A place to cache linked articles (think custom and personal wayback machine)
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  1. title: All My Blogs Are Dead
  2. url: http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/all-my-blogs-are-dead
  3. hash_url: 5e06ee2c484fe8856d1500c372d2371e
  4. <p>A couple of months ago, I pitched a feature on the music
  5. industry that I was totally qualified to write. But the editor
  6. questioned my experience: What exactly had I published about the
  7. music industry? By my count, over two thousand blogposts since
  8. 2009. But the links to my author pages bounced back because the
  9. websites had disappeared. Five of years work apparently evaporated
  10. from server racks somewhere in New Jersey, as if I had never
  11. written anything at all. Come to think of it, had I?</p>
  12. <p>Despite the pervasive assumption that everything online lasts
  13. forever, the internet is inherently unstable. Jill Lepore’s
  14. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb">recent
  15. <i>New Yorker</i> story</a> on archive.org’s Wayback Machine notes
  16. the average lifespan of a website is “about a hundred days.” Sites
  17. vanish with no explanation, or get overwritten without any
  18. traceable history. Media outlets, even those with salaried
  19. employees and editorial budgets can and do suffer the same
  20. fate.</p>
  21. <p>When a website dies, it’s usually the editorial that goes first:
  22. writers, both freelance and staff, then editors. Marketing and ad
  23. sales go next. Unlike print, where archive editions get filed away
  24. or become recycling, a website can be scrubbed out of existence
  25. because a company pulls it down or simply stops paying for hosting
  26. or domain rights. <i>Modern Farmer</i> went from National Magazine
  27. Award to pasture in a year. (Despite some <a href="http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/01/8561264/emmodern-farmerem-lives">
  28. assurances</a> it will still be around, check back in six months.)
  29. Hipster Runoff owner Carles, rather than pull his dormant site
  30. down, just <a href="https://flippa.com/3477214-famous-niche-hipster-pr-5-site-w-168-648-uniques-mo-making-1-300-mo-w-no-work">
  31. sold it</a> to an Australian investor for over twenty thousand
  32. dollars. Remember The Daily? <a href="http://thedaily.com/">The
  33. internet doesn’t</a>.</p>
  34. <p>Most of the media outlets I’ve written for have folded and then
  35. were flat-out deleted. In 2009, I had started blogging for AOL
  36. Music’s Spinner and The BoomBox, averaging three posts per day
  37. about indie rock and hip-hop. By 2010, I was writing approximately
  38. two print features and twenty blogposts per month on local music
  39. acts for New York <i>Press</i>. After that, in 2011, I joined the
  40. boutique MP3 blog RCRD LBL as the site’s lead editor/writer,
  41. publishing five posts per day. None of these outlets exist in 2014
  42. beyond stray citations, rotten links and Facebook apparitions.</p>
  43. <p>
  44. <span id="more-208257"/>
  45. </p>
  46. <p>Freelance writing for AOL Music in 2009 felt like a con. For two
  47. hundred words of music blogging, I earned fifty dollars per post.
  48. It was my only job, even though I was self-employed. I pitched my
  49. posts at Spinner, AOL Music’s rock and indie vertical, and The
  50. BoomBox; interviewed Ghostface a few times; and earned a relatively
  51. decent living without ever going to the office. In February 2011,
  52. AOL purchased The Huffington Post, which already had its own
  53. successful music section. Budgets were slashed and, in April,
  54. almost every <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/im-permalance-no-more-%25E2%2580%259Cthank-you-very-much-for-your-contributions-to-aol%25E2%2580%259D">
  55. permalancer writing for AOL Music</a>, including myself, was laid
  56. off and replaced by in-house editors who were tasked with
  57. publishing five to ten stories per day. The salaried model, despite
  58. hitting twenty-five million monthly visitors in 2012 and apparently
  59. costing less than paying dozens of freelancers on a per-post basis,
  60. did not generate enough ad revenue, and a 2013 hiring freeze
  61. foreshadowed the ultimate closure of all AOL Music properties on
  62. April 26, 2013. Spinner was its most-read music blog. But after
  63. shuttering AOL Music, the site, which averaged six million monthly
  64. visitors, was deleted entirely in August 2013. Spinner.com now
  65. redirects you to an AOL Radio homepage that won’t even load in my
  66. browser. And its Twitter account had been silent for so long enough
  67. that, in 2014, it was reset and claimed by a Japanese person named
  68. Sora, who has six followers.</p>
  69. <p>When I talked to Dan Reilly, former editor of Spinner, about the
  70. disappearance, he told me, “I assume that Spinner’s archives exist
  71. somewhere, but they’re definitely not readily accessible online
  72. anymore. AOL never gave us any explanation, but it seems obvious
  73. that they wanted to wash away any trace of AOL Music and promote
  74. AOL Radio instead. I’m not sure what the pros and cons are, but
  75. it’s definitely a shame that all that content is lost, even just
  76. for reference purposes. There have been times when I’ve needed to
  77. find a quote or information from one of our pieces, but they’re
  78. just not there anymore. “AOL continues to” <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7949485/aol-shutting-down-tuaw-apple">simplify
  79. its portfolio of brands</a>. “Tomorrow, it will shut down both
  80. TUAW, the well-known Apple site and Joystiq, its pioneering
  81. videogame blog. For now, the company says it will archive the sites
  82. as channels under its Engadget umbrella” one of AOL’s few remaining
  83. flagship properties, but arguably its most precarious.</p>
  84. <p>As my AOL income evaporated in early 2011, I focused on
  85. freelance work for New York <i>Press</i>, which, in turn, suffered
  86. the fate of most alt-weeklies: Shrinking ad revenue lead to a
  87. smaller paper with smaller budgets and eventually, total collapse.
  88. With no meaningful online footprint, Manhattan Media, its
  89. publisher, had started focusing on growing its under-read blogs.
  90. I’d been writing sporadic music features for the paper since 2008,
  91. but this new online focus earned me and a few freelance writers
  92. promotions to associate editors and a weekly paycheck of a hundred
  93. dollars. I interviewed local bands and wrote about homophobia in
  94. rap. In July 2011, my longtime editor took a better job and they
  95. stopped paying me for months. Six weeks later, a new
  96. twenty-two-year-old “executive” was hired. She offered me a hundred
  97. dollars per month for the same amount of work.</p>
  98. <p>The paper, whose circulation peaked at a hundred thousand in
  99. 2006, published its last edition in September 2011 to a circulation
  100. just twenty thousand. That’s when I quit. The online archive stayed
  101. up until a redesign went live in February 2012. Developers must
  102. have forgotten about the blogs, as all of New York <i>Press</i>’s
  103. online articles disappeared and large swaths of the paper’s history
  104. either got lost or were migrated into the new CMS with broken copy
  105. and unreadable line breaks. Somehow, in January 2013, Nypress.com
  106. was sold to Straus News. The URL now redirects to Straus’s
  107. community newspaper site, which has nothing to do with the storied
  108. alt-weekly besides owning its domain name. The music blog, along
  109. with over three hundred posts from my nine months on the job, is
  110. offline.</p>
  111. <p>In June 2011, as I sensed the New York <i>Press</i> was
  112. crashing, RCRD LBL offered me a full-time editor position
  113. publishing blog posts that featured MP3 downloads and a few
  114. sentences of copy. I was tasked with leading a staff of four
  115. freelance writers. RCRD LBL—and MP3 blogs generally—began
  116. shriveling that same year as fans transitioned from downloading
  117. tracks to streaming them. Why deal with downloading and managing
  118. files when you can just click a link to play nearly any song in
  119. existence? Why bother wading through wordy recommendations from a
  120. dude who secretly just wants to listen to Pavement all day when
  121. your real friends constantly share music you actually like on
  122. Spotify and Soundcloud? With operating costs around three hundred
  123. thousand dollars per year on top of hosting for fifty thousand
  124. songs, RCRD LBL’s business model quickly became untenable. In
  125. September 2012, freelance budgets were cut, and in October, the
  126. entire staff, other than me, was laid off. I reduced the posting
  127. schedule to one piece per day, and revenue from the site’s ad
  128. network, SpinMedia, flatlined.</p>
  129. <p>On May 14, 2013, I published an interview with Austin, TX
  130. haze-rock trio Pure X and an MP3 by French post-punkers Le Femme,
  131. knowing those would be the blog’s final posts. They stayed at the
  132. top of the site for five months. Even though I felt an obligation
  133. to the readers, funding had dried up, so I just stopped. Hardly
  134. anyone noticed until October 2013, when the entire six-year
  135. archive, including my roughly eleven hundred posts, disappeared
  136. from the internet altogether. Facebook and Twitter provide the last
  137. evidence of blogs like RCRD LBL. Like profiles of dead friends, fan
  138. pages and reader messages sometimes float into my feed as ghostly
  139. reminders that my work once existed.</p>
  140. <p>We assume everything we publish online will be preserved. But
  141. websites that pay for writing are businesses. They get sold,
  142. forgotten and broken. Eventually, someone flips the switch and
  143. pulls it all down. Hosting charges are eliminated, and domain names
  144. slip quietly back into the pool. What’s left behind once the cache
  145. clears? As I found with that pitch at the end of 2014, my writing
  146. resume is now oddly incomplete and unverifiable. Ex-editors can
  147. provide references, but I have surprisingly few examples of
  148. published work to show beyond scanned print features from my early
  149. days, so I’ve started backing up my work.</p>
  150. <p>For media companies deleting their sites, legacy doesn’t matter;
  151. the work carries no intrinsic value if there is no business
  152. remaining to capitalize on it. I asked if RCRD LBL still existed on
  153. a server somewhere. It apparently does; I was invited to purchase
  154. it for next to nothing. I could pay for the hosting, flip the
  155. switch on, and all my work would return. But I’d never really look
  156. at it. Then, eventually, I would stop paying the bills, too.</p>