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OpinionOpinionPast Article

The Archive Is the Newspaper

A daily that cannot show its work from last year is a feed. The case for keeping the old pages up.

By Samuel Ives, Opinion Editor

New York1 min read

brown concrete building during daytime
brown concrete building during daytimePhoto by Tomas Eidsvold on Unsplash

A news site that shows only today is a screen. A newspaper has a morgue. The morgue is how a reader checks whether we said something foolish in March, and how we check ourselves.

I want the old stories to stay dated. A piece from a prior year should wear that year and be clearly marked as past coverage. Redating it to keep it on the front would be a kind of lie. The front is for what is new. The archive is for what was true on the day, as far as we could source it.

Paywalls are a separate argument. Accuracy is not. An archived story that invents a quote is worse than a thin one, because it has had longer to be trusted. The standard does not relax because the headline has scrolled off.

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