The Difference Between What the News Reports and What Actually Happened

 In 1968 sanitation workers in Memphis Tennessee went on strike. They were mostly Black men doing dangerous dirty work for poverty wages with no benefits and no protections. Two workers had been crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck and the city had done nothing.

The strike lasted 65 days. It was one of the most significant labor actions of the civil rights era. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to support the strikers and was assassinated there.

The news coverage at the time focused heavily on the violence and disruption of the protests. On the National Guard presence. On the property damage. Much less on the actual conditions the workers were striking against or the economic system that had produced those conditions.

The news told one story. History tells a fuller one.

Why News Coverage Is Not the Same as History

News is written in real time with incomplete information. Reporters are working fast, often without full context, trying to describe something that is still unfolding. What they produce is a first draft of history. A useful one. But a draft.

News coverage is shaped by what editors decide is interesting to their audience. Conflict is interesting. Drama is interesting. The slow grinding reality of poverty or injustice or institutional failure is less interesting to cover day by day, even when it is more important.

News coverage is also shaped by access. Reporters cover what they can get to and who will talk to them. Official sources have press offices and spokespeople who know how to get their version of events into the record. Ordinary people and poor communities do not have those resources.

The result is a record that is skewed toward official perspectives, dramatic moments and conflict, and away from context, root causes and the experiences of ordinary people.

How to Read the News as a Historical Document

When you read news coverage of a current event, ask what is not being covered. What is the background to this story that the article does not explain. Who are the people most affected by this and are they being quoted. What would this story look like if it were told from a different perspective.

Save primary sources when you can. Photographs. Documents. Firsthand accounts from people directly involved. These are the materials that historians will rely on when they try to understand this moment fifty years from now.

Write your own account of things you witness. You are a primary source. Your perspective on what is happening around you is exactly what future historians will wish they had more of.

The news gives you the first draft. You can help write a better one.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

Poor Neighborhoods Never Make the History Books Even When Big Things Happen There

 In 1921 a thriving Black neighborhood in Tulsa Oklahoma was destroyed by a mob. Buildings burned. People killed. A prosperous community that had been called Black Wall Street was reduced to rubble over two days.

For decades this event barely appeared in any history book. It was not widely taught in schools. Many people in Tulsa grew up not knowing it had happened. It took until 1996 for an official state commission to formally investigate the massacre and until 2021 for it to receive widespread national attention.

An entire community was destroyed. And history looked away for a hundred years.

This is not just one story.

Why Poor Neighborhoods Get Ignored

Wealthy neighborhoods and wealthy institutions generate records. They have lawyers and accountants and archivists and PR people. They have the resources to document themselves and the connections to get their stories into the papers and the history books.

Poor neighborhoods do not have those resources. Their stories depend on someone outside the community deciding to document them, or on community members doing the work themselves with no institutional support.

When something happens in a poor neighborhood, a protest, a disaster, a crime wave, a community effort, the coverage tends to focus on the event itself. Not on the history of the community. Not on the people who live there. Not on what came before or what the place means to the people who call it home.

And when the event is over the cameras leave and the neighborhood goes back to being invisible to the people who write official history.

What That Means for the Record

It means that the history of poverty in America is almost invisible in official accounts. We have detailed histories of the decisions made in Washington about economic policy. We have almost no documented record of what it was actually like to live through those policies in the communities they affected.

It means that community organizations, mutual aid networks, local leaders and everyday acts of survival and resistance that happen in poor neighborhoods every single day are going unrecorded.

It means that the people doing the most important work of keeping communities together under the hardest conditions are doing that work without anyone writing it down.

What You Can Do

If you live in or grew up in a community that does not have a written history, you can start one. A blog. A Facebook page. A collection of photographs with captions. A series of interviews with longtime residents. It does not have to be formal or polished. It just has to exist somewhere.

If you know people who have lived through things worth documenting, ask them to tell you about it. Record it. Write it down.

If you see community organizations doing important work in your area, document what they do. Put names to the people involved. Describe what the work actually looks like day to day.

The Tulsa massacre survived in memory because community members refused to forget it even when the official record ignored it. That is the power ordinary people have. The power to refuse to let things disappear.

Use it.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Internet Is Both the Best and Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Historical Preservation

 When the internet first became widely available in the 1990s a lot of people thought it would solve the problem of historical preservation forever.

Everything would be digital. Digital things could be copied perfectly and endlessly. Nothing would ever need to be lost again.

That turned out to be wrong in a complicated and important way.

What the Internet Got Right

The internet did make it possible to preserve and share historical information at a scale that was never possible before. Archives that used to be accessible only to people who could physically travel to them are now searchable online. Documents that existed in one copy in one library can now be read by anyone in the world. Photographs that would have decayed in someone's attic can be scanned and preserved digitally.

The Internet Archive at archive.org has been crawling and saving copies of websites since 1996. Their Wayback Machine contains over 800 billion saved web pages. Genealogical databases contain records that would have taken months to access through physical archives are now searchable in minutes. Oral history projects have been able to share recordings with audiences that physical archives could never reach.

These are real and significant achievements. The internet has genuinely made historical preservation more possible for more people than ever before.

What the Internet Got Wrong

Digital files require infrastructure to survive. They need servers. They need electricity. They need organizations willing to maintain them. They need file formats that stay readable as technology changes. And all of those things cost money and require ongoing effort.

When a website shuts down its content can disappear overnight. When a company goes out of business the digital content it hosted can vanish. When a social media platform changes its policies old content gets deleted. When someone stops paying for hosting years of content can disappear in an instant.

This has already happened repeatedly. GeoCities, which hosted millions of personal web pages throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, shut down in 2009. Most of those pages were lost. Myspace lost years of music uploads due to a server migration error. Platforms have deleted millions of photographs and posts when terms of service changed. The early internet is already partially gone.

The assumption that digital means permanent is wrong. Digital means potentially permanent if someone is actively maintaining and preserving the file. Without that active effort digital content is actually more fragile than paper in some ways.

What to Do About It

Do not rely on a single platform to preserve anything important to you. If it matters, save it in multiple places.

Use services designed specifically for long term preservation. Archive.org is specifically built to preserve content permanently. Libraries and archives are specifically built to preserve content permanently. Consumer platforms like Instagram and TikTok are not.

Save copies locally as well as in the cloud. An external hard drive that you control is not dependent on a company staying in business or a server staying online.

Support organizations that are working on digital preservation. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that runs entirely on donations and is preserving more of human knowledge than almost any other institution on earth.

The internet is a remarkable tool for preservation. It is not a magic solution. It requires the same ongoing human effort that preservation has always required. Just with better tools.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.