After Gothamist archives disappear, heroic coders build tool to recover articles
When every one of the articles that had ever been published by Gothamist, DNAinfo, and their many sister sites disappeared on Friday night, many people expected the worst.
Thousands of articles from writers were suddenly gone. Those journalists, laid off as part of the sudden closing of the publications, also didn't have the clips integral to getting a new job.
That sent two coders into action. Hours later, they had built a web-based tool that allowed any journalist to search for their byline and grab their articles based on caches from Google's AMP web pages.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
By Friday morning, more than 50 people had used the program to recover their work.
The tool was built by two people who spread the link via Twitter: @turtlekiosk and @xn9q8h.
The tool is simple. Journalists enter their name and the program grabs every article it can find in the pages that Google's AMP program saves. AMP is a mobile web effort from Google that puts internet content into specialized pages, which load very quickly.
Those pages also evidently get saved by Google, allowing them to be found even after the original pages are offline.
Note: The tool won't work forever. The coders explained on their web page that "Caches expire so this may only work for a day at best." Journalists, get your clips together now.
Jason Abbruzzese is a Business Reporter at Mashable. He covers the media and telecom industries with a particular focus on how the Internet is changing these markets and impacting consumers. Prior to working at Mashable, Jason served as Markets Reporter and Web Producer at the Financial Times. Jason holds a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University and an M.A. in International Affairs from Australian National University.
