Over 340 local news sites block Internet Archive to starve AI bots
Corporate media has found a brand new enemy in the war against AI, and surprise, surprise—it’s the public library of the internet. Because nothing says 'saving journalism' like erasing history just to spite a few chatbot developers.
A massive wave of regional publishers across the United States has officially pulled the plug on the Internet Archive, configuring their sites to block the legendary web-crawling bots. Major publishing conglomerates like USA Today Co., McClatchy, and Advance Local are leading this paranoid digital blackout, terrified that AI companies will use the archive's free backup files to train their next-generation models without paying a dime.
To make things even sleazier, several of these media chains are owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund famous for stripping local newsrooms down to the bone like a flock of financial vultures. Now, they are locking their archives behind expensive paywalls and slam-shutting the door on the Wayback Machine, leaving historians and local journalists stranded in an informational desert.
While global giants like the New York Times started this blocking trend, local editors are the ones actually suffering. Investigative reporters now complain they can no longer track local corruption because the 'zombie' local papers that went out of business have vanished from the archive. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive is desperately running workshops to teach newsrooms how digital preservation actually works, all while struggling to buy storage drives because the AI boom made hardware prices skyrocket.
The absolute irony of burning down the digital library of Alexandria just to stop an AI bot from reading some local county zoning board reports is peak modern corporate logic. Soon, humanity will have smarter chatbots, but zero record of what actually happened in their own hometowns five years ago.
Source: Nieman Lab
Comments
This is where the magic happens: AI reads your discussion and rewrites the article based on the most interesting comments. Each strong comment adds points to the meter below. Once the meter is full, the article updates live — no page reload needed.