“The Internet Archive is a national treasure. I use it daily, and have for many, many years. I cannot imagine doing the work I do without it.”
— Rachel Maddow
“The archive has been an essential service as an editor working in the newsrooms of WaPo, NPR and NYT over the past 15 years.”
— Justin Bank
“As a tech policy journalist, I use the Internet Archive constantly to compare old versions of websites, TOS, or government documents. Without IA, it would be so much harder to trace histories online.”
— Ashley Belanger
“I am a science journalist and I’m in the process of researching my next book, which is focused on archaeology. Many books that I need are rare and expensive. Without the Archive, I would be struggling to access scholarly books on ancient Minoan pottery and Sogdian art, as well as Icelandic history. I can’t tell you what a boon the Archive has been for my work on this book, and my previous books on the history of psyops in US history (Stories Are Weapons), and archaeology in ancient cities (Four Lost Cities). I’m great to the Archive every day!”
— Annalee Newitz
“I use Wayback Machine all the time to fact check statements and pronouncements from institutions.
In the most recent memorable example, the Vancouver Police Department changed their press release AFTER I had reported an article on misleading statements in their original statement. The department then posted on Twitter from its official account, accusing me of falsifying information. I was able to use the Wayback Machine to immediately prove that the police department had changed their initial statement to make it look like I had lied in my article. Thanks to the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine and the publication I was writing for (as a freelancer at the time), the record was set straight.”
— Brishti Basu
“Digital history, digital archaeology are every bit as essential to our understanding of contemporary culture and society as physical documents and other standard forms of primary source evidence. To try to control access to historical information and news online is no different to censoring history books or banning them from schools and libraries. Who gets to control the narrative is more crucial than ever in these dark times and anything that offers such a vast amount of impartial information and first-hand evidence for historical researchers and writers over such a long period of time has to be defended at all costs. There is a perception in some circles that because something is digital it’s nebulous, not even “real” in a tangible concrete sense, so it doesn’t matter if it’s allowed to disappear. It is not a false equivalency to say there would be outcry across the board if suddenly access was limited, restricted or completely denied to writers, journalists, historians – anyone – who wanted to access material via the Library of Congress or the British Library in the UK. The Internet Archive and Wayback Machine is a GLOBAL resource every bit as valuable as both those monolithic institutions and it’s imperative that it be protected.”
— Stu Hennigan
“I’ve relied on the Internet Archive as a forensic tool in my journalism—especially when investigating narratives that shift over time or get quietly rewritten. In an era where digital content can be altered, scrubbed, or memory-holed, the Archive functions as a public ledger of what was actually said, published, and promoted. In my reporting, I’ve used it to verify past versions of websites, track changes in messaging, and preserve evidence that would otherwise disappear. This is not theoretical—this is practical. When you’re dealing with controversial subjects, powerful institutions, or coordinated information campaigns, links break and pages vanish. The Archive doesn’t. Quite simply: without tools like the Internet Archive, accountability in modern journalism becomes fragile, if not impossible.”
— Maryam Henein
“In our follow-the-money journalism, it’s important to know what political groups were saying at key points in time, or who was involved with a group’s influence effort. The Internet Archive offers a indispensable public resource for this type of fact-based reporting and our investigative team relies on it regularly.”
— David Moore
“In our work at DIW, the Wayback Machine has been a backbone of research, helping us verify publication timelines and recover older versions of webpages that are no longer visible to the public. Internet Archive allows us to support reporting with verifiable evidence from the past and even revisit how websites looked at earlier times, reflecting the design and structure of the web then. In one of our articles exploring ways to determine the publish date of webpages, especially when such information isn’t clearly available, the Wayback Machine proves to be an essential tool.”
— Irfan Ahmad
“Some of my investigative reporting would not have been possible without the Internet Archive. I’ve used the Wayback Machine to visit archived webpages from more than a decade ago, some of which helped corroborate serious allegations. I use the Wayback Machine regularly to figure out how many followers someone had at a given time, to resurface since-deleted material, and to find context for historical posts. It is an essential resource for internet culture journalism and beyond.”
— Kat Tenbarge
“The Internet Archive has been instrumental in our work, such as uncovering Google’s censorship of Palestinian human rights organizations and a journalist who reported on the Israeli military’s violent suppression of protesters in the West Bank. Google had deleted YouTube accounts for both the organizations and journalists — the Archive helped us understand the toll of the accountability work lost in Google’s deletions.”
— Jonah Valdez
““The Internet Archive has been one of the building blocks of my newsletter Tedium, where I’ve covered histories of numerous things that the internet almost forgot. I’ve been able to recover websites that were hanging by a thread thanks to the Wayback Machine, and have found its ephemera an essential part of uncovering stories of all kinds: essential, whimsical, and everything in-between. I consider it one of the most fundamental parts of the online experience. It has helped create a cottage industry of people interested in the roots of digital culture—me included. But there’s a risk that so much of it might be lost because of fears about AI leading publishers large and small to remove themselves from the archive out of short-term fears that their information will be digested by large language models. This is a mistake, and it’s completely at odds with the public discourse. My great fear is that all the history gathered from old books, newspapers, and magazines won’t extend to the internet, an ever-changing experience that is anything but encased in amber. Please know that this resource deserves better than this. The news industry should give back to it, given the many stories it has helped us uncover.”
— Ernie Smith, Editor of Tedium
“The Internet Archive preserves over two decades of original reporting on music and popular culture by MTV News. For any journalist covering the music, popular culture and trends of interest to young people (and young-minded people) the Archive is a critical resource. History needs stewards. The people of the Internet Archive do an outstanding job of preserving irreplaceable work and making it available to journalists and researchers.”
— Michael Alex
“Wayback machine is an essential tool for local journalists. Local and state/provincial governments regularly scrub pages with critical information, with no regard for archiving. Other than Wayback, the only other option would be to go through the FOIPP system which would waste the time of both journalists and public officials.”
— Stu Neatby
“A drawback of the internet is that things can be scrubbed from it suddenly. The Internet Archive provides a crucial service for journalists who aim to hold the powerful to account, ensuring that they cannot just wipe the web of their embarrassing misdeeds, statements and the like. That service needs to be preserved.”
— Zach Buchanan
“Among other things, the Internet Archive has allowed me to keep track of changes to state government websites to track changes and deletions. It is a valuable transparency tool.”
— Steven Allen Adams
“I use the Internet Archive constantly to track changes to product pages that computer and phone hardware manufacturers make over time, and to track the timing of other unannounced changes. Half the links on Wikipedia would be dead without the Internet Archive, and that’s probably being conservative. An indispensable resource!”
— Andrew Cunningham
“I’ve been using Internet Archive since the late 90’s for my reporting at a tech title then. I still use it now. One way I like to use it these days is actually to get hold of my old work, which tends to disappear as sites get changed. For me, that’s important.”
— Jonny Evans
“I’ve written over 4.2k news articles (mostly very short, 400-500 words) in the past decade. I’ve used the WayBack machine for research and for preserving evidence nearly every day I’ve written an article. Supporting the WayBack Machine safeguards journalistic integrity.”
— Mazelit Airaksinen
“In the age of aggressive paywalls and dead links and media consolidation and imploding media outlets, the Internet Archive is positively invaluable not just for doing functional reporting, but for maintaining any sort of consistent informed consensus and collective history.
What an incredible coalition of people doing amazing work.”
— Karl Bode
“Link rot is a huge problem in my industry, and I routinely have to rely on the Internet Archive to link back to my own published work.”
— Rob Pegoraro
“My job would literally not be possible without the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. It’s been super useful for both research and reporting.”
— Carlos Berríos Polanco
“Our organization does investigative work that digs into historical archives. Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine have been indispensible to our reporting.”
— Ron S. Doyle
“The Internet Archive is a crucial tool for our reporting in general, and in particular, our reporting that unearths lost history.”
— David Sirota
“The Internet Archive is a foundational tool for documentary filmmakers and journalists. I have used it countless times and cannot imagine a world without it. Lately it seems to become more vital to our democracy with each passing day.”
— Kate McLean
“The Internet Archive is a truly unique and powerful tool for writers, journalists, and historians, and it deserves our support across the board.”
— Rick Wilson
“The internet archive is a wonderful tool for any serious journalist that lays out the past discourse and history of our culture and research on the internet.”
— Daniel Greenfield
“The Internet Archive is an essential service for public service reporting and accountability.”
— Thomas Claburn
“The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource not only for reporting but for the valuable mission of preserving the internet as a cultural resource for generations to come, and I greatly appreciate its legacy.”
— Kari Paul
“The Internet Archive is our civilizational backstop — a record of us, in each time, that echoes forward for all time.”
— Ron Suskind
“The Wayback Machine let me find several US gov’ official reports about the 1st Gulf War which let me document that US military intelligence was well aware that bombings of water treatment facilities killed, in the following years, dozens of civilians, children and babies from cholera, typhoid and other diseases.”
— Jean-Marc Manach
“IA is a necessary tool for writers and journalists, because it archives original articles — this enables us to check for reporting errors and cases of plagiarism. And we need an archive of previously published material that does not require us to make trips to libraries and physical archives that might be hard to access.”
— Yasmin Nair
“I cover news within a larger news desert in New York’s Rockland, Sullivan, and Rockland counties. This means I need to heavily rely on archival data of old news articles from now deceased, or zombie-fied, media outlets. Without the Internet Archive, my would would be incredibly difficult to do.”
— BJ Mendelson
“I regularly find articles no longer available as well as help identify imposters by identifying the age and trajectory of their website. The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine are priceless.”
— Catherine Austin Fitts
“The Internet Archive is an incredible resource and an essential tool for journalists, it enabled me to read up on decades of independent journalism from Cambodia across publications that have long since been shut down or bought up by the government. The transition to digital-only news has left us all vulnerable to the whims of dictators and autocrats, many of which have sought to scrub the record clean and whitewash history. The Internet Archive is one of the best efforts to push back on this and preserve facts that authoritarian governments would prefer we forget. Thank you for helping to make my career as a journalist by keeping such intimate records of Cambodian journalism.”
— Gerald Flynn
“The Internet Archive is critical for reporting in the public interest. In my own journalism, I have used archived webpages to help trace a potential source’s connection to Luigi Mangione and contextualise reporting around the alleged motives authorities identified leading-up to the December 4th, 2024 shooting. In that reporting, I used preserved online material not to sensationalise, but to verify timelines, map relationships, and preserve public evidence that would have otherwise disappeared.”
— Christine Savino
“I often use the Wayback Machine in my health journalism to access historical content about HIV treatment and activism.”
— Liz Highleyman
“I’ve worked as an editor, researcher, journalist, and photojournalist, and have use the Internet Archive in many ways. I was online editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian which was later sold & shut down. Issues of the print newspaper are being digitized & archived on the Internet Archive. Many online versions of stories as well as stories & columns which were only online & promoted in the newspaper are only available through the Wayback Machine.”
— Steve Rhodes
“As websites disappear and evolve, preserving the history of the internet and the news and discussions it has enabled is vital. I’ve had entire bodies of work removed from the internet, creating massive holes in my CV – an issue that only the Internet Archive can solve.”
— David Hollingworth
“As a government and politics reporter, Internet Archives helps me hold government officials accountable by preserving press releases, documents and calendars may show a changed position, a deleted post, or a cancelled public meeting. This resource must be defended and protected to allow the public to know what their elected leaders often wish would stay hidden.”
— Stephen Caruso
“I was researching the secret ‘Corona’ satellite program from the 60s for a article few years ago, but half of the links to relevant web pages were either dead or simply wrong…. Then, I remembered the Wayback Machine, and found tons of detailed articles from the late 90s…and also… riginal docs from CIA archives that were related to the ‘Corona’ program.”
— Ivan Trajkovic
“The Internet Archive is a vital tool for journalism, particularly journalism tracking state censorship and propaganda.”
— James Griffiths
“I’m a pioneer of the earliest days of web publishing, so my relationship with the Wayback Machine goes way back … to 1995. There’s something deeply Orwellian about the idea that we need to dismantle an archive rather than tackle the root cause of the problem: the theft of copyrighted material to train AI models.”
— Graham Lovelace
“I have used the Wayback Machine innumerable times in my reporting on New York City politics. It’s an essential resource!”
— Theodore Hamm
“When Jack Dickey & I were reporting the Manti Te’o fake-dead-girlfriend story, it was an archived xanga.com page on the Wayback Machine that served as the missing link between the photos of the supposedly dead girlfriend and the very real (and alive) person whose photos had been taken to portray her.”
— Timothy Burke
“The Internet Archive is a critical tool for examining the history of websites. With Google and Bing pulling their cache web page services, the Internet Archive stands as the lone repository of the Internet’s historic record.”
— Matthew Keys
“The Internet archive is crucial for Internet history. Without it, we’ll lose all of the valuable data on how the world once was online. I use the Internet archive to hunt down old form posts and websites which helps me create videos on otherwise lost events that happened on the internet.”
— Pezle
“The Wayback Machine is one of the best accountability tools in journalists’ toolboxes. I use it all the time to monitor politicians changing positions, or to find past iterations of websites with relevant information. Losing it would be crushing.”
— Ty Rushing
“As Washington Post Fact Checker, the Internet Archive was essential to writing articles that debunked falsehoods. I could show how websites were changed and data was manipulated. When the Trump administration killed USAID and terminated its website, I could only examine their false claims about USAID with reports and data preserved by the Internet Archive.”
— Glenn Kessler
“Democracy dies in darkness. The Internet Archive provides much-needed historical transparency, especially in today’s world of ephemeral posts and claims of “fake news”.”
— Carey Parker
“I frequently use the Internet Archive to dig up and expose web pages that corporate interests have deleted to hide their malfeasance, and/or erase their past leadership who are engaging in corporate wrongdoing or lobbying and don’t want past evidence of their corporate relationships to remain online. It is also crucial for citing sources that are no longer online.”
— Eric Brooks
