This means what was once an interactive teller of how planes crashed into the World Trade Center or a visually rich history where some survivors of the attacks are now, at best, a still image that doesn’t work or, in the worst case, a gray box. informing readers that “Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported.”
Dan Pacheco, an internship professor and professor of journalistic innovation at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, has experienced the problem first hand. As an online producer for the Post website in the late 1990s and later for America Online, some of the work he helped build has disappeared.
“It’s really the problem of what I call the Internet bard. Anything other than a piece of text or a flat image is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of content distribution replace it,” he said. dir Pacheco to CNN Business. . “I just feel like the Internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. It shouldn’t be.”
Flash rise and fall
Adobe Flash played a key role in the development of the Internet as the first tool that facilitated the creation and viewing of animations, games and videos online in almost any browser and device. Animated stars from the early days of the Internet, such as Charlie the Unicorn, Salad Fingers and the Club Penguin game brought Flash to life.
The software also helped journalism evolve beyond print newspapers, television, and radio, leading to an era of digital news coverage that used interactive maps, data visualizations, and other new ways of presenting information to the public.
“The ease of use of Flash to create interactive visualizations and searchable content shaped the first experiments with web coverage and, in particular, served as a preview of what it could bring to add dynamic elements to a story,” said Anastasia Salter, associate professor at the University of Central Florida and author of the book “Flash: Building the Interactive Web,” she told CNN Business by email.
Since then, a lot of Flash-based content across the web has become inaccessible.
“Web conservationists have been sounding the alarm on Flash for a long time,” Salter said.
“Unfortunately, it is much more difficult than we would like [to restore Flash content], mainly because “Flash” includes generations of work and the complexity of the platform’s code grew with each iteration of Adobe’s scripting language, “Salter said. I can’t say I’ve seen any news organization make the kind of concerted effort that animations, games, and electronic literature communities have to save this story. “
For his part, an Adobe spokesman said in a statement: “Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player as of December 31, 2020. Unfortunately, these older web pages can no longer be played because the plugin Flash cannot be loaded in browser “.
A Samsung-owned software called Harman has also partnered with Adobe and can help companies maintain Flash-based content.
Find solutions
Some newsrooms have been tasked with rebuilding Flash content. For its September 11th anniversary coverage, USA Today republished some 2002 articles with the first anniversary, which included the recreation of some Flash-based interactives. While some of these graphics were originally larger interactive, USA Today’s graphics teams have redone some to make them smaller.
“We played around a bit with the limitation … because it’s more of a more relaxed and more solemn and calm way of looking at stories,” said Javier Zarracina, graphic director of USA Today. “We’re not doing a facsimile. We’re examining what we published 20 years ago.”
USA Today has archived many of its old interactives by storing the original files on its servers. As some of the online interactives became for the printed newspaper, they also saved associated static graphics. Zarracina said he was able to open some of the files originally made in Adobe FreeHand software in a new creative software package called Affinity.
The New York Times has reclaimed some of its old Flash-based interactives using Ruffle, an Adobe Flash Player emulator that is part of an open source project, said Jordan Cohen, executive director of communications for The Times.
“The Times is concerned with preserving the digital history of the early days of web journalism, and through various site migrations, we have made sure to preserve the pages as they were originally published on archive.nytimes.com,” Cohen wrote in a e-mail. “[W]We hope in the future that our readers will be able to experience all of our Flash interactions. “
But not all media organizations are engaged in archiving.
“Information companies are in business this very minute and tomorrow,” said Pacheco, the Syracuse professor. “We are not libraries.”
Jason Tuohey, digital editor at The Boston Globe, said in a statement that his team planned to “revive some of our file coverage [for the September 11th anniversary], but in many ways, the best material we can offer our readers is journalism that puts the anniversary in context and perspective, rather than simply repeating what we have directed in the past. “
Kat Downs Mulder, managing director of digital for The Post, said in a statement that her news organization “has made a great effort to make most of our articles, images, graphics and text-based maps accessible” to its archives. online, but added that not all projects are rebuilt.
CNN and ABC News declined to detail any plans to rebuild Flash-based interactives.
An endless problem
News organization file limitations do not start or end with Flash. Pacheco noted how his former entrepreneur, The Post, has invested significant effort in TikTok. He wondered if they kept every video and if that was also the case with other social apps, including the disappearance of content on Instagram and Snapchat.
“‘ The Wall ’is a great example where we did an amazing job and we realized,‘ Okay, yes. We want this to be out there as long as it can be, ”Sergeant said.