Terry Britt: Saving the future past: Digital news content archiving

Terry Britt of Sweetwater, Tennessee, is a doctoral candidate studying journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia. His paper deals with deterioration of collective memory over time. Alongside a review of relevant literature on the challenges of media content preservation, both pre-digital and born-digital, and efforts toward that end, responses from a recent qualitative study involving 18-23-year-old college students are analyzed. The study findings suggest that young adults today place high importance on preservation and access of archival digital news content, both on social and personal levels, but also maintain a false perception that content on most any topic will generally be available and accessible on demand through new media.