Librarians, data geeks strike fear in hearts of bullies
They preserve culture and science from government decrees and executive orders
You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
Trustworthy news and information sources are scoring some quiet victories in the war against truth. The world’s strongmen fear science, culture, free speech, and any voices that question their authority.
Perhaps you’ve been discouraged by many recent headlines. They usually describe threats, decrees, arrests, executive orders, or even violence aimed at silencing any dissenting voices.
Antidotes for despair. Meanwhile, the quiet work of cataloging and recording the collective knowledge of humanity over the millennia doesn’t make headlines.
Save the data!
In this post you’ll hear about:
A group that aims to protect government data from being wiped away by the current administration
A group that is helping local news outlets find buried data relevant to their communities
A coordinated effort to save U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations
Two newsletters with rigorous reporting on misinformation
Reasons for Optimism (and antidotes for despair), Part 1
The First Reason for Optimism is the Data Rescue Project. It is “a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network.”
The project describes its mission as serving as “a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public U.S. governmental data that are currently at risk.” Its efforts include “data gathering, data curation and cleaning, data cataloging, and providing sustained access and distribution of data assets.”
The site recently highlighted the Tracking Gov Info Project, which is a crowdsourcing effort to track “removed and modified government information and resources.” Tracking Gov Info is asking for the public’s help in “compiling a comprehensive list of government websites, documents, articles, reports, etc. that have been removed or modified by the current administration.”
Reasons for Optimism (and antidotes for despair), Part 2
The second one is called Big Local News. Its co-directors, both professors of journalism at Stanford University, start from the premise that “It’s too hard for local journalists to access public records about policing, public health, government, and other vital topics.”
Big Local News tries to solve the problem by gathering data, building tools and collaborating with reporters.
“The biglocalnews.org site also offers a free archiving service for journalists to store, share, and publish data. Selected projects are preserved by the Stanford Digital Repository.” Some of its financial support comes from its Industrial Affiliates program.
You can hear an interview with Cheryl Phillips, co-director of Big Local News, on the Data Journalism podcast, “The Datapocalypse: Are we losing our public data?”
Reasons for Optimism (and antidotes for despair), Part 3
The End of Term Archive “captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The EOT has thus far preserved websites from administration changes in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024.”
The Archive contains federal government websites from all three branches —legislative, executive, and judicial — that “were at risk of changing or disappearing altogether during government transitions.”
The archive is now asking the public to nominate URLs they believe should be preserved in the U.S. Government Web & Data Archive 2025.
Content is available on the Internet Archive in their Wayback Machine. Go to web.archive.org, scroll to the ‘Collection Search’ area, select your desired End of Term (EOT) collection from the dropdown, and type in your search term.
Reasons for Optimism (and antidotes for despair), Part 4
Actually there are two projects here in Part 4, both of them fact-checking widely distributed falsehoods and conspiracy theories. One of them is NewsGuard’s Reality Check, a free newsletter that I subscribe to.
I can vouch for the credibility of its self-description: “Published three times per week, Reality Check regularly breaks unique, important stories related to tech, media, and misinformation . . . It explores how misinformation spreads online and uncovers the forces that shape online narratives.”
For example, Reality Check traced the claim about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating neighbors’ pets back to its original sources, who admitted they had gotten the information third-hand.
. . . and open-source intelligence techniques
Nieman Lab is reporting that two well known fact-checking journalists, Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis are launching a newsletter called Indicator.
They describe it as “your essential guide to understanding and investigating digital deception. We publish original reporting, in-depth investigations, and practical tutorials on open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools and techniques.”
Indicator will fund itself mainly with subscriptions, starting at $100 a year. “It is designed for people on the front lines of digital investigations: journalists, analysts, researchers, and trust and safety professionals—alongside everyday citizens who want to make sense of what they see online.”
For example, their reporting revealed that Meta’s Facebook ran thousands of clickbait ads showing scantily clad women for networks that monetize through the Google platform.
Final thought
On Monday I found myself at a Memorial Day cookout with strangers from the worlds of corporate law, artificial intelligence, academia, and international development.
When I revealed that I had been a journalist, I was inundated with familiar complaints. People distrust the media, are depressed by the shouters on the left and the right, and they wonder where to find sane, moderate, thoughtful news sources.
I count myself among those sometimes in despair. At the cookout, I admitted, sheepishly, to avoiding the daily news machine that produces clickbait — the sensational, the titillating, the frightening, the frivolous, the horrific. As they say in TV news, “if it bleeds, it leads.” It’s fast, easy, and cheap to reproduce.
Trustworthy news and information, by contrast, takes time and is costly to produce. An offhand remark by an attention-seeking blowhard rockets instantly into headlines around the world. Is it even true? But investigating that takes time and skilled, experienced people.
I’m an optimist by nature and continue looking for grass-roots media projects, like the ones described above. They’re an antidote to despair. They are designed to inform people about the issues that matter to them in their communities. That’s what this newsletter is all about.