The Great Erasure: Local history tossed

One day it was there; the next, it was a “404 Not Found” error

Feb 18, 2026

SANDUSKY — The late, great publisher of the Washington Post Phillip Graham is credited with calling journalism the “first draft of history.” But, in the hands of modern media conglomerates, that draft is being fed through a digital shredder.

The recent disappearance of the Sandusky Register’s YouTube channel—a decade-plus vault of raw, unedited civic life—is not an isolated technical glitch. It is part of a 40-year pattern of corporate neglect that has turned the collective memory of our community into a “proprietary asset” that executives feel comfortable deleting to save a few dollars in server space or administrative overhead.

Ogden Newspapers owns more than 60 newspapers from coast to coast and one in Hawaii. The owners of the newspaper chain, the Nutting family, are based in Wheeling, West Virginia. The company traces its history to The Intelligencer, the city’s newspaper of record. The Nutting family owns the Pittsburgh Pirates Major League Baseball franchise and massive holdings in other industries. In recent years, the family has purchased dozens of daily newspapers at fire sale prices — including the Sandusky Register, the Norwalk Reflector, The Findlay Courier and the Youngstown Vindicator. The company has made a major investment to keep local journalism — which is on life support — alive.

But critics fear detrimental cost cutting decisions — like switching up email servers to reduce an expense category — are diminishing the effectiveness and value of local papers. Ogden saved pennies in contrast to losing a rich community asset that told the community’s story, where it’s been and what we strived to become. It’s unknown how many other Ogden Newspaper communities had their histories deleted by elimination of their Youtube channels.

Bob Nutting, the company’s CEO, could not be reached for comment. Written inquiries asking if the company was taking steps to recover the lost data did not elicit any response. At Ogden’s corporate website, Nutting explained why the company was expanding its newspaper holdings.

“We are proud of the support our newspapers are able to provide their communities and local businesses,” he states. “We constantly strive to preserve the best of our newspaper’s century old traditions while adapting to the modern innovations that will help carry them into the future.”

Powerless protectors

When you ask men like Jeremy Speer, the the publisher of Ogden’s five Northwest Ohio newspapers, or John McCabe, Ogden’s executive editor, why two decades of primary-source reporting has vanished, the silence is their only answer.

It’s a specific kind of silence: the silence of the powerless.

While their titles suggest they are the stewards of the community’s record, they are, in reality, middle managers in a billion-dollar empire. They oversee 13 newspapers in Ohio and dozens more nationwide, yet they appear unable (or unwilling) to protect the very data that justifies their existence. When corporate “cost-cutting” comes for the archives, they aren’t the ones at the table; they are the ones sweeping up the ashes.

15-Year grave

Sandusky has seen this movie before. Years ago, the Register lost its 15-year “OLIVE” archive—a proprietary digital indexing system that housed tens of thousands of stories, photos, and records from a critical era of local transition. Like the YouTube channel, it didn’t disappear because of a fire or a flood. It disappeared because of a contract, a server migration, or a decision made in a room far away from Sandusky.

One day the history was there; the next, it was a “404 Not Found” error.

4-decade fire

The war on archives didn’t start with YouTube. It began in the late-1980s and accelerated in the 1990s, when legacy media companies began systematically terminating “librarian” and “archivist” positions. These were the people—often the smartest in the room—who knew where the bodies were buried, literally and figuratively. They maintained the “morgues” (physical clip files) that allowed reporters to connect today’s scandal to a 20-year-old pattern of corruption.

By firing the archivists, newspapers effectively gave themselves lobotomies. They became organizations with no long-term memory, forced to reinvent the wheel with every new reporting cycle.

The precedent for this corporate vandalism was set as early as 1983, when the remains of the Washington Star—once the “newspaper of record” for the nation’s capital—were auctioned off. Its massive archive was sold to The Washington Post in a bankruptcy sale, essentially handing the city’s historical narrative to its primary competitor. It proved that history was a commodity to be bought, sold, and, if necessary, buried.

Loss of ‘raw’ history

What makes the loss of the YouTube channel particularly galling is the nature of the content. Unlike a polished news story, these videos were raw. They were the unedited breaths between questions at a school board meeting. They were the visible pain in Mike Limberios’s eyes or the defiant stance of Jess Burdine, two men who fought for justice for their families right up until their deaths.

When you delete the raw footage, you delete the evidence. You remove the community’s ability to go back and say, “No, that’s not how it happened. I saw the video.”

Digital graveyard

In an era where every teenager has a cloud-synched camera in their pocket, it is an irony of the highest order that billion-dollar media companies like Ogden are the ones losing the record.

If Bob Nitting, the newspaper chain’s owner, Jeremy Speer and John McCabe cannot account for the disappearance of the Register’s history, we have to ask: What exactly are they publishing? If the “first draft of history” is meant to be permanent, Ogden Newspapers is treating it like a Snapchat message—here for a moment, and then gone once the bill comes due.

The community deserves more than a “404” error where their history used to be. But as long as the archives are seen as costs rather than treasures, the digital dark age will only get darker.