Survey of Digital Archiving Practices at Canadian Media Outlets, For-Profit Archiving Services, and Media Monitoring Companies: Preliminary

Report Ernest Hoffman and Lisa Lynch Introduction Over the past several months, we have been conducting research to determine how print and broadcast media outlets in Canada are currently archiving their born-digital content. The following represents our preliminary findings: though much more research needs to be done, we feel that what follows helps to elucidate some of the issues involved in creating publicly accessible archival resources of a spectrum of born-digital Canadian media content. While our research partners at the University of Western Ontario have focused on the legal issues attendant in the creation of such archives, we focus here on the practical realities of media archiving in Canada as it currently stands. Our research has been guided by the following areas of interest: 1.) The degree to which media outlets present-day archiving practices consider a given media portals design and functionality as something to be preserved for future viewing or emulation. Before the online transition, print news was preserved though image capture; thus, historical print news archives contain not only news articles, but the contextual frame in which news was presented. As yet, no agreement exists about what aspects of news presentation online print or broadcast need to be preserved. Reader comments, images, video presentation formats, and the content management system (CMS) in which the content was embedded are all aspects of news presentation online, and currently none of them are seen as necessary elements of online news archives. 2.) The relationship between a media outlets online infrastructure, including their CMS and their social media platforms, and their archiving practices. Currently, as noted below, comments and other interactive elements of news websites are often archived off-site for legal, logistical, and financial reasons. Archiving news content sans comments or interactive media would violate the spirit of full born-digital archiving; however, the patchwork of relationships between media companies and hosts of a media outlets social media or interactive services will need to be assessed. 3.) The degree to which non-Canadian companies are involved in providing CMS and social media support to Canadian media outlets. As noted below, it may be the case that some portions of Canadian news sites live on servers outside of Canada, thus creating particular jurisdictional or copyright issues. 4.) The different approaches to archiving pursued by a. public and private media outlets b. legacy print and broadcast media outlets that have made the digital transition in whole or part Our preliminary results show that archiving practices differ widely from outlet to outlet, in ways often rooted in concerns that unrelated to the legacy medium. Further research will be needed to determine whether a legacy-platform-agnostic project for born-digital archiving might be possible, or whether some, at least, of Canadas for-profit media companies might see the advantages of publicly-accessible born-digital archiving. 5.) The role of Library and Archives Canada in either developing archives of born-digital media or, alternately, establishing partnerships with private-sector archiving. Given that the LAC is currently going through a phase of privatization and decentralization, what effect might this have

on creating an archive of digital materials that is not-for-profit and centrally accessible in collaboration with the LAC? 6.) The relationship between media outlets and for-profit archiving services in Canada. Legacy print media companies traditionally have had contractual relationship with databases such as Proquest and Lexis/Nexis: the online transition has meant that they have also begun to monetize their own archives. It remains to be seen whether broadcast media will consider paid access to archives in the future. This will undoubtedly have an impact on the ability to negotiate with media companies to archive born-digital content.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS: I. MEDIA COMPANIES The information below suggests that Canadian media companies archiving of digital content is piecemeal and underthought. Ironically, the least organized media companies (CBC, QMI) may in fact have the most comprehensive archives extant, because they have never tried to select content for archiving. Otherwise, the best archives belong to media companies which contract out to full-service CMS companies, because these companies must be organized, systematic and are liable for the loss of any data they manage. The majority of media companies we contacted are in the midst of looking critically at past archiving practices and thinking ahead to the future, though again, no consensus emerged about what that future would entail. The one media company that seemed relatively sanguine about its archiving practices was TORSTAR, which has invested a good deal of resources in developing what they claim to be a stateof-the-art CMS and archiving system. 1. CBC (http://www.cbc.ca/news/) The CBC has had a mixed record in terms of archiving practice. While (allegedly) nothing that has been uploaded to the CBCs servers and published on CBC.ca including stories, photos, audio and video has been deleted or removed from the server, much of the content is effectively inaccessible. This is in large part a result of CBCs many site redesigns: as the taxonomy and architecture of the site is not consistent, content can be difficult to find. The CBC has committed to systematically archiving their web-only content going forward, but the organization is still deciding what to do about their past content. The CBC assembled a task force several months ago, led by CBC Libraries and Archives, to create a strategy for the archiving of their online content. Among the issues to be decided are whether they should archive the full user experience, including full pages with comments, etc, or just the story content, and how to balance the needs for archival access of CBC journalists with access for the broader public. Though the CBC.ca contracts with Pluck Media (see below) for some social media content, they host their own user comments. There has been no systematic effort to preserve comments these comments through the various redesigns. Further research on the CBCs archiving practices includes following the activities of the CBC Libraries and Archives task force, and obtaining more precise information about the integration of propriety and third-party resources for social media and the impact this might have on archiving. 2. Bell Media (http://www.ctvnews.ca/) Like the CBC, CTV has kept the bulk of its digital assets online and yet accessibility is an issue. The text of online stories created since the current website was set up in 2000 is still up and accessible to the public, but video assets are less easy to find on the site. Because of the volume and size of online video content, it is accessible only for one year before it is placed in deep archives, where the content is less readily available. Comments are hosted directly by CTV.ca, but are not preserved when the stories and videos are archived, because the technical parameters of the existing system do not allow for it: so the comments are effectively lost.

Further research will entail following the migration to Polopoly and verifying how much of the back archives become accessible, and whether comments are saved going forward. 3. The Globe and Mail (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/) While the CBC and CTV maintain free archives, The Globe and Mail like most print media outlets draws revenue from paid archive search. Thus, all content goes behind a paywall after 14 days, where it is accessible to paid subscribers but not to the general public. On the other hand, all online content is saved, and all of it continues to be accessible to paid subscribers, including blog content, etc. The Globe and Mail also has a contractual relationship with the largest for-profit media archiving services, including Proquests Factiva, FP Informat, and Lexis/Nexis: the text articles (including webonly articles) are hosted on these sites for paid subscribers to the services. The Globe and Mails online comments section is moderated in-house, but hosted by Pluck Media, which maintains its own archives of the comments associated with the stories. Though this research focuses on born-digital archives, it is interesting to note that a full image archive of the print edition Globe and Mail from 1844 is available via the Globe and Mail Canada's Heritage database, setting a precedent for full-capture (though not interactive) archives of born-digital content. Further research will entail finding out how thoroughly the online environment and is archived by the Globe and Mail itself, and the percentage of Globe content archived by FPInfomart. 4. Torstar (http://torstar.ca/about_business.php) Though Torstars flagship publication The Toronto Star has foundered in recent years, Torstar itself has been an innovator in terms of online archiving. The Star and other online news portals of Torstar use a proprietary CMS they developed in-house called TOPS 2.0 (Total Online Publishing System). This system is designed to archive every newspaper and every web element produced by Torstars members. The news articles are saved as full-text like other archiving services, but TOPS also tags and saves all photos, graphs, polling data, etc from the born-digital web content, both as independently searchable elements and associated to their original stories. TOPS also has its own commenting platform, where each comment is tagged by user and archived independently, and also associated with its story. The TOPS archiving system is cloud-based, and allows all member papers and web portals access to the centralized content of all other outlets, with access controlled by permissions assigned to the user account rather than being limited to the individual outlets separate archives. Further research will entail assessing how far back the TOPS archive goes, and whether back archives have been adapted to TOPS or not. 5. Quebecor (http://www.quebecor.com/en/content/canadas-top-newspaper-chain) Quebecors archiving practices reflect the fracturing that occurs when a media corporation acquires multiple assets. Though Quebecor has informally explored the possibility of a centralized database of content, currently each news portal of the QMI/Sun Media family has its own locally hosted archiving system. These archives echo a familiar pattern: though all the online content of each site remain online, in many cases it has not been formally tagged and archived. While there is no cutoff date for public 4

access to online content, the dates of migration or redesign of various websites effectively curtail access by changing taxonomy, etc. Quebecors larger assets, including Toronto Sun, have their comments run on the Disqus platform (see below). Disqus tags and archives the comments separately while preserving story associations. The smaller community daily and weekly newspapers, as well as the Canoe.ca portal, host their own comments, but the plan is to switch all of them to Disqus within a year. Sun Media withdrew from its relationship with Lexis/Nexis in 2011. Further research will entail following up with member sites to see exactly what are their archiving practices. 6. Global (http://www.globalnews.ca/) Since Shaw Medias acquisition of CanWests Global television properties in October 2010, Globals online news presence has undergone major changes. Before the breakup of the parent company, Global was able to draw on news content from CanWests newspaper chain, including National Post, etc. Following the sale of the newspapers to Postmedia, Global News is limited to Canadian Press wire stories, and video clips from local and national Global News broadcasts. They appear to have retained the rights to text news stories written by Global Television journalists and credited to CW Media Inc. as far back as 2007, but video news archives only go back one month. There are no comments on the Global News websites, and social media implementation is limited to sharing buttons for popular services. Further research will entail interviewing members of Globals online news team to find out how the reorganization is proceeding and what their plans are for the production and archiving of online news going forward. 8. Postmedia (http://www.postmedia.com/company/our-brands/) The Postmedia news portals (National Post, Montreal Gazette) allow users to search the archives back to 2007, beyond which they promote FPInfomart for further access (FPInfomart is owned by Postmedia). FPInfomarts website archiving of the Postmedia networks news portals covers nearly all of their borndigital story content, but functions like the full-text archive and does not save full pages, charts, polls, etc. Postmedia recently switched commenting platforms from Disqus to Pluck, and were able to migrate their existing comment archives over to the new platform, but comment threads are not viewable for archived stories accessed through the news portals. Further research will entail finding out whether Postmedias archiving practices are limited to FPInfomart, or whether there is parallel and more comprehensive archiving of online content beyond fulltext. Research may expand to include: Smaller community dailies and weeklies, including Black Press, Transcontinental, etc, and some of the larger independents such as Winnipeg Free Press and Georgia Straight. II. CMS AND COMMENT MANAGEMENT SERVICES WITH ARCHIVING CAPACITY These services are of interest because they are used by media companies to archive content, in some cases social media content which is not preserved on a media outlets home site. Further exploration needs to be made of the impact of the use of different CMSs and platforms on the archivability of content.

1. TOPS 2.0 Developed in-house by TorStar Group, Total Online Publishing Solution runs the TorStar and Rogers web properties, including Toronto Star, CityTv, 680 News, and the Metro newspapers. All TOPS sites access a cloud database which contains the full Torstar archive including Toronto Star stories but also wire content. The cloud archive contains all stories, images, comments, etc and each is saved as its own file as well as associated with its original companion pieces. 2. Polopoly (http://www.atex.com/solutions/web-cms) Owned by UK-based Atex, Polopoly is a content management system for news media used by clients including BBC, News Corp., Financial Times and Gannett. Polopoly offers cloud-based dynamic databases and archiving similar to TOPS; however, Canadian clients, including the Calgary Herald and the Vancouver Sun, mainly use Polopoly as an advertising platform. As well, the CanWest newspapers that use Polopoly may shift following CanWests sale of newspaper properties to Postmedia. 2. Pluck (http://www.pluck.com/) Owned by the US-based Demand Media, Pluck is an integrated community platform. Pluck hosts and manages the comments and social media content and interaction for the websites of CBC.ca and The Globe and Mail, and is effectively an archiving service for the UGC of the news sites that use it. 3. Disqus More limited in functionality than Pluck, the US-based Disqus is a comments platform integrated with popular social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Users register and their comments are then stored and archived by Disqus. Research may expand to include: Other major players in CMS in Canadian news media which offer archiving services, or function as de facto archiving services for various forms of content. III. FOR-PROFIT ARCHIVES OF MEDIA CONTENT Finally, these are some of the major players in the archiving of content from Canadian news sites. The contractual relationships between these companies and Canadian news outlets needs to be better understood: as well, it is worthwhile to understand the technology used by these companies and to determine whether they as well are shifting archiving practices in an era of converged media. 1. FPInfomart FP Infomart is Canadas largest provider of news and broadcast monitoring. Subscribers gain access to full text (and some images, etc) of 1282 sources, including 1197 news sources (717 Canadian), as well as many trade publications. It also archives transcripts of radio and television programming, and provides monitoring services for television and radio. Infomarts online archiving is limited to 18 websites, though this includes most of the major Canadian news sites: CBC, National Post, Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, and Vancouver Sun.

Further research will entail determining how much of the online content of Canadian news portals they are archiving, and how far back these online archives go, as well as whether they have plans for expanding their born-digital archiving services. 2. Lexis Nexis Lexis Nexis archives major Canadian newspapers including the Globe and Mail, National Post, Postmedia papers and the Toronto Star. The service no longer archives Sun Media. 3. Proquest Proquest provides subscription access to Canadian media content through its Canadian Newsstand service. Canadian Newstand provides access to over 150 current Canadian newspapers, including The Globe and Mail (1977present), The Gazette (1985present), Ottawa Citizen (1985present), The Province (1989present) and The Winnipeg Free Press (2006 present). Research may expand to include: Other media monitoring services which serve Canadian news organizations and offer archiving or de facto archiving services.