Breaking the News - News collections in the Web Archive
By Jason Webber, Web Archive Engagement Manager, British Library
The British Library is currently running the wonderful ‘Breaking the News’ exhibition. If you’ve not seen it yet, make sure you check it out. It is open until Sun 21 Aug 2022. The exhibition explores how the News has impacted and influenced our society. This exploration includes modern digital forms of news, much of which are contained in the UK Web Archive (UKWA).
The ‘News’ collection in UKWA contains over 2700 news sites that we archive. The scope ranges from major national news outlets - BBC, Guardian, Daily Mail etc. as well as many local and even hyper-local news websites. The collection includes one newspaper, The Independent, that ceased being a print paper to become exclusively a digital one.
The majority of these archived news sites and twitter accounts can only be viewed in reading rooms of UK Legal Deposit Libraries. Many, however, are openly available to view from home, lets see some examples:
Local news
In addition to major national news outlets we collect thousands of local and hyper-local news websites. Many towns, suburbs and villages maintain a local news website and we do our best to archive them.
Cranfield and Marston Vale Chronicle
International
Whilst the focus of the our collection is for UK based news, we do also collect some international or overseas publications. Tristan da Cunha, one of the remotest places on earth maintains a news website for its residents.
Irish news - TheJournal.ie
About journalism
As well as news outlets aimed at us the public, we also collect websites for journalists themselves.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
You can discover everything we have collected in the News collection via our website.
If you know of a UK news website (this might be about your local area), nominate it to the UK Web Archive.