Article by By Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez: “…News outlets’ homepages are vital historical records, providing a real-time view into what a newsroom deems the most important stories of the moment. From a homepage — headlines, word choice, story placement — readers get a sense of a newsroom’s editorial priorities and how they change over time. If homepages aren’t saved, records of those changes are lost.
The Wayback Machine, an initiative from the nonprofit Internet Archive, has been archiving the webpages of news outlets — alongside millions of other websites — for nearly three decades. Earlier this month, it announced that it will soon archive its trillionth web page. The Internet Archive has long stressed the importance of archiving homepages, particularly to fact-check politicians’ claims. In 2018, for instance, when Donald Trump accused Google of failing to promote his State of the Union address on its homepage, Google used the Wayback Machine’s archive of its homepage to disprove the statement.
“[Google’s] job isn’t to make copies of the homepage every 10 minutes,” Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, said at the time. “Ours is.”
But a Nieman Lab analysis shows that the Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news outlets’ homepages have plummeted in recent months. Between January 1 and May 15, 2025, the Wayback Machine shows a total of 1.2 million snapshots collected from 100 major news sites’ homepages. Between May 17 and October 1, 2025, it shows 148,628 snapshots from those same 100 sites — a decline of 87%. (You can see our data here.)..(More)”.
