Talk about ironic — the day after I sent out last week’s newsletter writing about the importance of archives in the digital age, HuffPost’s Phil Lewis broke the news that Black Entertainment Television Digital removed its entire web archive to prioritize video.

The Internet Archive quickly worked to set up a searchable explorer of the Wayback Machine-preserved BET Digital articles, which is now available on BET’s site. But the move highlights the fragility of digital media and raises questions about the increasing influence of the Trump administration’s priorities on corporate news. Paramount Skydance owns the BET Media Group and settled a $16 million lawsuit with Trump.

Read on for more, and find an abbreviated version of our media links on Instagram each week. (Here’s our most recent round-up.)

—James Salanga

📻 Long live public media, say Poynter Institute and Public Media Company: The two groups launched the Future of Public Media Initiative to ensure public media can sustain decades beyond a tumultuous media landscape and the end of federal public media funding.

🔎 Investigative Reporters & Editors has a primer by Emilia Ruzicka about where to find LGBTQ+ data now that the U.S. government is systematically erasing it. One possibility is to create it — conduct surveys (or focus groups, or content analysis) of your own community.

🦉 California’s longest-running bilingual newspaper El Tecolote has been hemorrhaging the majority of its full-time staff leave over the past year. Current leaders claim natural churn as people leave for better opportunities, while former employees say ineffective management contributed to the mass exodus. They characterized it as “a call to action” for an “essential institution.”

🎲 The New York Times is scrapping a planned deal with prediction market Kalshi for advertising and “other commercial opportunities” after union members demanded the deal be called off last week. Kalshi became CNN and CNBC’s official prediction market partner last year, raising concerns about editorial firewalls and the trivialization of life or death issues.

💲 In Ohio, the Toledo Blade has announced it will explore a sale or close its doors on Dec. 31. The Blade is currently owned by Block Communications, which posed the same threat to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, site of a record-breaking work stoppage, last year.

🤖 Does scraping a news article to train an LLM count as “free use”? Does it necessarily “transform” the work, offering a different utility than the original intent of the copyright holder? “Certainly,” says the Trump administration. “Now wait just a minute,” says the New York Times. Publishers argue that if OpenAI wants to use their content to train LLMs, they need to pay copyright fees just like everyone else. 

🏙️ La Fronde profiles “the most fired woman in Brooklyn”: After being one of Condé Nast’s “Fired Four” last year, Alma Avalle talks about standing behind the importance of questioning news leadership decisions, the joy of making trans work specifically for a trans audience, and going back to being a capital J-journalist. “Being able to go to your boss and say, why are you running the company this way, … especially when it comes to matters like political censorship …  is a quintessential part of journalism.”

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

This issue is by James Salanga and Marlee Baldridge. Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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