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In February, Rusty Morris began to suspect there might be a cancer cluster in Keyport, New Jersey, where he grew up. His father was being treated for prostate cancer, and every time Morris talked to his mom, she seemed to mention another neighbor who had been diagnosed. When he decided to map the cases, he found at least twenty-eight people on his parents’ street had developed cancer. Across the neighborhood, there were forty-one cases. “I started asking friends I grew up with around the neighborhood,” Morris told NJ.com. “It just kept freaking snowballing.”
In April, thanks to Morris, NJ.com’s Karin Price Mueller and Steven Rodas published a special report on a potential public health crisis, noting that his neighborhood was “chillingly close” to “a shuttered dump that limited tests show has leached toxic waste and harmful chemicals into the air and water surrounding the Morris house for at least fifty years.” The piece quickly led to the discovery of more cases. “Once that first story ran, we got so many calls and Facebook messages and emails from people with cancer cases near the landfill concerned and wanting their case to be counted too,” Price Mueller told me. “We’re up to four hundred and eighty-five.”
Christopher Kelly, the vice president of content at NJ.com, told me he’s committed significant resources to the project because of the community response. “I’ve been here for twelve years. I can’t think of another thing we’ve published where the reaction has been as intense,” he said. Price Mueller has been able to pursue the story aggressively over the past five months, publishing more than twenty pieces. “I’m grateful for the trust that residents have given us,” she said. “And I’m sad that there are fewer and fewer journalists given the opportunity to take the time to really go into an issue where people’s lives are literally at stake.”
In June, the newsroom commissioned its own preliminary cancer incidence study, which found that people who live near the landfill—a site that spans fifty acres—are 15 percent more likely to have cancer than other county residents, with the risk appearing to increase closer to the site. New environmental testing, also commissioned by NJ.com, revealed that the neighborhood around the landfill, which was first shut down in 1979, “is a ‘hot spot’ of toxins.”
As a result of NJ.com’s reporting, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said that it would investigate the landfill. Last month, the department started collecting samples for testing. “When you report on potential cancer clusters historically, there is a strong tendency for government agencies to tell you there is nothing to see here. Cancer clusters are notoriously impossible to prove,” Kelly told me. “I see it as our job here to rattle that cage and to keep putting the ball back in their court.”
In yet another reminder that the people who own our cultural and historical records cannot be trusted to preserve them, BET Digital has permanently deleted its online news archive. Philip Lewis, the deputy editor at HuffPost who broke the news, reported that BET wants to “prioritize video content.” The result, as he put it, is that “years of news articles are now gone forever.”
BET is owned by Paramount, which did the same thing to the archive of MTV News not long ago. (Apparently the Ellisons are not satisfied with gutting institutional memory at CBS alone.) But the loss of digital memory goes well beyond one media organization. In the digital landscape, publishing is cheap, but building the infrastructure to preserve archives long-term is not. Many digital outlets were built without clear policies or practices for content preservation, leaving years of journalism vulnerable when sites shut down, change hands, or consolidate.
“There’s a certain tension—big institutions and governments aren’t fully committed to creating digital libraries that are maintained with a view to preserving digital posterity,” Maria Bustillos, the editor of Flaming Hydra and an information activist, told me. “It’s a fight against entropy. All kinds of entropy: political entropy, academic entropy, cultural entropy, news entropy.”
There is some good news here, from the Internet Archive, the world’s largest digital library, which posted on X this week that it had “preserved more than 199,000 BET articles over the years,” accessible through the Wayback Machine, its website index. When MTV News shut down, in 2024, the Internet Archive created a searchable index of more than 470,000 pages.
But even the Internet Archive faces an uncertain future. In January, Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez reported for Nieman Lab that publishers such as The Guardian, the New York Times, and USA Today are limiting the Internet Archive’s access because of concerns about AI scraping. In response, a coalition of advocacy groups and journalists published a petition in support of the Archive’s role in preserving the public record. “In previous generations, journalists would turn to the physical archives of a local newspaper or of a local public library to access historical reporting,” an open letter published by the group reads. “The work of safeguarding journalism’s record increasingly falls to the Internet Archive.” As Joe Mullin, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, put it recently, “turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn’t start, and didn’t ask for.”
Bustillos argues that it’s because of AI, not despite it, that preserving digital history is so urgent: the less that information exists in its original context, the more of it will likely be lost. As she once wrote for CJR: “Our records are the raw material of history; the shelter of our memories for the future. We must develop ironclad security for our digital archives, and put them entirely out of the reach of hostile hands.”
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban seized Kabul, Afghanistan. It was at once a shocking event and years in the making, two decades after United States–led forces toppled the country’s government, and about a month before the last American troops were scheduled to withdraw.
For the press, Rebecca Blumenstein and Diana Kapp write in a new book, “there was every reason to fear the new regime would imprison, kidnap, or even kill those who had worked for a Western news organization.” The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America, out this week from Grand Central Publishing, describes the extraordinary efforts of the New York Times to evacuate journalists and others who worked for the bureau, as well as their families. Blumenstein—who was then a deputy managing editor at the Times, and is now the president of editorial at NBC News, as well as the chair of CJR’s board—oversaw the extraction of what was ultimately one of the largest privately sponsored refugee groups to come to the US in modern history.
The task was immense and ethically complicated. The Times wanted to “do anything possible” to support contributors in harm’s way, Blumenstein and Kapp note, but the newsroom has a policy not to seek favors from subjects of coverage. “Hours ticked by as various scenarios were debated across time zones,” the authors write. “Our group witnessed one of the most horrific scenes of the fall of Kabul, when people desperate to leave clung to a plane taking off, their bodies falling to the ground.” After repeated attempts and false starts, Mujib Mashal, a Times reporter from Afghanistan, led the group to the American checkpoint by foot. “Until we actually took off from Kabul, it was chaos and uncertainty,” he tells Blumenstein and Kapp.
All the more striking is that the group stayed together—arriving, sixteen days after the fall of Kabul, in Houston. Blumenstein managed their resettlement; at one point, to get the group placed in apartments, she flew in with a letter from A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, assuming responsibility for the rent. For years, she and Kapp, a journalist who writes for the Times and elsewhere, followed the story of the relocated families as they adapted to life in a new country. The women and girls, in particular, faced a complicated reality: culture shock, guilt, sacrifice, rebuilding, and disappointment in the cruelty that streaks across America, including Islamophobia and hostility against immigrants. (“You should take that thing off and embrace your new freedom,” an Uber driver barks at one of the refugees wearing a hijab.) Blumenstein and Kapp tell a story focused on four young women. “Their freedom is imperfect,” the book concludes, “but they know their fate is far better than it would have been if they had been left behind.”
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