Like those of us who came of age with the internet, freelance multimedia journalist Brandon Tauszik viewed the web as permanent — once something was on the internet, it was always on the internet.
But now he’s realized it could be gone tomorrow.
“A publication could just go out of business and take down whatever content they want. Your writing is not permanent. Your photography is not permanent. Anything you’re putting online is short-lived and will probably vanish.” Tauszik said. “If I were to pass away tomorrow and my credit cards stopped, a lot of these projects of mine would just vanish, be gone for good and never come back.”
It’s a situation many journalists are finding themselves in as media websites shutter (like The Messenger), archives disappear in sales or mergers, or, like some of Tauszik’s freelance projects, there’s no long-term plan once a site’s registration expires.
Tauszik discovered one of his projects, Syria Street, had disappeared due to link rot — the gradual decay of URLs and websites as they become broken, inaccessible or deleted over time. As a journalism fellow with the The Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford, Tauszik has spent his time creating a way for other journalists to keep their work online longer, and at a lower cost — especially when many must foot the bill themselves — while ensuring their work is preserved in more resilient systems.
Tauszik’s project is one of many at the lab focused on helping journalists understand and use rapidly evolving tech and tools. Ann Grimes, director of the Journalism Program at the Starling Lab, said she tells her students it’s like Moore’s Law for media.
“No sooner do you learn something, 18 months later, you’re going to have to learn it all over again, because it’s going to be different. As technology evolves, we need to be aware of who has control of our data, and what kind of risks we take when we place all our data into large, centralized systems,” she said.
Grimes said it’s exciting to see journalists like Tauszik be able to talk and work with tech in this way.
“I would have these conversations with journalists and they would be talking about blockchain and say, ‘Oh, that’s crypto,’ and would shut down,” she said. “Now they’re reaching out to us to ask for training. They want to know how these tech tools work and how they might be able to use them. And so there’s much more of an embrace of what we’re doing especially given the rise of generative AI. So it’s very heartening.”
I spoke with Tauszik about why he created this project and what he hopes other journalists can learn from it. What follows is an Q&A I had with Tauszik and Lindsay Walker, who led project development at the Starling Lab, conducted over two interviews and lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Tony Elkins: Tell me a little bit about how your link rot project started.
Brandon Tauszik: This became real when a digital commission of mine, Syria Street, vanished from the web and sent me down this path to try and find something more sustainable.
It was a commission from the International Committee of the Red Cross to create a project profiling the two populations inhabiting the city of Tripoli, Lebanon. The Sunni Muslim residents of the Bab-al-Tabbaneh neighborhood and the Alawite residents of the Jabal Mohsen neighborhood clashed during the Lebanese civil war and then again during the Syrian civil war. The two neighborhoods are divided by a main thoroughfare called Syria Street.
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This commissioned project originally lived on a custom built website purchased and hosted by the ICRC. All was well until I received a message from an advertising agency producer looking for the project to include in a pitch. Unbeknownst to me, the website had vanished entirely. I reached out to the ICRC communications staff, but they were as surprised as I was. No one knew where the site had gone. Eventually, ICRC’s IT department confirmed that the project was terminated due to the ongoing maintenance and hosting work associated with keeping the project live. The code was deleted and could not be brought back.
I considered the project entirely lost forever until I reached out to the web development company I had hired to originally build the site. They did not have a copy of the website, either. However, when later searching their Github repository, they found a backup. I took that copy to a developer I hired who was able to rehost it via my website.
Elkins: What was it like having your work just completely disappear off the web? What were your immediate emotions when something like that happens?
Tauszik: I was really sad. I was really disappointed because it’s so permanent. It’s not like, “Oh, we just moved it.” When something’s taken off of a server and deleted, that’s just it. It’s almost like losing a friend that you didn’t get to say goodbye to. I wasn’t ready for that project to be gone.
Elkins: Given the news surrounding a lot of government information being pulled off the web, how should journalists and organizations be thinking about how content and data live online?
Lindsay Walker: It serves as a reminder that each time you load a webpage it’s merely a performance on your screen, one that disappears when you close your tab. Could you save it yourself? Many users are aware that consumer storage systems — floppy disks, hard drives, flash drives, etc. — decay and can fail to work within a few years, leaving consumers reliant on costly storage solutions in “the cloud” controlled by the big tech companies.
Archivists traditionally recommend a “3,2,1” backup strategy: three copies, two file formats, and one offsite location. But increasingly, experts also recommend considering decentralized storage solutions which can be more resilient and secure. Case in point: A storage node on the decentralized Filecoin network which launched recently at the University of Southern California. Data physically resides on this node and redundant copies are made offsite. The node also uses blockchain and Proof-of-Spacetime (“PoSt”) — confirming every 24 hours that the node has properly preserved the data it claims to hold. The node also will offer unique long-term storage solutions for academic researchers who sometimes need to meet grant requirements to preserve data for at least 20 years.
Consider these concepts when evaluating how you preserve webpages from your own investigations, be it with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a browser extension to create replayable web archives like Webrecorder, or a university library supported service like Perma.cc.
Elkins: Blockchain and crypto technology often get used like they are some sort of tech magic wand that can fix anything. How would you suggest people learn more about its actual uses for data integrity and archiving?
Tauszik: Back in 1994, Katie Couric famously asked live on air, “What is internet?” (sic) Since then, journalists have incorporated the internet into most aspects of their professional lives. Similar to media literacy coming into focus in recent decades, digital literacy is now a crucial concept for both journalists and the broader public to wrap their heads around.
Blockchain and crypto technology are driving forces behind decentralization, a movement focused on shifting control of digital information (or content) away from centralized powers like Big Tech and governments.
“Crypto” as a concept has been largely hijacked by cryptocurrency in the past decade due to its mass adoption and heavy media coverage. However it actually stands for the age-old concept of “cryptography,” the earliest known use being by the Egyptians with their secretive hieroglyphs. These days, we secure communication through encryption anytime we send an iMessage, visit an “https” website or do just about anything online.
“Blockchain” is just a ledger, establishing existence and authenticity in a similar way that a notary public does for paper documents. Blockchain records each exchange in a securely timestamped and tamper-proof block, stored across a distributed network rather than being controlled by a single person or entity.
People can learn more about these actual uses by reading my Starling Lab case study and by seeking out information independently online. They can also try free and readily accessible tools like Webrecorder or ProofMode, and explore decentralized storage systems like Filecoin, IPFS, Storj, and Arweave as potential alternatives to the large tech companies where data today likely lives often unquestioned “in the cloud”.
Elkins: Walk me through the process of your project. What steps did you take trying to find a more permanent solution?
Tauszik: I wanted to find a solution that would safely and affordably preserve Syria Street, as well as other projects of mine, like Facing Life. I reached out to Stanford University’s Starling Lab for Data Integrity, which prototypes tools and principles that can bring journalists into a new era of the internet. Through a yearlong fellowship, we outlined and identified potential technology solutions to preserve both Syria Street and Facing Life.
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Walker: Part of it is just spaghetti thrown at the wall. We go with systems that are built to be redundant and reusable. We chose some common tools for website publishing because they’re well designed, like Github and Vimeo. Another big factor is, are they open source?
In our projects, we research and build prototypes using decentralized, web3 technologies. And there’s some design ideas behind the way that these systems are created, for example, Interplanetary File System — or IPFS — and blockchain. Some of the systems we use are designed so one person, or one entity or organization, doesn’t have centralized control. They’re designed in a way to make it super easy for users to host, retain and share copies of digital content.
Elkins: If you’re not coming from a strong technical background how do you approach using these types of tools?
Tauszik: The philosophy of web3 and blockchain is just entirely different from what our web2 brains are used to. At the kickoff of the fellowship there were a lot of webinars to help bring me and the other fellows in the cohort up to speed. They had a similar knowledge base to mine — which wasn’t much around things like this. So that was a great foundation. Other people could use YouTube or Coursera to wrap their head around this space. It’s not as complicated as you might think.
From there it’s about identifying the right tools, like Lindsay said, and the right platforms. You try to find ones that are as future proof as possible. Think about what’s going to be here long term, as best as you can.
Elkins: If someone was interested in trying this themselves, what’s the process and cost like?
Tauszik: Since there was no existing roadmap for how to do this, it was time consuming in the short term and took six months of part-time work. However, the goal of this fellowship was to find a streamlined, replicable solution, and that was achieved.
Developer costs were by far the largest part of the budget. If you already have a static site, that conversion process and cost would vanish. The second largest part of the budget was the domain renewal, but if one uses cheaper domain names or subdomains on one second-level domain, those costs can be greatly reduced as well.
Ultimately, IPFS is a very affordable and secure data storage system that we are using for decentralized backups. Storing both sites on IPFS costs around $9.60 per year compared to my previous solution of $45 per year for Syria Street and $150 per year for Facing Life. In addition to the Web3 solution with IPFS, we’ve also hosted Web2 versions of the sites for free on Github Pages.
The ultimate outcome is that both projects are now securely published (with backups on distributed hosting) registered on their existing domains for 10 years, the current limit set by ICANN. Total cost for both sites:
- $2,500 – Developer to capture and convert Facing Life into a static site
- $198 – Nine additional years of domain ownership renewal for the Syria Street second-level domain
- $431 – Nine additional years of domain ownership renewal for the Facing Life domain
- $86.40 – Nine years of data pinning on IPFS
- $5 – Blockchain registration
- $0 – Github Pages hosting
- $0 – Filecoin archives
Elkins: As a creator, in what ways has this project changed how you work or how you view a product life cycle?
Tauszik: It’s a weight off my shoulders in a lot of ways. I wasn’t going to be able to find the solution on my own and I’m super grateful to now have a roadmap for projects in my backlog and also going forward. Now that I have a firm price tag on what this costs, which is cheaper than keeping dynamic sites hosted on WordPress, I can bring that into the fundraising part of future projects and think about long-term solutions.
Elkins: Looking back at this whole process, what’s been the biggest challenge you’ve had to personally overcome?
Tauszik: That my digital work is not as permanent as I originally thought, even with the solution we’ve come up with. When I was just starting out making these projects 10 years ago, I did view the web and my websites as permanent without thinking of the costs or changing technologies. So these past few years have been a bit sobering. I don’t know if these projects will exist in 100 years, but we can at least try and make them last for as long as possible.
Elkins: How does this project fit within the larger scope of what the Starling Lab is trying to accomplish?
Walker: Our mission is to maintain the integrity of data, identify where digital content came from — what we call provenance — and design systems that allow us to trace and track the authenticity of information. We’re establishing why and what sorts of things provenance is useful for. We talk about these in very abstract ways, but having someone like Brandon say, “Hey, I’m documenting these parts of our culture and our identity. This is why it’s important.” It gives us a good use case for what tools are available and how they could be implemented.
One of the things that I would like people to see is we need to examine the systems that we’re using and understand the limitations and how they’re fundamentally designed. Think about who these designs benefit. Right? So, if you take a big cloud provider, these things are designed by them, to benefit them. It’s time to ask: Why are you using only their systems? Are there better things that we can use that are built with open use and open sharing in mind? When you use something, who are you supporting, how is it designed, how’s it going to impact us?
