Sacramento Magazine editorial director Krista Minard was blindsided in July 2023. She was told the publication would close four days before getting eye surgery. A few months later she was in for another surprise. Emails from former colleagues led her to discover the magazine’s website as she knew it was gone. SacMag.com was still online, but in its place was something she calls “rudimentary.”

“It’s got a few stories up there, but no real rhyme or reason to which ones were chosen to put up,” says Minard, who has contributed to Comstock’s. The magazine had been published in print since 1975, “but material that was online went back to about 2006, and all that went away.” About two decades’ worth of articles and photographs documenting the Capital Region’s history disappeared from the internet. While the digital print replicas from March 2020 to the present remained on the website, pretty much everything else was taken offline. Now Minard encourages reporters to back up their work while they still can. 

“You never know what can happen, Minard says. “And boy, we sure got that message loud and clear last summer.”

Unfortunately for journalists, digital permanence is a myth. Last year more than two newspapers closed a week on average in the United States, according to a report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. When web hosting bills go unpaid, online content disappears. A study from the Pew Research Center published in May found that 38 percent of web pages created in 2013 are no longer accessible. More than half of Wikipedia pages contain at least one source leading to a dead link. 

A physical archive is left behind too when a newspaper or magazine dies. Often this collection of back issues, sometimes bound together in volumes, is donated to a library, museum or government archive like the Center for Sacramento History. That’s where Sacramento Magazine’s print collection went for future preservation. Now to see them requires sifting through boxes at the center’s warehouse, scheduled appointment only. (The Sacramento Room at the central branch of the Sacramento Public Library also has all issues of Sacramento Magazine from 1979 to 2023 available for viewing without an appointment.) 

Marybeth Bizjak, Sacramento Magazine’s former dining editor and a contributor to Comstock’s, says she was “incensed” by the website shutdown. Bizjak, who wrote for the publication for decades, thought it would likely close eventually, but says “It didn’t occur to me that the internet archives would ever go away, and that just shocked me. I was so surprised.”

After the Michigan-based Hour Media shut down its subsidiary Sacramento Media, which published Sacramento Magazine, some of the remaining assets including intellectual property like subscriber and advertising lists were sold to the owners of Sactown Magazine. The terms of the sale were not publicly disclosed, and Hour Media did not respond to requests for comment. Reached by email, Sactown’s co-owner Rob Turner wrote that the sale included web domain names, but not the website itself. 

Sacramento Magazine’s website was taken down, and Turner paid for a new website to be built from scratch as a placeholder with a handful of articles. This is how SacMag.com appears today. The amount of time, effort and money it would take to upload thousands of articles along with possible legal concerns over copyright and libel is why Turner said he never had the website fully restored. However, Sacramento Magazine’s digital editions uploaded to Issuu and BlueToad are still accessible. Combined, more than a hundred issues are on the two publishing platforms, although it can be difficult to find content on these platforms through search engines like Google. 

“From what I’ve witnessed and experienced first-hand, most online stories don’t live on forever,” Turner writes. “In Sacramento Magazine’s case, however, nearly 13 years of full issues online is more than I’ve seen for most other magazines.”

When media outlets close

Sacramento Magazine lives on in a diminished form online. But there are news websites that don’t exist beyond the life of the business. Originating in the summer of 2014, City Scout Magazine was an Instagram passion project turned blog with aspirations of becoming a quarterly print publication. About 10 writers and photographers, mostly volunteers, contributed food and travel guides to the website. It was never profitable, owners Felix and Nicolette Molina told me. City Scout’s last article was posted in October 2019. 

Felix says “It felt best to close all doors and just let it be.” The couple wanted to move on and felt the website didn’t have any long-term value. Most of the businesses City Scout wrote about have closed. The guides they published weren’t usable anymore. The owners thought other outlets covered the same topics and didn’t see value in keeping their articles up or preserving them.

“It never crossed my mind,” says Nicolette, who has contributed photography to Comstock’s. “The business stopped existing. It’s like a brick-and-mortar. If the business sells, it closes down and something else moves in. And I guess it felt more like that. It’s like, okay, pack it up and move on.” 

While CityScoutMag.com was taken down following the publication’s closure, some websites of defunct Sacramento-area publications are intact (at least for now). Alt-weekly Submerge Magazine’s website remains up despite its closing four years ago. The owners Melissa Welliver and Jonathan Carabba said through Facebook Messenger it only costs them a few hundred dollars a year to keep the site up. Submerge’s website will remain in status quo until a long-term plan is devised. Maybe one day the magazine will relaunch as the couple’s hobby. 

For now, SubmergeMag.com lives because, the owners write, “There’s a lot of great content that might want to be viewed again by friends, family or fans of the people we featured in the decade-plus Submerge was a part of documenting Sacramento art and entertainment.”

Tim Foster felt the same way about Midtown Monthly,which ran for six years until closing in 2012. Foster owned the publication for a time and reacquired its assets when it ceased. He said Midtown’s website was an afterthought, and most print content was never uploaded. However, he feels those online articles still have value. 

“We covered things that other people weren’t looking at, and I wanted to keep that out there,” Foster says. However, the site is in a “diminished state” due to outdated software. Images and text formatting are missing. Hyperlinks don’t work without editing the URL. One day Foster wants to hire a web designer to fix up MidtownMonthly.net. Aging technology is what makes maintaining online articles a challenge. 

What happens to digital news?

Preserving paper is pretty straightforward. Preserving digital media is more complicated, says Marcia Eymann, city historian at the Center for Sacramento History. Technology changes and storage formats come and go. Film has been around for hundreds of years, but does anyone still remember LaserDisc? It takes effort to transition files from one system to the next. When done, questions can arise over how long those devices will function over millennia.

“I know how long a piece of paper will last. I can give you an idea of how long a photograph will last,” Eymann says. But as for digital files, she has “no idea how long that’s going to exist.”

Eymann says the center does not preserve websites at this time. They’ll scan photographs and newspapers for accessibility, but the entirety of Sacramento Magazine’s original website isn’t something the center has the resources to keep online. So how will the Capital Region preserve its past amid the decline of print news media? 

Some articles are only ever published online. Sacramento News & Review and Capitol Weekly ceased publishing in print, and news outlets launched in recent years like Stocktonia and the Folsom Times are digital only. How can their articles be saved for the future? 

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is one solution. The nonprofit’s software crawls the publicly accessible internet to download webpages. It isn’t perfect, according to Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. The automated program sifts through the internet backing up websites. Sometimes pages weren’t downloaded before the article was yanked offline. Sometimes pages are saved but displayed incorrectly. Images or text formatting could be missing. Embedded video and audio files might not play. Plus, finding web pages requires a tedious search without the URL in hand. 

The Library of Congress also archives web content. In California, there’s an effort underway to preserve the state’s newspapers at the UC Riverside’s Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research. Director Brian Geiger said the center functions as the Golden State’s newspaper repository and digitizes millions of pages as part of the California Digital Newspaper Collection. The center doesn’t archive websites or accept magazines at this time. There are plenty of print newspapers on hand to keep them busy, but things are changing. For decades, local libraries and historical societies have collected newspapers to be microfilmed. Geiger said that work largely ended in the 2010s.

“We’ve got this gap now of ten or more years where papers just aren’t being saved,” Geiger says. “There’s no concerted effort to save them, so it’s kind of catch as catch can.” The center adapted and has a small project called “Born Digital” where publishers send PDFs of newspapers for preservation. It isn’t popular. 

“It’s a real question whether this period of newspapers is going to be available to researchers decades from now,” Geiger says. “I suspect it’s not.”

People have to be proactive about preserving media before it’s gone, Geiger said. However, he doesn’t necessarily believe publishers want to be nor should be responsible for the long-term preservation of their content. He thinks public institutions need to start planning for a world where more and more content is only ever online. 

“We’ve got now over decades worth of digital content that hasn’t been preserved in any way, and if we don’t do something soon, we’re going to lose it.”

Correction September 19, 2024: A previous version of this article stated that back issues of Sacramento Magazine are only available by appointment at the Center for Sacramento History. They are also available without an appointment at the central branch of the Sacramento Public Library. 

–

Subscribe to the Comstock’s newsletter today.