SRINAGAR: One afternoon, while trying to locate one of my earliest bylined reports published in Greater Kashmir several years ago, I typed the headline into a search engine expecting to find the original article. Instead, I found broken links, error messages, and no trace of the story.
As I searched further, I realised this was not an isolated case. Scores of reports once published by Kashmiri news organisations had disappeared, leaving gaps in the historical record.
Archives are widely considered essential to society because they safeguard records of past events, institutions, and experiences that shape collective memory. Their loss can mean the loss of valuable historical and cultural material. The digital revolution transformed archives from static collections into dynamic, accessible information platforms, testing traditional preservation methods while expanding public access to historical data.
With the shift from print to digital media, Kashmiri news organizations turned their websites into vast repositories of coverage, documenting decades of reporting and preserving the region's modern history. For journalists, scholars, students, and readers, these archives became an indispensable public resource. Yet a significant portion of this material has quietly vanished from public view.
Every Newsroom’s Story
This is not confined to one newsroom. Interviews with management at several newspapers cited website overhauls and server migrations as contributing factors. The outcome, however, remains the same. A vast chunk of Kashmir's recorded history is now difficult, if not impossible, to access online.
A reporter with the Greater Kashmir, said he first noticed the missing archives shortly after internet connectivity began to be restored after a six-month-long-shutdown in 2019.
He used to write then for Kashmir Reader. Every search on the Google engine drew a blank. “I could not find them; even my author profile was missing. Some of my colleagues faced the same situation and we raised concerns about it with the technical staff and the management. We were informed that it was a temporary issue caused by the prolonged internet shutdown, which had substantially affected the functioning of the servers.”
Since the shutdown lasted long, and the restoration was only partial, reporters did not instantly realise the scope of the problem. Reporters from almost every newsroom began whispering about the issue to each other. Those who would regularly upload the content were among the first to notice it.
“What was shocking was not only that the content was missing; there was a bizarre, uncanny sort of silence in the newsrooms about it,” said another journalist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The missing archives were more noticeable after the government introduced the J&K Media Policy 2020.”
"We have lost a substantial amount of our archives due to the emergency and the extended internet outage, which made it impossible for us to recover the information. Preservation measures are currently the top focus in order to protect our professional work for future use. It is feasible to recover the lost records, but it will take a lot of work and funding," said an editor at a mainstream Kashmiri newspaper who wished to remain anonymous.
What disappeared with the voided archives was the record of the turbulent years in Kashmir. “You can’t understand Kashmir without knowledge about what happened in the past,” said a veteran journalist. “Local media serves as the eyes and ears of the international press. When local reporting fades, and the archives are scrubbed off, it creates a significant information gap which directly affects national and international coverage as well.”
Erasure Creates Gaps in Historical Record
Experts say press archives preserve contemporaneous narratives of socio-political and cultural change, and their loss creates gaps in understanding both media and regional history.
"Newspaper archive is not merely a storage repository. It is a structured dataset of historical public discourse. It serves as a historical and empirical record of how public opinions and dominant ideologies were framed, negotiated, and mediated by the press over time. Besides serving as a collective memory, they work as a significant source of knowledge and learning for future generations," said Dr Arif Nadaf.
Despite decades of political and social unpredictability, Kashmir has remained under sustained national and international attention, making archives especially valuable for documenting the region's past.
As Marie Le Roch, Head of Editorial at RetroNews, puts it, "Press archives capture a moment in time - specifically, the perspective of a newspaper at that moment - and that's extremely valuable."
The disappearance of archives has also affected journalists whose professional work was stored online.
"A few years ago, I looked up one of my previously published stories online. The byline was mine, the story had once been visible on the publication's website, but the link no longer worked. When I approached the editor to ask why my bylines were no longer available, I was informed it was a technical issue. After years of professional experience through my published reports, witnessing their disappearance was profoundly discouraging," said Farhat Bhat.
"During job or fellowship applications, I am often asked to present earlier published bylines. Unfortunately, I don't possess many bylines to showcase, which makes it challenging to validate my experience and credibility as a journalist," Bhat added.
Kamran (name changed), a reporter who previously worked at Greater Kashmir and Rising Kashmir, described a similar experience. Attempting to revisit his earlier stories, he found them inaccessible online, even after repeated searches. "It is far difficult to claim that I started journalism back in 2015. When applying for jobs, your claims are futile unless you can show your archived work," he said.
Kamran's account reflects a broader pattern. A former Greater Kashmir journalist said politically sensitive stories had vanished from the site, while governance and development bylines now appeared under a different author's name. An editor at Rising Kashmir said the paper had erased its archived stories altogether, regardless of subject matter.
A senior correspondent at Greater Kashmir, speaking anonymously, said recovery remains possible but impractical for now: "It is possible to recover the archival data. But repairing is a resource-intensive procedure that requires considerable financial investment and technical know-how. Such an exercise is not feasible at this stage given the current constraints."
Archives underpin historical research by preserving official records, letters, photographs, maps, and newspapers - primary sources that let historians reconstruct events and understand multiple perspectives. Without them, knowledge of the past risks becoming incomplete.
"When newspaper archives vanish, we lose the nuance of the present moment and are left with a history based on a single narrative. Archives act as a permanent record, making it harder to rewrite the past," said Ikhlaq ul Rehman, a Kashmir-based research scholar.
Media researchers depend heavily on newspaper archives for content analysis, a foundation of much work in media and communication studies.
"Communication researchers rely on newspaper archives because they provide a reliable, day-by-day record of public life. They allow us to look back and trace exactly how specific stories were reported, how public opinion shifted, and how the media influenced society during different eras. Without these archives, we wouldn't have the concrete, historical evidence needed to study the relationship between the press, politics, and the people over time," said Muneeb Mir, a media scholar.
A professor of media studies, Afaq Ahmad (name changed), warned of consequences beyond scholarship. "The absence of archival records creates a gap in our knowledge of the past. This gap can easily be filled with historical revisionism and state-sponsored propaganda. Without reliable records, people may forget what actually happened, leading to collective amnesia. As a result, it becomes much harder to verify facts, challenge false narratives, and hold those in power accountable."
Journalist and author Nayeema Ahmad Mehjoor described archives as foundational to investigative work.
"Real journalism requires archival material to provide necessary context, history, and facts. Without this foundation, reporting is merely superficial and cannot yield investigative stories. For investigative journalism, the archives are a lifeline that forms the foundation of your story. But if we are deprived of archival material, that amounts to decimating your history, legacy and identity."
Though journalists point out that some physical archives may still exist, the issue of access remains. “There are researchers who cannot travel to Kashmir and that is why digitization is crucially important, as it allows people anywhere in the world to access historical archived records simply by searching for keywords. What is happening is a kind of erasure of historical memory,” one of them said.
The causes of Kashmir's archival gaps are not uniform. While recent losses stem largely from deleted or restructured digital content, earlier losses came through physical destruction - most notably the September 2014 floods.
Shabir Ahmad Dar, an Indian Information Service officer, recalled: "We at Doordarshan lost our archives exclusively to the 2014 floods. Doordarshan had a rich repository of archival material in the form of DVD tapes and cassettes and also a good collection of books, which unfortunately was lost entirely during the 2014 floods."
Together, these digital and physical losses have steadily eroded Kashmir's media memory. The disappearance of news archives is not simply a technical failure. It removes fragments of the region's collective record, making it harder for journalists, researchers, and the public to reconstruct the past.
As news increasingly exists only in digital form, its preservation is no longer solely a technical question but a matter of safeguarding public memory itself.
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