More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

McClatchy, Advance Local, Tribune Publishing and other major newspaper chains are restricting the nonprofit’s archiving bots

Posted Thursday, May 21, 2026 10:40 am

Andrew Deck and Hanaa' Tameez | Nieman Lab

In January, Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers — including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co. — had started blocking the Internet Archive due to concerns that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data.

No news publisher has confirmed to Nieman Lab that an AI company has already scraped their content from the Wayback Machine. Still, in the five months since we published our story the number of news sites blocking the Internet Archive has continued to rise.

Overwhelmingly, these sites are local news outlets.

Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and preserve their stories.

Click here to read more.

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More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

McClatchy, Advance Local, Tribune Publishing and other major newspaper chains are restricting the nonprofit’s archiving bots

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