More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive's access to their journalism

In January, Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers —
including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co. — had
started blocking the Internet Archive due to concerns that AI companies
might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data. 

No news publisher has confirmed to Nieman Lab that an AI company has
already scraped their content from the Wayback Machine. Still, in the
five months since we published our story the number of news sites
blocking the Internet Archive has continued to rise. 

Overwhelmingly, these sites are local news outlets.
Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the
United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access
and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five
Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing.
The latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden
Global Capital. 

Researchers, historians, and citizens around the world rely on the web
archives of local news sites to do their work. 

“Blocking the Internet Archive’s web crawlers threatens one of the most
effective ways that we capture and store news content for the long
term,” Edward McCain, a journalism librarian at the University of
Missouri, said. “In the present we may have some workarounds, but in the
long run, it weakens a vital link in primary source materials that we
need to understand where we’ve been and where we want to go.” 

Working journalists are among the most frequent users of the Wayback
Machine’s local news archives. Over the last month, online petitions
have called for news media companies to allow the Internet Archive to
preserve their journalism. 

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/more-than-340-local-news-outlets-are-li
miting-the-internet-archives-access-to-their-journalism/