Dear leaders of major media outlets,

The freedom of journalists isn’t only the freedom to write, it’s also the freedom to have your work read and remembered for generations to come. 2026 is the first World Press Freedom Day in 30 years that journalists’ work at major media outlets including New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today is not being preserved by the independent, nonprofit Internet Archive. We are calling on you and on all news outlets to publicly commit to working with the Internet Archive to keep the news in the Wayback Machine.

Since February of this year, the New York Times has told the Internet Archive to stop its Wayback Machine from preserving the work of its journalists. Meanwhile, Wired recently reported how USA Today is publishing powerful reporting that relies on the Wayback Machine, while ironically blocking it from archiving that same reporting. And when over 100 journalists delivered a letter celebrating the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of journalism, generating a wave of tech-viral angst, the CEO of The Atlantic weighed in but didn’t commit to finding a solution. The concerns about AI that these publications cited as a reason to ban the Wayback Machine are wholly hypothetical. Journalists, and this nonprofit public good that they rely on, deserve better.

Though other websites use the word “archive” and try to style themselves as similar to the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine isn’t a flash-in-the-pan service that skips over paywalls. It has been preserving the news longer than many people who sign this petition have been alive. Generative AI is the worst excuse to hide principled reporting from fact-checkers. If anything, AI is the top reason why the Wayback Machine is more crucial than ever. The truth is that AI companies can easily do what knockoff archiving sites are doing: ignore the rules and grab the news off of publisher’s websites without their consent. There is little to stop them. There’s only one reason that the Internet Archive isn’t doing what most of Silicon Valley is: integrity. This integrity shows us that the Internet Archive is trustworthy and aims to operate for a very long time.

It should. Censorship and authoritarianism are growing, along with pressure to alter reporting and erase facts. Journalists frequently face death threats, and many have died across the past year for their work. The least we can do out of respect during these horrors is to shore up the Wayback Machine’s neutral third party preservation efforts so these brave journalists’ work is not lost. Their reporting must remain accessible not only to their colleagues and loved ones, but to the eyes of history.

The Wayback Machine makes every online news outlet it archives more resilient against pressure to remove stories that threaten the powerful. It is in the interest of any news outlet that still does real journalism to champion such an ally in times like these. It shouldn’t be this hard to find a way to independently preserve the news. We call on the leadership of major media outlets to commit to working with the Internet Archive and getting all the news in the Wayback Machine now!

Sincerely,