With Talk2020, The Wall Street Journal turns an internal reporting tool into a reusable news product

Several groups are preserving digital content related to the capital insurrection to ensure it is archived in case it gets deleted. A subreddit thread collected thousands of Tweets, Snapchats, and other videos to upload to the cloud, while the Woke Collective ensured the survival of livestreams by publishing them on its own YouTube and Twitch accounts. Efforts to crowdsource the identification of members of the mob include the Instagram account, @homegrownterrorists, and the journalism site, Bellingcat, which invited contributions to a publicly editable Google spreadsheet of links.

France was the first country to publicly release documents about government investigations of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. Around 100,000 documents were released on an online archive, with the oldest record dating back to 1937. The archive includes police and expert reports, witness sketches, maps, and photos, video, and audio recordings. The archive has about 1,650 cases on record and 6,000 witness accounts. Web traffic to the archive exceed expectations. Only 9% of reported strange phenomena have been fully explained, with 28% inexplicable despite precise testimonies and high-quality evidence.

The Internet Archive is a digital library of around 544 billion archived web pages, most of which are found using a bot that crawls the web and saves snapshots. However, a self-described loose collective of volunteer activist archivists, known as the Archive Team,' individually monitors and preserves websites at risk of being abruptly taken down. Using donated bandwidth and hard drive space on the archiving application “Warrior,” they systematically download sites they fear will be deleted. The downloads are saved within the Internet Archive database, which is available to the public.

In the 1980s, a virtual messaging network, then known as bulletin board systems (BBSs), acted as a support group for many who were in search of peer support and reliable information as the AIDS epidemic spread. Although the site was a grassroots effort with little to no financial stability, it grew to 500 daily users and 100 messages posted per day.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawls and caches websites to preserve a history of deleted pages. The Wayback Machine has archived a large amount of the public web over the past two decades, adding more than a billion URLs a day to its databases. The archive has over 468 billion web pages in total, and more than 45 petabytes of data. A new partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which caches a static version of websites, has had promising results. Powering Cloudflare’s work with the Wayback Machine’s interface has allowed them to find more sites to archive.

While news of failures in the fight against climate change make headlines daily, there are many steps the everyday citizen can take to reduce their impact. Many don't know where to start though. That's where Project Drawdown comes in. This project is a global coalition of researchers, scientists, economists and others, that rate the impact of solutions, creating a way for people to see how they could possibly fit into the equation of climate solutions.

When Facebook rolled out its Free Basics program offering internet services through a company-controlled portal, Indian activists launched the Save the Internet campaign to oppose the initiative and the practice of "zero-rating" on the grounds that these practices violated Net Neutrality. Through marches, social media organizing, and viral videos, the movement was able to sway public opinion and the Indian regulatory authority ultimately outlawed zero-rating.

Once viewed as one of the nation's most brutal and corrupt police departments, New Orleans Police Department has earned steadily improving public support with a host of reforms. One reform that it took voluntarily, and in contrast with common practice in Louisiana, is to quickly release body-camera videos of police shootings and other uses of force. Though its effect is hard to untangle from other initiatives, video releases have become routine. In one case, a video prompted an official apology after proving rubber bullets were used against protesters. This helped lead to new restrictions on crowd control.

City Limits, a nonprofit newsroom in New York City that specializes in longer-form journalism, created a judicial election voter guide that received nearly 81,000 page views, more than six times that of the site’s other top-performing posts. The company also partnered with Gotham Gazette and WNYC to create an interactive voter guide that gives users a breakdown of election races in their area. The collaboration filled an information void for readers, expanded City Limits’ reach, and allowed it to benefit from the resources of the larger organizations, such as a tech team to build a custom embeddable widget.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites defended against election-related disinformation campaigns by quickly identifying and removing fake accounts and putting labels and warnings on posts that made false claims of voter fraud and premature claims of victory. Instead of frictionless usability, they slowed or shut down core parts of their products such as limiting political ads, tweaking recommendation algorithms, and/or preventing sharing and comments on questionable posts. Threats will continue in the weeks ahead, but the companies have prevented widespread disinformation campaigns so far.