Authory may help me actually keep an internet archive of what I write
Not once, but twice I’ve been burned by a website changing and my work no longer being available.
I have a giant plastic tub full of newspapers and clips. And lots of Google Docs of unedited content. But those don’t make for a public archive.
When I started in the newspaper industry in 1992, we didn’t publish online. Even as we started using email and fax machines with the paper that rolled out of the machine as it printed, we cut out our stories and put them in file folders or little envelopes and that’s how we created our clip files.
We had a library in the newsroom where I worked for more than 20 years. By the time I left that paper in 2016, we relied on the online archive, which had slowly gotten better. The initial online archives were wobbly, but had finally gotten really good.
When we built a new website in 2014 or so, great care was taken to transfer the archive so that the stories going back to around 2000 were there. You could find something you wrote from back in the day.
But then the paper was sold and the new owners moved the website to their servers without that care. It broke all the links to stories I and dozens of other journalists had written. I was able to grab some of the stories from here and there digitally, but the online archive was gone. It returned months later, though it’s behind a paywall and you can’t just google something to find it. You have to go behind the paywall and get it.
I kept writing as a freelancer and publish one or more stories a week. I had learned my lesson and posted the links to my own personal website. That should create the archive, right?
The problem is that another site I worked for went dark. Once again, the links didn’t work. And to be honest, I’m not very good at remembering to cut and paste the verbiage or the links to a personal website every time I write something. I am, after all, the guy who would let papers pile up on his desk for months before he’d go through and clip in afternoon marathons of scissors and paper cuts.
I’ve explored different ways to create an online archive of my writing that isn’t susceptible to the whims of someone else and whether they keep their servers humming. Aside from that, in the modern realm of writing and journalism, even the best of intentions don’t guarantee an online archive. Publications come and go.
The problem with posting what you write before it’s edited is obvious: Everybody needs an editor and the posting of edited content is much better. Besides, that byline still matters. So to have someone take the busywork out of this makes sense.
I’ve been using Authory a couple weeks as a free trial. That ends soon, but I plan to keep going. It comes at a cost. The fee is $8 a month if you sign up for a year. Is that the right amount? I don’t know. It saves me time and effort. It’s a valuable tool if it works as advertised and so far it seems to. I’ve embedded it in my site. And the customer service has been great.
Authory tracks social media performance, which some other services such as Muckrack can also do. It creates ways for people to subscribe to you as a writer, which has value but interests me less than a platform such as Mailchimp or Substack, which I also recently started using and really like.
The “three laws” of Authory are that you own the content, you can make them private, and you can take them with you if you leave. That’s huge. That has such tremendous value. Trust me. I’ve learned the hard way.
Authory offers a free month of use (use this link and it helps me too).
