Benton: So it’s the big academic publishing companies that bought up rights to microfilm that was created 50 or 80 years ago?
Kahle: There’s a play I really want to see put on at the Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square — a two-person play, fictitious, of Binkley meeting Eugene Power.5
Eugene Power started University Microfilms, and Binkley had this dream of microfilm playing a different role. And basically, Eugene Power won — Binkley died. And we ended up with it being a corporation, which then got bought and bought and bought and bought again. And then they think that, if you want to move something to the next medium, you need to go back and get a new license. That transaction cost is so high, right? You don’t do it very often. So things get left behind because of this idea of licensing.
Enabling news and archiving news
Benton: I wanted to ask you specifically about how you see the role that journalism has played and does play in the Archives’ history.
Kahle: There are two dimensions, right? There’s being a useful tool for journalists, having materials that they want to use. And then there’s documenting the output of journalism, of news. And those are both probably best illustrated with the Wayback Machine.
Being a resource for journalists has been a major goal of ours. We’ve got an internal Slack channel that uses Google Alerts to find uses of the Wayback Machine in news stories, and they come in all the time. I actually find that a useful stream of news to read, because it indicates that the journalist has done some work.
Benton: Journalists’ use of the Wayback Machine reminds me a bit of the way that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show was able to gain a certain amount of rhetorical authority by finding all these old clips of politicians saying something six months ago that was the opposite of what he is saying today. Using that archive of video information to build accountability. I think journalists use the Wayback Machine for the same reason. It’s “This company says X now, but only three months ago, on their website, they said Y.”
Kahle: Absolutely. And Jon Stewart’s Daily Show was really inspiring to us. We did a grant-funded program to try to build a tool that would allow anyone to become a Jon Stewart research intern. And that was what became the Television Archive.
We’d been archiving television, and then we wanted to make it available. And so we tried to make it so you could search on what people said and then make clips. And it didn’t happen as much as I thought it would.
So those are tools that we’ve helped make that are useful to journalists. Then there’s trying to archive news. And we’ve really done a lot work to try to make sure that we capture news from around the world. What’s becoming really tricky now is paywalls and robot traps. Newspapers are becoming very sophisticated to try to make sure that people don’t crawl them. They’re employing more and more sophisticated tools.