Few things in life are certain for journalists. There is one thing that definitely is: The longer you work in journalism, the more of your articles you will lose access to. They’ll vanish. Disappear. The fruit of your hard work gone in the ephemeral ether of the internet. Just like this:
What a pain!
That’s what used to happen to seasoned journalist Glenn Fleishman, too. Nowadays, he has a backup of every article at his fingertips at all times. Here Glenn shares a behind-the-scenes look at how he lost articles in the past and how he handles his article backups today.
The big “gone”
Why do you need backups of your articles in the first place? Aren’t they safe with their respective publishers? Glenn is very blunt about his reasons:
It’s inevitable that everything we write will eventually be erased from a publication’s archives. I’ve been burned many times by publications that went under, were acquired, redesigned, switched their content management system, or just unceremoniously seemed to dump old content without warning.
He has lost hundreds of articles because of this — and more often than not, these were long feature stories. Nowadays with the rise of paywalls, this problem compounds further since many publications require a subscription to access older content.
A career in writing — but no record to show for it?
With the realization hitting hard that everything he writes will eventually be erased from a publication’s archive, Glenn decided to do something about it. He didn’t want to be at the mercy of publishers.
So initially he started to create PDFs of his published works. It was a manual task and quickly became very cumbersome. Especially because Glenn, like many journalists, writes more than one piece every now and then.
Plus, having a large folder with a myriad of PDFs on his hard drive was difficult to browse and search properly whenever he was looking for something specific. Not to mention the fact that it was utterly useless on any mobile device.
Something had to change.
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A reliable backup, but fully automated
When looking for a better solution, Glenn had two main requirements. It needed to back up his articles automatically and it needed to be reliable.
He stumbled across Authory. And Authory came with a simple promise: The platform backs up all your articles — and you don’t have to lift a finger.
After signing up for Authory, Glenn added the names of all the publications that he had published in the past. It then took Authory less than 24h to create Glenn’s personal Authory page, showing all of his 2,742 articles (and counting): authory.com/GlennFleishman
The public version of this page contains headlines and text snippets for all his articles. The private version, only available to Glenn, consists of full-text backups including all images of each of his 2,742 pieces.
That’s not the end of the story though.
Glenn also told Authory where he continues to publish new articles. And since then, Authory has automatically picked up every new piece right after publication, sending Glenn a short email about it.
I routinely get Authory’s automated emails that let me know new articles have been added. It’s definitely a relief.
So, Authory imported all of Glenn’s previous articles AND automatically adds all new articles right after publication. Whatever happens to the original article page, Glenn has his full-text backup in Authory.
More than just a backup
Having his articles safely backed up is great and a big relief. But Glenn quickly discovered a huge additional advantage of his Authory account:
I’ve found that Authory has become my own outboard memory, and when I can’t remember if I’ve written about something, I’ll search my Authory index to see if I can find it there!
Glenn can log in to his Authory account from anywhere, with any device. And thanks to the extensive search and filter options, he can find the proverbial needle in the haystack in no time.
Authory has been built to accompany a journalist throughout their entire career. There is no safer place for Glenn’s articles than his Authory account. But just in case Glenn wants to export his work, he can do so anytime. It takes exactly two clicks for him to download his entire article archive from Authory to his local hard drive.
Then again, Glenn ditched the local hard drive to keep a backup of his articles a long time ago. Instead, he uses Authory, in his words, “as his own outboard memory.”
To preserve a consistent record of your journalism, Authory offers the only comprehensive approach.
Glenn and thousands of other journalists are using Authory to take control of their content and their audience. Join Glenn for free at authory.com.
