Missing links: The digital news preservation discontinuity, by Dorothy Carner, Edward McCain, and Frederick Zarndt. Submitted on: 8/4/2014. IFLA 2014 Lyon.

“That the spread of printed news has changed dramatically since the Internet and the Web is no news to anyone. The Christian Science Monitor, in print since 1908, ceased daily publication in 2009 to focus on web-based publishing (CSM still publishes a weekly print edition). One month before this, The Seattle Post Intelligencer stopped its print edition.  More recently, Lloyd’s List, which claims to be the world’s oldest newspaper, announced that it would stop its print edition. These are but a few examples of news publishers that no longer print the news on paper. While these newspapers stopped printing news, they did not stop publishing news. Instead they now concentrate on digital news. Similarly and until only recently, the IFLA Newspapers Section has focused on cataloguing, collecting, and preservation of printed news. With few exceptions, Section members do not catalog, collect, and preserve digital news with the same diligence as they have in past given to newspapers. In this paper we will review digital news publishing, both for traditional news publishers like the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and for digital only publishers like The Huffington Post, The Texas Tribune, NewsWhip, and others. We will especially look at the publishers’ digital preservation policies and practices. The result? For that you will have to read the paper or listen to the presentation. But you won’t be surprised if we hint that there is a humungous collection, catalogue, and preservation gap between the printed and digital.”