Tuesday 12th July: Can The Atlantic Archive make subscribers pay for history?

July 12, 2022

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

The ephemeral nature of digital publishing means we lose vital information for understanding the world - past and present - all the time. Link rot means we lose access to important context, even when those stories haven't been removed or otherwise deleted. So that's why it's really exciting that The Atlantic is making its entire back catalogue available to browse, going back 165 years:

"Nearly 30,000 articles, reviews, short stories, and poems, published between The Atlantic’s founding in 1857 and 1995, the year we launched our website (a site that included, from its start, articles that originated both in print and on the web), are now accessible to subscribers, researchers, students, historians, and that blessed category, the incurably curious."

I'd love to see more of this, but it's a huge undertaking. There has to be a financial imperative to do so - and hopefully the success of the Atlantic Archive can act as a proof point for this. The magazine states it believes the operation will become profitable within three years.

Look, I could talk about conspiracy theories for days. The individual theories - no matter how crazy - and the reason people choose to believe them are both so interesting. So this article on Nieman Lab, which uses conspiracies to examine how best to counter disinformation online, is a gift of an article.

An interesting read in light of our talk around news avoidance a few weeks ago. Digital consumption has changed how we experience the news, and as this piece argues "today’s news, even high-quality print news, is not designed for humans. How do we fix it?"

While working in renewable energy in developing countries, Yara Akkari developed a love for travel that saw her launch Open Spaces magazine last year. This interview with her for MagCulture really cheered me up; it's a reminder of what magazines mean to people - both the creator and the readers.

This week's podcast:

This week we hear from Max Towey, Co-Founder and CEO at RocaNews. Roca is a start-up building a community around the news that lowers the blood pressure; they believe alarmist and partisan coverage has been responsible for much of the news avoidance we’re seeing today. Towey tells us how RocaNews is aiming for balanced and informative coverage of just a few stories a day, and are hoping to rebuild the younger generation’s trust in news.

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