No way they are. They are YOUR fault.

What happens when journalism is done with a software program that becomes obsolete? Adobe ending support for the Flash multimedia player means that, among other things, some of the news coverage of the September 11th attacks and other major events from the early days of online journalism are no longer accessible. Only twenty years after the fact, that is.

CNN is wrong

CNN just said “Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash”:

CNN is wrong, and so is the professor of “journalism innovation” quoted in that same article as saying “Everything that’s not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it…[it’s] like the internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. It shouldn’t."

CNN and that professor are wrong. This is a problem that was well known well before September 11th, 2001, and well before Flash itself, for that matter. It is not Adobe, or “innovation”, that should be blamed for this “rot”.

Blame editors, publishers, academics and journalist instead. Blame, that is, everybody who trapped valuable information into proprietary file formats, when they could and should have known very well that it is a very stupid thing to do, and the opposite of preservation. I and many others have been saying this for decades now. See here for a good, always current summary.

Oh, and of course also blame whoever still calls “innovation” anything that is merely “new”, instead of what is new but also, and above all, both useful and done well. Duh.

Image sources: imgflip and ahseeit