If any hobbyist publication/website could be said to be venerable, it would be DPReview.com, a home for digital-photography enthusiasts. The editors posted a grim note:
After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year.
The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content.
The parent company is Amazon. That DPReview is not a huge moneymaker for Amazon is absolutely believable. But I think with a few aggressive members of its business staff, it could be self-sustaining. The main video-content creators, Chris Niccolls and Jordan Drake, are moving to PetaPixel. This continues the tradition of on-camera talent for gear-review sites outlasting their various publications. (Camera reviewers Lok Cheung and Kai Wong similarly survived and thrived after their original channel shut down.)
What’s worrisome is that there seems to be no plan for keeping the site’s valuable archives and forums online. The forums were a hive of connected communities around different camera brands or even sensor-sizes. I’m not a pro photographer at all, but every time I’ve considered buying a new lens for our Micro Four Thirds system camera, I go to the forums on DPReview to see what other pros and amateurs are doing with it first.
Many millions of dollars of value from professional and amateur creators are in this website, and in a few days it may just blink out of existence.
It’s a moment to think about how wise or unwise it is to allow so much value to be so unprotected for the future. Old newspapers and print magazines have archives in multiple libraries around the world. Books last on shelves.
But online publications that don’t have a print DNA, or come to be owned by firms that don’t embody the best traditions of publishing, start to rot. I’ve seen bylines and datelines disappear from articles as sites get redesigned by financial firms or tech companies. Eventually, JavaScript nodules meant to serve ads get broken and seem to start eating parts of the article text.
If you’re creating digital content, I think at minimum you should begin saving all your work on your home computer and a few backups so that it can be republished on a personal website if your company gets shuttered.