[bell-cot]

Sounds like we have rather different philosophies about "try to do something".

Once it is established that the takedown was either completely legal, or very easily could have been - then my attitude is that spending further resources on a "takedown whodunnit" investigation is about like tracking an escaped horse from the open barn door to the highway, where it was hit and killed by a truck. Beyond a little story to tell, you probably won't have much to show for the effort.

My notion of "doing something" is more about closing the damned barn door, before more horses get out. The Washington Post would need ~zero reporter resources to clearly make that point. Maybe throw in a kudo to some lawmaker who's trying to help on that front, or some old-newspaper-story preservation effort.

[matthewdgreen]

I'm not exactly sure what you're proposing to do here. This case involves a private media archive being sold to a private buyer, with said private buyer (potentially) using the purchase to suppress older reporting. An obvious immediate fix would be to eliminate the incentives that drive this behavior, i.e., ensure that the Streisand Effect makes this approach worthless.

Specifically: if this buyer is attempting to "catch and kill" stories by purchasing and destroying the archive, then a good fix is to ensure that there is new reporting that undermines the purchaser's goal and actually drives more attention to their activities. Indeed, far from being something to complain about, this Washington Post story seems like the first step in achieving exactly that goal. It now needs to be followed up by further investigation that identifies the specific individual(s) at issue so they can be explicitly named and shamed.

Your alternative approach is what exactly? Clearly you're correct that posting the archives to a public library would have been better. But I'm not sure how to force for-profit publishers to do this in the past (impossible) or even in the future.