The Coming Archival Crisis: How Ephemeral Video Disappears Protest Journalism and Threatens Newsreels of Tomorrow

Abstract

Today’s Black Lives Matter movement is mediated largely by fortuitous smartphone witnesses and dedicated mobile journalists, who post precious footage to social media platforms that are designed to disappear their content. This has potential long-term consequences for the world’s collective memory of this summer’s global uprising, in the wake of George Floyd’s extrajudicial killing—and beyond. For these reasons, I argue in this article that the next frontier in mobile journalism research will involve finding new ways to archive the millions of protest videos that are uploaded to ephemeral social media sites every day. To achieve this ethically, digital journalism scholars can consider the three “P’s” of protest journalism preservation: precariousness, privacy and platforms.

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