Karen Hanson is the Lead Research Developer at Portico.
For World Digital Preservation Day and the Save Our Stories theme, it seemed apt to introduce our current pilot project to preserve digital news and a new Mellon-funded project with Portico’s long-time partner, NYU Libraries.
For over a decade, members of the library, archives, and journalism communities in the US have raised concerns about whether digital news is being adequately preserved as the industry shifts from print to digital. As legacy newspapers move online, reduce or end print operations, and in some cases close altogether, new kinds of digital and hyperlocal outlets are emerging to fill the gaps, often experimenting with new funding models to survive. Preserving hyperlocal and community-focused reporting is essential to capturing an inclusive historical record, yet this volatile environment places this vital record at a high risk of permanent loss.
Portico is an established non-profit digital preservation service that launched in 2003 to preserve academic publications and protect the content that libraries subscribe to. The issue of news preservation was raised by Portico’s advisory committee, which saw potential overlap in infrastructure requirements for news article preservation, and an alignment of interest in this material from the library community that Portico serves. To explore this challenge, we launched a pilot project to test whether our preservation framework could be adapted to meet the unique challenges of digital news.
A review of existing services and the literature indicated that there were significant gaps in preserving born-digital news articles, especially subscription content and those that web crawlers may not reach reliably. During the research, some websites began restricting automated access to block AI bots. In some cases, those restrictions also affected web-archiving crawlers, raising concern within the archive community. These concerns reinforced the value of having a range of approaches to preserving digital news. We explored options that drew on Portico’s strengths, including working closely with publishers and platforms to import article data through exports and technical integrations. As part of this research, we considered whether the features of publisher platforms that were created to distribute content to news aggregators such as Apple News and NewsBank might also be a useful route for preservation.
One report that was especially useful during the initial research was the 2021 Reynolds Journalism Institute report, Endangered But Not Too Late: The State of Digital News Preservation. We connected with the authors of the report, and the faculty and staff of the Institute became important partners and advisors for the work. With their support, Portico began working with BLOX Digital, whose news CMS hosts several thousand news outlets in the US, including many that are subscription-only. BLOX could provide a full XML export containing articles and images. Portico’s experience with XML in scholarly publishing made this a relatively straightforward starting point. Next, Portico developed a harvester to retrieve article data from WordPress, which is used by a significant portion of US local news sites. The tool retrieves content through the WordPress API rather than scraping the public-facing website.
To explore the technical limitations and scalability, Portico has been recruiting news outlets under a pilot project in which preservation is provided at no cost to the participants. As of October 2026, 44 organizations representing 72 news outlets are participating in the pilot, across the two supported platforms (BLOX and WordPress). The process is far from perfect at this point, but there are indications that it could scale and help preserve these stories using a method that complements existing efforts.
Though the initial research included conversations with a wide variety of stakeholders, it reached a point where evolving the pilot into a permanent service would require broader involvement from the library, archive, and journalism communities. This resulted in a new phase of work with NYU Libraries, a long-time research partner with an interest in preserving and providing access to hyperlocal news.
Partnering with NYU Libraries led to a successful application for a two-year, $510,000 Mellon Foundation grant. NYU Libraries received the award and is leading the project in partnership with Portico. The project will engage additional library and journalism stakeholders, including NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, to help shape Portico’s preservation service. NYU Libraries will also explore ways to improve discovery and access to hyperlocal news for researchers. Other goals include adding 100 publications to the preservation pilot, supporting a third publishing platform, and developing partnerships and a cost-recovery model to sustain the service over the long term.
We’re excited to explore these goals with NYU Libraries and the broader preservation and library community and to implement suggestions based on the priorities that emerge from the work. The grant project began in June and will continue for two years.
For now, the work focuses on news in the United States, but there are so many others working on digital news preservation in many places. We’d welcome hearing about the challenges they’re facing and the approaches they’re taking. By sharing what we learn and finding ways to connect our efforts, we can help more of these stories remain available for the future.