From the Editor’s Desk: Preserving Local News with Portico

One of the most important parts of building Newsberg has been understanding that we’re not just publishing for today — we’re documenting our community’s story for the future.

There was a time in college when I wondered: Is journalism actually what I want to do? 

I had been writing professionally since before I could drive (yes, my mom dropped me off and picked me up from the Hickory Daily Record office), and maybe I was experiencing a little bit of early burnout.

I took stock and explored a few other career paths—Linguistics was interesting, but what could I do with that? I was raised in a family of entrepreneurs, but they didn’t go to business school—did I really need that? 

I landed on history. It’s a part of the study that I loved, and during that brief departure, I realized how many times a newspaper article would be referenced as a first point of order.

Within months, I was back in the journalism space with a renewed interest in preservation of our current moment through news reporting.

Local news is often described as the first draft of history. But we live in a world where all of our information is not stored on physical paper in the corners of our libraries and government buildings. It’s stored digitally on the internet for any and all to access forever more. 

But, is it really forever more? Is there a way to make it forever more?

That’s the question at the heart of a new pilot project Newsberg has joined this month in partnership with Portico, a trusted not-for-profit digital archive service, and the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) at the University of Missouri.

Starting in July, every single Newsberg article is now being automatically and securely archived off-site by Portico. That means even if something happens to our website, our content — your stories — will remain accessible, preserved, and intact.

Why does this matter?

It’s easy to think of digital news as permanent. But the reality is that born-digital journalism — especially from independent or digital-only outlets like Newsberg — is shockingly vulnerable to loss. Servers fail. Websites shut down. Content management systems evolve or disappear entirely. And when that happens, stories that once informed and united communities can vanish without a trace.

This issue was the focus of a 2021 report from RJI titled Endangered But Not Too Late, which found that very few news organizations had any plan in place for long-term digital preservation, and that small, local outlets were often at the greatest risk. 

For example, if you head to the Hickory Daily Record website, you cannot find my old articles. The newspaper has been bought and sold so many times, they’ve lost some digital archives along the way. However, being that it’s a print paper, you can always go to the Patrick Beaver Memorial Library and search through issues from 2007 through 2008 and find my old high school column, Hearsay, buried in somewhere in the “A” section.

Portico and RJI have been working to change that by developing a scalable, sustainable system that can help newsrooms like ours preserve their work for the long haul.

How it works

Portico isn’t just a backup service. It’s a dark archive, meaning content is stored securely and privately — not available to the public unless a specific condition is met, like the original publisher going offline or losing access. It was originally created in the early 2000s to safeguard scholarly journals and ebooks as they shifted from print to digital formats, and it now serves thousands of libraries and publishers worldwide.

With support from RJI, Portico has adapted this model for news. Through this pilot, they’ve developed tools that can harvest content directly from publishing platforms like Blox and WordPress — including Newsberg’s own platform.

After a simple setup process on our end, Portico now receives structured versions of all our published stories, along with accompanying images and files, and stores them in their trusted archive.

This partnership doesn’t require ongoing work from us, and it doesn’t affect your access to our website — it simply gives us a safety net and ensures that the record of what’s happening in Newberg is protected for years to come.

What’s at stake

At Newsberg, we cover the big and the small: city budgets and community events, celebrating new businesses and remembering old ones. Each story adds to the fabric of our town. They are worth remembering — not just in a headline or a browser tab, but in a reliable, long-term archive.

We’re proud to be one of the early adopters of this pilot and to stand alongside other local outlets committed to building something that lasts. We hope our work not only informs you today, but helps future generations understand what life in Newberg was like — what we valued, what we questioned, what we celebrated, and how we came together.

Thanks for reading, and for being part of a local news movement that’s thinking far ahead.