this year.
Mix and Mash content however you like, but note that ALL of your sources must be from the public domain. They do not all have to be from 1931, and can include published works from years earlier than 1931 as well. Remember, U.S. government works are public domain no matter when they are published. So feel free to use those NASA images! You may include your own original work if you put a CC0 license on it.
We are celebrating the public domain as a triumph of human creativity, and we want your submission to reflect that spirit. The contest honors the imagination, craft, and originality that people bring to remixing culture, so your final film should be a human-made work of art. If you use AI tools in your submission, please explain how they are used.
Add a personal touch, make it yours! (It is a celebration after all!)
Submission Deadline
All submissions must be in by 11:59pm PST, January 7, 2027.
To help get you started here are some materials that will become part of the public domain on January 1, 2027.
Books: 1931 was a year full of many great literary works, including: Sanctuary by William Faulkner. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. The first edition of The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer. The Waves by Virginia Woolfe. The Adventures of Mickey Mouse from Walt Disney Productions; the first original Disney storybook. The Road Back by Erich Maria Remarque; sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. The Shadow slinks into the public domain with the first volumes of The Shadow Magazine.
Films: Frankenstein and Dracula from Universal scare up new potential for stories. Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights exhibits the potential of silents in the age of the Talkie. Another Marx Brothers comedy, Monkey Business, creates opportunities for laughs aboard a ship. The German expressionist film M by Fritz Lang starring Peter Lorre creeps into the public domain. Provocative pre-Code film, Safe in Hell, pushes limits now in the public domain. Even more cartoons including Pluto’s first appearance with his name and status as Mickey’s dog in The Moose Hunt.
Musical Compositions: Iconic jazz pieces continue to stack up including All of Me. Iconic works from African American composers and musicians join the commons like Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo and Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher. The Great Depression inspired escapist anthems like Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams And Dream Your Troubles Away. Early versions of iconic film songs like As Time Goes By become free for all to use.
You can record your own versions of any of these compositions and reuse them in your film.
Sound Recordings (1926):I’ve Got the Girl from Don Clark and his Orchestra features Bing Crosby in a supporting role in his first ever sound recording. Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five rolled out some iconic scat singing in Heebie Jeebies. The California Rambler’s Breezing Along With the Breeze puts a pep in your step. The iconic Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra continued their prolific 1920s output with Valencia.
Be sure to double-check when these recordings were published as sound recordings follow different rules that other creative works. Sound recordings published in 1926 will enter the public domain this year, not 1931.
Prizes
1st prize: $2000
2nd prize: $1500
3rd prize: $1000
Honorable Mentions: $250
Judges will be looking for videos that are fun, interesting and use public domain materials, especially those from 1931. Submissions should highlight the value of having cultural materials that can be reused, remixed, and re-contextualized for a new day. Winners will be announced and previewed at our virtual event, then shown on the “big screen” and celebrated in person at the in-person Public Domain Day party in San Francisco. Winners’ pieces will be purchased with the prize money, and viewable on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license.
For further reference, check out past entrants from 2026.
Between text, images, audio clips and videos, there are so many elements at your fingertips to tell a story in the digital era. A new expressive tool is now available to make it easy to assemble material online and share your creation widely.
Tapestries is a user interface developed by Bob Stein and Dan Visel (who works on the Wayback team) that allows people to make dynamic, multi-linear presentations with various digital objects. The curation tool lets users gather items from all over the web and put them together into a single space to tell a story. Rather than simply listing links at the end of a document, a tapestry can be designed by dragging photos, video clips or other items onto a digital canvas that viewers can click to open.
The finished product can be kept private or posted publicly – with the option of inviting others to collaborate, comment on the project, or make copies of the tapestry to edit and revise.
The Tapestries platform launched as part of the Internet Archive’s Oct. 21 celebration. Stein, Visel, as well as the project’s new director, Ben Vershbow, were on hand to demonstrate the tool during the Funston Avenue party.
“We’ve made Tapestries open source and have a good foundation for people to start building on it,” said Stein, a digital media pioneer who incubated the project with the Internet Archive. “I love that we’re entering [a time] when the author or producer or designer is not stuck with one medium. They can use any combination of media to tell a particular part of a story.”
A New Canvas for Digital Storytelling
Vershbow, who worked with Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book, and most recently was with the Wikimedia Foundation, is director of the Tapestries project.
“Over time, I got to know the tool, use it and see the potential,” Vershbow said. “It’s about curating different types of media, arranging them however you’d like and fully embedding the media objects. It’s a novel, free way to assemble and make sense of material in the digital world.”
After a limited early release of the tool in 2025, some educators began to experiment with Tapestries in the classroom.
Dene Grigar, professor and director of creative media and digital culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at Washington State University Vancouver, introduced students to Tapestries to learn about digital storytelling. Along with her own majors who specialize in multimedia content design and development, it allowed her to teach non-majors unfamiliar with digital tools and programming how to create born-digital content.
“The students loved it. It’s an easy drag-and-drop system,” Grigar said. “It’s great for my non-majors and my majors because it’s a way for them to get more experimental, do more interesting things, take some risks. I used it last spring in my Internet Revolutions class, and it was so successful that I’m teaching it again this semester in my Digital Storytelling class as a way to produce digital narratives.”
The application allows students to draw images, add commentary and captions – sometimes diving in after just an hour of introduction. Grigar said she likes that Tapestries is open source, rather than a proprietary product with the risk of becoming outdated.
Stein suggested Grigar have her class use papers and videos of computer pioneer Alan Kay to examine his work through an intergenerational lens and use Tapestries to tell his story. That project in the spring will include student interviews with Kay, now 86, that will culminate with an exhibition of Kay’s work in Tapestries.
“Students are learning the cycle of the importance of holding on to things that are dear to them, expressing themselves about why it’s dear, and then making it available for other people to see what it’s like. That’s the value of what we’re doing here,” Grigar said. “We want people not to be just consumers of media, we want them to be producers of their own knowledge.”
Vershbow said Tapestries opens up a new dimension for teachers in protected digital space and offers a low barrier to entry. Because it doesn’t require specialized technical expertise to use, he said, the application levels the playing field yet challenges students to think creatively.
“At this moment in education where AI has flooded the zone, we’re seeing this crisis of students not developing critical research skills,” Vershbow said. “Doing assignments in Tapestries is a compelling alternative to traditional research papers, which are really vulnerable to AI shortcutting. This tool changes the equation. Students draw from a larger range of media material and they have to show their work. The process becomes the product, which we think opens up a lot in terms of learning outcomes.”
Reimagining How We Create and Connect Online
In addition to schools, the creators of Tapestries see potential use for the tool with historical archives to create digital scrapbooks, exhibits, and presentations.
“Tapestries are meant to be archivable,” Vershbow said. “It is deliberately low-tech and minimal. You can export a whole tapestry as a zip file – and it could be deposited in the Internet Archive as its own cultural media object.”
Acknowledging that digital memory on the web is fragile, Vershbow said, Tapestries can be viewed as a personal digital archiving tool complementary to large institutional preservation. “It allows individuals and small communities to make their own choices about what matters and what they want to pass on to the future,” he said.
After years of linear creations in print, film and TV, Stein said, it will take time to throw people into a world to see the potential of thinking in two or three dimensions. Yet, he believes users will design “breathtakingly new” projects in Tapestries.
Stein, co-founder of The Voyager Company and The Criterion Collection, sees potential for crowdsourcing creative works since authors can grant anyone permission to copy a tapestry and change it in ways that are useful. His “dream project” is to send 50 invitations to artists (filmmakers, composers, photographers) to put something on the center of a tapestry. Then they can extend the invitation to anybody else in the world. “We could look back in five or ten years and they will have evolved into an amazing tableau or mosaic of ideas,” Stein said.
Tapestries gives users a way to find agency online at a time when the web has become dominated by large platforms and algorithmic feeds, said Vershbow. Rather than having information summarized and knowledge processed, users are relating directly with sources for raw material.
“It’s a connection to an earlier era of imagining and working with digital information and invention,” he said. “It’s more on your own terms. You have the freedom to associate with these things and pull them all into one universe that you sculpt.”
At a time when free speech is under attack and the public record is fragile, supporters gathered in San Francisco on October 21 to celebrate the Internet Archive’s work to preserve knowledge for all through Democracy’s Library, an initiative to make government information accessible to everyone.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker Emerita of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, were among those offering congratulations and encouragement to the Archive at the celebration of “Democracy’s Library: Tools for Participation.”
“Preserving the data is essential to a democracy,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi declared from the stage at the Funston Avenue headquarters. “Lincoln said, ‘Public sentiment is everything. With it, you can accomplish almost anything. Without it, practically nothing.’ But for public sentiment to prevail, you have to know—and we have to show them where they can find out.”
Pelosi reminisced about time spent with her five children at public libraries, and her service as a library commissioner. Much has changed over the years in preserving and communicating information, she said, but libraries must continue for a free society to thrive.
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi
“To me, libraries are about freedom. Libraries are about liberty,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said, urging the audience to seek out candidates for Congress who share the public’s love and support of libraries.
Making the Public Record Accessible
Internet Archive founder and digital librarian Brewster Kahle told the audience that democracies need an educated populace and public access to government information. “Just because something’s in the public domain, doesn’t mean that it’s publicly accessible,” he said. “If it’s accessible today, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be accessible tomorrow.”
That’s why the Internet Archive is committed to leveraging digital tools to preserve government documents and make them easy for the public to access, Kahle said. Last year, the Archive joined more than 1,000 libraries in the United States as a designated Federal Depository Library to make government information permanently available. Since 2004, it has been collecting born-digital government publications; now it is digitizing the print and microfiche past.
“We want this material to really come to life. That’s our shared heritage that has been authored at taxpayer expense,” Kahle said. “We want to celebrate openness. Openness brings us together. Openness, communities, and democracies all are needed to build a world that we want to be in.”
In video remarks played at the Oct. 21 event, Reich said attacks on free speech and efforts to control access to information threaten the foundation of our democracy.
“Understanding our history, analyzing government data, holding the powerful accountable – it all centers on being able to access information freely, and it all now lives digitally,” Reich said. “Authoritarian laws to restrict this access makes the Internet Archives work more critical than ever. Restricting our access to digital information makes us less informed, less inspired, and easier to control.”
Reich expressed appreciation for the leadership of the Internet Archive in safeguarding the historical record.
“Thank you to the Internet Archive for your tireless work protecting and preserving our access to information in today’s digital world,” Reich said. “Your work is crucial against authoritarianism and sorely needed to protect our democracy.”
Celebrating Community Heroes
The program highlighted how individuals can make use of preserved local government documents to make a difference in their communities.
Eric Hryniewicz was recognized as a “hometown hero” for discovering land being eyed for development in Falmouth, Massachusetts, near the town’s water supply was actually protected.
With the help of records scanned at the New England Regional Digitization Center at the Boston Public Library, Hryniewicz showed the town had purchased the forested land under consideration in the early 1930s for conservation. Joining with other citizens, Hryniewicz made the case to the town government to halt the development.
Speaking at the event, he urged the public to make use of archives and libraries in their collective action efforts.
“I was not an expert in deeds. I’m not a lawyer. I was just a person that cared about a place,” Hryniewicz said. “I went looking for an answer and went to the library. I doubted the narrative sold to us and a librarian pointed us to the Internet Archive. What we found there was a story of care and compassion for us. Our predecessors had put together considerable resources … to guarantee a future where you have open space and clean water in the town, and that history had been lost.”
The 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award was presented to the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) for providing tools and training to preserve local news online. The annual award recognizes individuals and organizations that have demonstrated leadership in making information available to people around the world. Learn more about this year’s recipients.
“Over the past two decades, the United States has lost nearly 40 percent of its local newspapers,” explained Anna Trammel, program manager of archiving & data services at Internet Archive. “When that happens to a community, something really irreplaceable is lost … coverage of the school board meeting, budget cuts, or the local election. The information that’s not available anywhere else and that matters most to the people who live in that community.”
Through the Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program, Poynter and IRE are connecting journalists in 300 newsrooms with free access to the Internet Archive’s web archiving and preservation services to save their work.
“Strong journalism is at the core of a healthy democracy. We have not spent a lot of time, however, thinking about what happens to the first draft of news after we witness and report it,” said Kristen Hare, Poynter’s director of craft and local news. “We’re really honored on behalf of the Pointer Institute to accept this award…We’re concerned not just with preserving the work of individual journalists but making sure that a community’s memory stays preserved for future generations.”
Jonathan Kealing, executive director of IRE, said the impact of investigative accountability reporting isn’t always recognized at the time the story is published. “That work can take a long time to find its ultimate end,” he said. “In an era when we’re seeing newsrooms close and shut down, we risk that work never reaching its fullest potential if we don’t preserve it for perpetuity on the Internet Archive.”
Kealing expressed gratitude for partnering with the Archive and Poynter to ensure that the work of journalists is preserved for communities and people to access long into the future.
Participation for All
The evening wrapped with a tribute to the music in the public domain that artists can use as a tool for participation to remix and reimagine.
The Internet Archive recently partnered with WNYC, a public radio station in New York City, on their Public Song Project, an annual contest where people are invited to contribute recordings of songs created based on works in the public domain.
WNYC’s Simon Close with Public Song Project winners Gabrielle and Dexter-Marie.
Simon Close, a producer for WNYC and steward of the Public Song Project, announced that submissions were received from all over the world and songs by the finalists have been preserved in a collection on the Internet Archive. Two of the winners, Gabrielle and Dexter-Marie, were recognized on stage. A portion of their song, “Now You Know,” based on a sample of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” recorded by Marian Anderson, was played for the audience.
Close led the audience in playing kazoos to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with lyrics he adapted from the Internet Archive’s About page as “The Battle Hymn of the Internet Archive” singing….
“We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Today we have 30 years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine. One trillion web pages, 56 million books and, 13 million audio recordings, 15 million videos, 5.3 million images, 1.3 million software programs, in our first 30 years!”
Internet Archive’s digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, leads a tour through the Physical Archive.
Visitors who came to the open house at the Physical Archive in Richmond, California, on October 20 were curious. They wanted to learn about the range of items collected, the process of preservation, and the staff responsible for making it all happen.
As people toured the space and observed the various media being saved, many also expressed support and reverence for the Internet Archive’s work to provide universal access to all knowledge.
“I really care about preservation and digital culture. Places like this are important to maintaining and building the society we want to live in,” said Sidney Le, a film archivist who now works in logistics, of his third visit to the Physical Archives. “It’s good to see that people here are taking seriously the idea of holding on to culture and preserving it.”
A Closer Look at Collections
Liz Rosenberg
Liz Rosenberg, donations manager for the Archive, welcomed the crowd in Richmond and provided directions for the evening.
“Thank you all so much for coming to our open house, where we can showcase the amazing preservation work done in the Internet Archive,” she said. “Here, you will see many special collections and interesting preservation demos showcasing the work that our incredible team does to preserve, digitize, and make accessible collections to patrons from all over the world.”
Rosenberg invited visitors on tours of the facility with Internet Digital Librarian and Founder Brewster Kahle, as well as a chance to see the Scribe book digitization workstation, a presentation on dehumidification of books, and observe microfiche digitization.
For visitors in the special collections room, Caslon Kahle pointed out new donations on display including Romanian history documents from the estate of professor Keith Hitchins, climate records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and materials from more than 9,000 Freedom of Information Act requests filed by San Francisco’s legendary researcher Ernie Lazar.
Why These Collections Matter
Ivy Shaw and Max Buettner, both doctoral students at University of California, Berkeley, came to the event because they said they are big fans of the Internet Archive.
Buettner said he was impressed by the sheer quantity of material at the facility and unique items in special collections, such as a paleotectonic map of the Jurassic. Studying classics, he said he relies on the Internet Archive for rare materials he can’t find anywhere else – once discovering a manual on the Etruscan language online.
“Our library at Berkeley did not own a copy of this very important book, and the Internet Archive did,” Buettner said. “It’s sort of a miracle that we have this Internet Archive that can supplement these university libraries.”
Shaw, who is in a French PhD program, said seeing the books at the Physical Archive on so many topics made her appreciate the nonprofit organization’s effort to make knowledge available to all. “The Internet Archive allows you to access things in a very ethical way so you can feel good about supporting it,” Shaw said.
On a recent Friday tour of the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco, Shawdi Sani became curious about how the physical material was stored, so she registered for the event. Exploring the Richmond facility, she was captivated by the microfiche station and the customized software and equipment used in the restoration. “It was interesting how they brought that back to life,” she said. “It was kind of archaic and now it’s very useful.”
Sani, who works in applied machine learning, said she’s interested in seeing how the internet has evolved over time.
“As someone in Gen Z and with AI everywhere, there’s a huge need I see among my peers to go back to when the internet was less monetized and more raw,” said Sani, who enjoys exploring old websites, such as Gawker, saved by the Archive.
Preserving Today for Tomorrow
New to the event this year was a recording studio set up in an Airstream trailer parked outside the warehouse.
“Talk to the future,” Marc Weber said to visitors who walked up to check it out. Those who were game were asked to pull a question out of the hat such as “Why do you think preservation is important?” or “What’s your favorite item/collection on the Internet Archive?” to answer.
The soundbites will be shared on social media and preserved online. “It’s an informal way to capture what people are thinking today,” said Weber, an historian and curator for the Internet Archive. “Ten or 20 years from now it will be interesting to see what was on people’s minds.”
There were also postcards set out for people to fill out asking: “What’s your commitment to preservation?” Then, Archive staff will mail the postcards to them in three months as a reminder of their pledge, explained Chris Freeland, director of library services at the Internet Archive.
Charlie Robinson, an engineer from San Francisco, said he relies on the Internet Archive often when he can’t find a book or piece of media anywhere else. “The Internet Archive is one of those things where if it didn’t exist and somebody tried to explain it to you, it wouldn’t sound like an inevitable thing or even possible,” he said at the event in Richmond. “And I’m so glad that I live in a universe where it exists.”
The Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve all forms of media and chronicle digital history is something to be revered, said Eric Ma, applied scientist working in tech in the Bay area.
“It’s all in the public good and not motivated by profit. Honestly, I can’t really name another organization quite like it,” said Ma, who especially enjoyed seeing the collection of vinyl at the Physical Archive. “So many people are willing to donate their whole collection over to the Archive. It makes me have hope in humanity a little bit more.”
As newsrooms across the United States close, years of reporting are at risk of disappearing. Stories documenting local elections, holding public officials accountable, investigating community problems and recording everyday life can become difficult or impossible to find when the news organizations that produced them shut down. Much of this reporting now exists only in digital formats, where it can be lost when websites go offline or archives are never created.
Local journalism captures the first draft of history in communities across the country. Preserving it means ensuring that future generations can understand not only what happened, but how communities responded, how decisions were made and how those decisions shaped people’s lives.
For their work, the Internet Archive is honoring Poynter and IRE with the 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award. The annual award recognizes individuals and organizations that have demonstrated leadership in making information available to people around the world.
Training Newsrooms to Preserve Their Work
Poynter and IRE, non-profit organizations serving journalists for more than 50 years, partnered with the Internet Archive for the Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program, a national initiative to help newsrooms with strategies for digital preservation. The project connects journalists with free access to the Internet Archive’s web archiving and preservation services to save their work. It also links them with support from local libraries, universities and museums.
“How are we to learn from our history if we can’t find it?”
Jonathan Kealing, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors
“Going a bit outside of the library and archives world, it’s often hard to find allies for these kinds of projects – not because people aren’t interested, but just the time and capacity,” said Jefferson Bailey, director of archiving & data services at the Internet Archive. “I think it’s heroic Poynter and IRE recognize the need, are willing to partner and sign on to do the work. They have been on board, committed and enthusiastic.”
With grant funding from Press Forward, a national initiative to reimagine local news, the organizations started providing training to newsrooms in 2026, covering a variety of media organizations from Alaska Public Media to the Chicago Tribune to the Bucks County Beacon. The target is to cover 300 newsrooms in six cohorts over two years. The program is open to journalists from any newsroom, not just IRE members. In virtual sessions spanning a few weeks, journalists are introduced to systems that make archiving choices easier.
“We have tried to offer a simplified solution to a really complex problem, and I think we’re getting there,” said Kristen Hare, Poynter’s director of craft and local news. “Helping them realize that they do not have to do this alone is a big part of the training.”
Why Preserving Local News Matters
It’s a challenge for many newsrooms to prioritize archiving when they are struggling to stay afloat financially, said Hare, who is spearheading Poynter’s participation. Journalists also have a competitive mindset, she said, and part of the education is emphasizing the legacy aspect of preservation.
“We are making sure everything exists, so that in 50 years reporters in our newsrooms, members of our community, and people who want to understand what was happening today, will be able to get an accurate depiction,” Hare said.
Watchdog reporting that has impacted communities needs to be available for future generations, said Jonathan Kealing, executive director of IRE.
“These investigative reporters and editors do so much work that has the potential to change lives,” Kealing said. “It’s really important that their work is preserved for the long haul.”
Often, IRE members are searching to tie multiple threads together to unlock a new narrative, he said. Having an accessible archive provides crucial bits of context that can help in uncovering a story. In years past, print stories were clipped and saved in a newsroom library. Today, much of the news is digitized and not intentionally organized for future use.
“The promise of the internet is that all that information is at our fingertips. But if it’s not being archived, it goes away,” Kealing said. “Having a preservation strategy from the beginning is really essential – to media literacy, and it’s essential to democracy. Journalism is the first draft of history, and how are we to learn from our history if we can’t find it?”
Bailey said local news archives are critical to education, scholarship, research, and knowledge production. The TNT project is making archives more diverse, the historical record better preserved and more accessible.
“We are making sure everything exists, so that in 50 years reporters in our newsrooms, members of our community, and people who want to understand what was happening today, will be able to get an accurate depiction.”
Kristen Hare, director of craft and local news, The Poynter Institute
Preserving local news can help readers make sense of what’s happening now with context from the past, Hare said. It also can help newsrooms create something new, such as a history newsletter, to connect people in a community. “So much of what we’re seeing and getting in the media today, feels like it’s designed to remind us of our differences,” Hare said. “The place where you live is something you have in common with the other people who live there and understanding its history is a really valuable thing that local journalists can offer.”
Building Partnerships to Address a Crisis
The crisis of disappearing news was the focus of the National Summit on Local News Reporting hosted by the Internet Archive, Poynter and IRE in June in Maryland. The gathering brought together representatives from memory institutions, local newsrooms, universities and others to discuss ways to work together and recommendations for next steps.
“We see news outlets going offline, changing domains, losing access to their digital record every day,” said Anna Trammell, program manager of archiving & data services at Internet Archive. “[Preservation] is a big challenge, but it’s so important and we’re trying to take action. We know that other people are feeling the same sense of urgency.”
The summit and TNT project could not have happened without the support of Poynter and IRE, said Trammell.
“The Internet Archive usually works with libraries, archives and museums, and it really took outside-the-box thinking to move beyond those typical partners and go directly to the news outlets themselves to support this work,” she said.
The news organizations helped co-design the training to address the concerns of journalists and develop effective outreach, Trammell said. They have served as “translators” to customize tools to meet the needs of journalists.
“We couldn’t have done this program without them,” she said. “They’ve built a lot of trust with the journalism community and are seen as experts in providing instruction and professional development. Having them as partners on this project allowed us to build those connections with local newsrooms.”
The Wayback Machine as a Tool for Journalism
The organizations have also been huge supporters of the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine has been blocked by a number of news outlets recently and, Trammell said, this collaboration is a positive connection with journalists and illustrates the shared value preservation for the public good.
IRE members rely on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to unearth valuable information – including how political candidates or business developers have changed their language on issues.
“Whole stories can emerge from what was taken off of a website,” Kealing said. “The Internet Archive is out there as a neutral preserver of the way things were. The reality is, we as journalists, aren’t always watching. But the great thing about the Internet Archive is it’s always there…The ability to go look back at the way things were is a really useful tool in certain types of storytelling.”
Kealing said he’s impressed by the engagement of journalists in the TNT program. He credits his IRE team and his predecessor Diana Fuentes, who passed away in March, with having the vision for the project. “It’s clear to me that people are excited about being able to participate in this and learn,” he said. “This project brings together the Internet Archive, Poynter and IRE to deliver the right program for journalists when they need it, without duplicating efforts. I hope beyond this program that we’ll continue partnering to efficiently deliver training that journalists need when they need it.”
Celebrating the 2026 Hero Award
As for the 2026 Hero Award, Kealing said he’s thrilled that it might draw more attention to the issue and motivate news organizations to consider archiving strategies. “By training our members, we’re actually having a positive impact on the internet and a positive impact on the world,” he said. “I think that’s something really exciting to celebrate.”
The Internet Archive Hero Award is an annual award that honors those who have exhibited leadership in making information available for digital learners all over the world. Previous recipients have included Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the island nation of Aruba, public information advocate Carl Malamud, copyright expert Michelle Wu, and the Grateful Dead.
Added Hare of the Poynter Institute: “We feel incredibly lucky to get to work with Internet Archive and IRE and it’s also pretty cool to share an award that was once given to the Grateful Dead,” she said. “It’s a huge honor. This is quiet, almost invisible work, and anything that can make it more visible to people is really important.”
Every year, the Internet Archive throws a party at our headquarters, celebrating a different facet of our ongoing preservation work. The theme for 2026 is “Democracy’s Library: Tools for Participation” and we’re putting a spotlight on the ways every day people can use our tools to participate through the Internet Archive—from saving and contributing materials to exploring government records, researching history, and building new tools with our collections and APIs. (NOTE: We have sold out of tickets for this event on Wednesday October 21).
This year, we will be featuring several of Internet Archive’s core projects in a street fair with live demos of our most impactful features. To begin, you can check out our Digitize a Book station, where you can try out our proven method of digitizing books, which we’ve been employing for 20 years that preservers the integrity of physical books.
Have a favorite item or collection on the Internet Archive and want to talk about how you make use of it? Or have a personal story about a library or collection that you’d like to share with us? Pop by the Airstream trailer near the corner of Clement and Funston and share your archive story with Internet Archive’s resident oral historian, Marc Weber of the Computer History Museum.
Here are the other Internet Archive projects that will be presenting at the street fair:
Democracy’s Library: Democracy’s Library’s goal is to preserve government information and civic memory at critical moments of democratic change, with an archive that now contains more than 1,000 collections from over 50 government organizations. The team will demo their work preserving government websites, from local to national institutions in the U.S. and Canada.
Wayback Machine: The Wayback team will showcase their “Save Page Now” tool that allows anyone to save any web page with a click of a button. They will also demo some other new tools for exploring our extensive collection of web archives.
OpenLibrary.org: Come by this table to learn about how we are building the World’s Catalog of Books. The Open Library team will demo their new interface for browsing books as though you were browsing a library bookshelf, as well as new tools librarians can use to help improve our books’ metadata.
Archive-It: Archive-It is a comprehensive suite of archiving, digital preservation, and research services. The team will highlight some of their ongoing projects to ensure perpetual access to diverse cultural and historically significant digital collections from around the globe. One project is Community Webs, which is helping public libraries and cultural organizations preserve their communities’ digital heritage.
Tapestries: Tapestries is a tool that enables users to graphically assemble material from archives to tell stories, surface new contexts, and bring cultural artifacts to life. Once a tapestry has been created, it can be published in an open and machine-parsable format. The Tapestries team will demo the tool and showcase tapestries woven from Internet Archive’s materials.
Donate Books: Do you have books you believe might not be part of Internet Archive’s collection? Come by this booth and learn about our Donate Books App – Internet Archive’s smart phone app for determining which books we want to add to our library. (The app can be downloaded from the App Store here, or from the Play Store here.)
TV News Archive: Did you know that the Internet Archive has been archiving television news broadcasts of over 100 channels in 60 countries, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Come by this booth to check out the archives and learn how we do it.
Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC): DLARC is a library of materials and collections related to amateur radio, college radio, and related communications. Meet the team behind our efforts to document the history of amateur radio and to provide freely available educational resources for researchers, students, and the general public.
Live Music Archive: The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format for current and future generations to enjoy. Come by the Live Music Archive to check out our collection of over 300,000 live recordings from trade-friendly artists who have opted in to provide these works for strictly non-commercial access.
Internet Archive Canada has been working with Canadian libraries, archives, and partner institutions for 20 years to digitize their holdings, and has preserved more than one million items totaling 390 terabytes of text, music scores, archival records, and other ephemera. Come by their table to learn about their programs creating open systems and tools for sharing and accessing information.
Internet Archive Philanthropy: Visit the Philanthropy table to learn how you can support us. “Creating opportunities for donors to support our work, enables the Internet Archive to thrive”, said Joy Chesbrough, Head of Philanthropy. “Support from over 250,000 individual donors ensures millions of cultural and historical artifacts online are preserved and not erased.” We appreciate the public’s support of the digital commons. Providing universal access to knowledge is not only our mission, but a way for patrons around the world to freely access digital materials online.
Internet’s Archive Friends and Allies
At this year street fair, you’ll also find some of Internet Archive’s close allies and neighborhood organizations:
Our Future Memory: Our Future Memory is a campaign that highlights the existential threat facing libraries, archives, and museums due to unfair digital licensing practices that erode their ability to preserve and provide access to knowledge. Come by this table to learn how you can join the fight to preserve our collective digital memory.
Library Futures: Since 2020, Library Futures has worked to ensure public access to trusted information and support the institutions that underpin a healthy democracy, economic and educational opportunity, knowledge discovery, and creative expression. They work with librarians, community leaders, and policymakers to advocate for current and future digital rights of libraries and their communities.
Better World Books: Better World Books is one of the leading socially conscious online booksellers and they have been a close partner of Internet Archive for several years. Through our partnership, BWB has donated more than six million books to the Internet Archive.
Western Neighborhoods Project: The street fair will feature this local organization that researches the history of the western neighborhoods of San Francisco for preservation and community education. Western Neighborhoods Project will be tabling with a pop-up tent displaying panels with neighborhood history.
“Echoes of Absence and Mythos: The Un-Archivists of Shitocracy” comes straight from the hands of artist Christopher Burch and opens on October 17 at Incline Gallery. Created in collaboration with the Internet Archive, D. Scott Miller, who wrote the Afro Surrealist Manifesto, and Incline Gallery, with funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission, this exhibition takes aim at the dual specters of societal erasure of Black experience and the often unmet need to amplify marginalized voices.
The Un-Archivists of Shitocracy, an imagined secret society comprised of those overlooked by history, takes these heavy subjects on through historical and contemporary contexts, mixed together with the hands of a trickster to challenge oppressive systems that seek to erase the narratives crucial to Black identity.
The trickster often appears in stories as the jester, the truth teller and as a being able to change the world with the absurdity of their wits. Often turning systems upside down, their disruption becomes a way of showing us medicine for healing or, in this case, what is broken and what has been left unseen. According to Burch’s research, Black folklore was often used in this way to create a spoken foothold for Black voices in America’s history.
Utilizing the resources of the Internet Archive, Burch was able to identify these suppressed and misrepresented narratives. Figures rendered from Burch’s skilled hands stare out from canvases. Their eyes hold the power of their knowledge. Feathers take the place of hair in one, moth wings in another. Uncanny, unapologetic and uncomfortable, the figures walk the line between human and myth, leading the viewer into a world where hard truths lie sharply under an enticing gossamer wrapping.
Immersive drawings, sculptures and writings create a library of Afro Surrealism that wields humor to defy and whispered spells to defend stories from erasure. Each piece is intentionally layered with symbolism, mirroring the layered narratives that they represent. Viewers cannot help but be drawn into questioning how and where Black narratives are represented in the currently changing landscape of American history as told by an oppressive overculture.
Burch’s work is at its most compelling when these layers begin to reveal themselves. They create an atmosphere in which history feels both present and unsettled. The result is a body of work that asks viewers to look again at the stories that have been preserved, the stories that have been suppressed and who has been given the authority to tell them.
“My role in this creative endeavor encompasses research, concept development, material experimentation, and narrative expansion. I envision and bring this multidimensional, absurdist world to life, crafting each piece as a vessel for cultural critique and rich storytelling. Through careful symbolism and layered narratives, I invite viewers to engage in the unarchiving process, reconsider histories, and uncover meaning in the strange yet significant struggle for cultural memory and justice,” says Burch on the exhibition.
“Echoes of Absence and Mythos: The Un-Archivists of Shitocracy” opens October 17th, 2026, at Incline Gallery.
About Christopher Burch
Based in San Francisco and St. Louis, Christopher Burch investigates the effect of intergenerational trauma and shared experience, and how they affect the shared Black cultural psyche. Intertwining this with social justice and spirituality, he challenges societal expectations, all within a world of his own imaginings.
“My practice engages with and reinterprets Black mythology and folklore. Through symbolic, linguistic, and gestural means, I create objects and ideas that give way to co emergence and slippage. By investigating my people’s myths, legends, and folkloric expressions, I expound on how cumulative intergenerational memories become embedded within the Black cultural psyche. I challenge the status quo through this engagement, breaching identity, spirituality, and social justice issues.”
The Internet Archive Artist in Residence program connects visual artists with the digital library’s massive collections. The program is organized and directed by Amir Saber Esfahani.
The Internet Archive Hero Award, as designed by Taekyeom Lee.
Taekyeom Lee is an educator, designer, maker, and researcher.
The associate professor of graphic design at Indiana University Bloomington is not only committed to teaching his students, Lee believes in sharing knowledge of art and design that inspires the broader community.
In 2021, Lee was an artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Fascinated by art featured in the Archive’s collection, he wanted to turn the works on the page and screen into a tactile experience.
Lee has built 3D printers based on the open-source project, RepRap. During the residency, he took a book about Korean ceramics published in 1966 from the archive’s collection, traced the shapes and turn them into 3D models, and built a DIY 3D Printer to make physical small-scale vases out of clay. Lee documented the process and created a series of videos for others to replicate the machine to print clay with an open-source plan.
“The goal of the Archive is to gather data and archive as much as it can to share with a broader community,” Lee said. “But everything has been digitized. I asked, ‘What if we can materialize the digital data from the archive so we can actually touch it’? So we can restore healthy relationship between the digital and physical worlds”
Among Lee’s 3D creations: A replica of the Internet Archive’s Funston Avenue building.
Brewster Kahle presenting Sir Tim Berners-Lee with the 2025 Internet Archive Hero Award.
The 3D printed artifact was used as a trophy for a Democracy’s Library award in 2022 and was recently modified for the 2025 Internet Archive Hero Award. Made out of Polylactic Acid (PLA), corn-based bioplastic, the 120mm (approximately 4.7 in) tall building model is lightweight and hollow. Lee added a special slot for USB drive inside, which can be loaded with files relevant to the award recipient; when Sir Tim Berners-Lee received the award in 2025, the drive was loaded with Wayback Machine archives of his original website at CERN from 1990. The idea of adding the USB slot was ignited from the conversation with Brewster Kahle when he showed an old trophy package with a USB drive.
“It’s a trophy, but at the same time it’s the library itself,” Lee said.
The 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award will be presented to The Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration on October 21st in San Francisco. Join the celebration in person or via livestream.
Lee, 42, is a first-generation college student who came to the United States from South Korea to attend graduate school in 2011. He received an MFA degree in graphic design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In his work, Lee is an avid user of the Internet Archive – tapping into its collection, including vintage art books. He said he appreciates it as a credible source of data for his research and teaching, which focuses on unconventional materials and digital methods to create 3D graphics and designed objects. He said Wayback Machine is very useful tool to study the evolution of GUI (Graphic User Interface) and usability. Lee also has a particular interest in improving visual accessibility for people with low vision and vision impairements, having experienced some lingering vision issues himself from a retinal detachment.
Lee said he supports the Internet Archive’s mission and enjoys his partnership with the organization.
“I’m an educator. I believe in the value of sharing knowledge and make it accessible – especially from the past. Innovation starts from connecting dots from the past to present and to future” Lee said. “Now, there’s so much information on the internet. What the Internet Archive has been doing is so valuable in making that information accessible to everyone.”
When Lee completed his 3D printer, he was eager to find the proper channel to show others bolt-by-bolt how they, too, could create it. He is proud to be an educator. “I really enjoy the process of sharing it as open source. So it can go further and empower makerst,’” he said.
After the Artist-In-Residence, in 2023, Lee received a message on LinkedIn from a civil engineering student, Ryan Zhang, at the University of Waterloo in Canada who followed his plan to build a 3D machine. In the post, Zhang said “His easy-to-follow YouTube tutorials and a general guide to how the printer should function were of great help.” Lee said “It really made my day. I was so happy,” Lee said. “It was my goal to share the knowledge – and it actually reached someone.”
To learn more about Lee, explore the following resources:
