Friday, November 12, 2004

The Internet Never Forgets
Back in 1995 I co-authored an article for the American Journalism Review about journalists leaving the profession. I long ago lost my copy of the magazine, and every nine or 12 or 17 months over the past several years I've found myself Googling the article. Today, suddenly, the piece showed up, right here. It's not a bad bit of work. I actually think it holds up pretty well. You might even say it exhibits a certain prescience. So I'm glad to have found it. Nevertheless, what an alarming development!

Most of my journalism was committed pre-Internet. So I've rested comfortably, sure that my oeuvre, such as it is, was buried deep in the ink and dead tree past. But now I can't be so certain. Busy archivists are clearly at work, exhuming away. They couldn't possibly find their way to the Daily Californian of the early 1980s, could they? One shudders.