This morning I was listening to the latest episode of Inside Music and checking for any remaining edits that needed to be made when an article from The Awl caught my attention. The title of the piece was “All My Blogs Are Dead,” and within two paragraphs author Carter Maness had me on the edge of my seat. You can find the whole piece here, but I wanted to focus on this key portion for the rest of this post:
“Most of the media outlets I’ve written for have folded and then were flat-out deleted. In 2009, I had started blogging for AOL Music’s Spinner and The BoomBox, averaging three posts per day about indie rock and hip-hop. By 2010, I was writing approximately two print features and twenty blogposts per month on local music acts for New York Press. After that, in 2011, I joined the boutique MP3 blog RCRD LBL as the site’s lead editor/writer, publishing five posts per day. None of these outlets exist in 2014 beyond stray citations, rotten links and Facebook apparitions.”
When a music blog dies, the content created for that publication will remain online only as long as the person owning the URL continues to pay the site’s hosting fees. In my experience, that time is often quite short, and as soon as the metaphorical switch is flipped to shut down the site for good all of your hard work disappears faster than the blink of an eye. The internet time machine may save a post or two for you, if you’re lucky, but more than likely the bulk of your hard work will vanish from existence. This brings us to the same question Maness addresses when writing his article: If it’s deleted from the internet, did it ever really exist?
I’ve been writing about music for almost ten years, but I have only been presiding the site I currently contribute to most often for the last seven. The site where I got my start, the now long-forgotten High Beam Review, stopped posting new content int the fall of 2008. By the spring of 2009 the site was entirely offline, and with it any proof I had contributed content of any kind to a site other than the one I was writing for at that very moment. Fortunately, that site was one I owned, and though I since sold it to a media group it still exists today. All the content created over the last seven years still exists as well, though given the number of times the site’s design has changed I’m not sure how some of the older content would look when viewed on the current layout. Still, it’s there, and until the site dies it will remain available for everyone to see.
But what happens when the media company that now owns my site decides its a property no longer worth their time or hard drive space? Will I even get a warning? If I do, how long will I have to collect what is essentially the entirety of my professional experience up to this point and preserve it for future generations by other means?
I have no answers to these questions, and even before reading Maness’ piece today such inquiries had crossed my mind several times. The best solution I have developed thus far is to maintain a professional portfolio site, which contains links to all the content I create around the web. Those links are only good for as long as the sites they link to are active, but for now its the only means I’ve found aside from copy/pasting years of work onto a separate site. I’ve also begun keeping all the drafts I create on my own word processing programs, but without the sites the content ran on existing I have to wonder if anyone would believe such ramblings were actually published in the first place.
The future is a scary place, and for writers there are few thoughts more terrifying than having the bulk of your published work wiped from existence, but we cannot allow our fears of a potential future prevent us from taking action now. Create backups of your work, and be sure to maintain a digital portfolio whose URL you control. The only one who is going to look out for the livelihood of your content online, especially the more said content ages, is you. It is your responsibility to preserve your work, and I am urging you to begin doing so as soon as possible. Establish a system of preservation and stick with it. Your career will thank you.
James Shotwell is the editor of the Haulix blog. He is also the founder of Under The Gun Review, co-owner of Antique Records, and host of the Inside Music podcast. When not writing and talking about music, James can usually be found eating pizza or going to the movies. Follow him on Twitter.
