Archive & Permanence Terms
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/terms/archive · Effective October 16, 2026
In plain terms. What we publish, we keep. An address, once printed, keeps resolving; the archive is as free as today's front page; and the past is never quietly rewritten — changes are marked, corrections are dated, and when something must come down, rarely and for reasons we will state, a dated notice stands in its place, because an archive that pretends it never erred is lying twice. If this business ever changes hands, the archive travels with it whole; if a publication ever closes, its archive is to be kept served or placed in a preservation home before anything goes dark. This summary is part of the terms and binds us like any article below, and ambiguity in these pages is read against us, never against you.
Article 1 — The Commitment
1.1. The published record of The Massachusetts Times is kept. Publication here is not a feed that scrolls away; it is an entry in an archive that The Massachusetts Times Company maintains as the institution itself, not as inventory to prune.
1.2. We publish for the reader of today and the reader of thirty years from now on equal terms. The second reader is why this page exists.
1.3. Nothing in these terms is a promotion or a feature announcement. It is the standing condition the archive is kept in, enforceable by you under the Dispute Terms.
Article 2 — Addresses Are Promises
2.1. The address of a published work is part of the work. A page's address at massachusettstimes.us is kept resolving to that work for as long as we serve the record.
2.2. Where our site's structure must change, the old address is redirected to the work's new address. A reorganization is our cost to carry, never the reader's dead link.
2.3. This article is the other half of the Citation and Quotation Terms: we invited the world to cite us by address, so the addresses hold. A citation to us is not supposed to rot, and when one does, it is a defect — report it through the publication's published contact channels and we will repair it.
Article 3 — The Archive Is Free
3.1. The archive carries the same grant as the front page. The Access Terms — no payment, no account, no registration, no identity, no meter — apply to every archived work exactly as they apply to the newest one.
3.2. We do not operate an archive paywall, and we will not convert the record into a vault that readers must pay to reenter. The press that charges the public to see what it told the public has put a price on memory; we decline the model in writing.
Article 4 — One Record, Shown Honestly
4.1. There is no stealth editing here. A substantive change to a published work — anything that alters what a reasonable reader takes from it — is marked on the work and dated, under the machinery of the Correction Terms.
4.2. Repairs beneath substance — a misspelling, a broken layout, a malformed link — may be made without ceremony, because ceremony over typography would bury the corrections that matter.
4.3. The line between 4.1 and 4.2 is drawn in the reader's favor: where it is arguable whether a change altered substance, it is treated as substantive and marked.
Article 5 — No Memory Holes
5.1. We do not rewrite the past to flatter the present. An old work that embarrasses us, or that reads badly against later knowledge or later standards, stays in the record as published.
5.2. Where an old work needs present-day context — a finding superseded, a term of art aged poorly, a subject later vindicated — we add an annotation, dated and distinct from the original text. The remedy for an aged page is more record, never less.
5.3. This article binds us against our own future management most of all. It exists so that no later editor, owner, or fashion can quietly launder what this institution published.
Article 6 — Withdrawal
6.1. Withdrawal — removing a published work from the served record — is the archive's rarest act, available on three grounds only: a law or order binding on us; a demonstrated danger to a person's safety; or the work's failure of our own published standards so complete that correction cannot cure it.
6.2. A withdrawn work leaves a withdrawal notice standing at its own address: dated, stating that a work stood here, identifying it, and stating the ground of withdrawal, to the full extent the law and the safety of persons allow us to speak.
6.3. We do not withdraw silently. An address that once held the record never pretends the record was never there.
6.4. Withdrawal removes the work from the served record; it does not alter our duty to preserve what we are lawfully permitted to preserve, so that the act itself remains accountable.
Article 7 — Repairs Are Not Retractions
7.1. The duties of Article 6 attach to works that stood as the record — pages published to readers as our journalism.
7.2. A malfunction — a draft served in error, a duplicate, a test page, a technical artifact — is removed as a repair, not a retraction. Papering the archive with retraction notices for pages that never stood as the record would make the archive assert a history it never had, which is its own kind of false record.
7.3. Where a malfunction was readable long enough that readers may have relied on it, the Correction Terms decide whether the repair must be disclosed, and that question too is resolved in the reader's favor.
Article 8 — Demands Against the Record
8.1. Demands to erase the record — from subjects, advertisers, officials, or anyone else — are tested, not obeyed by reflex. The posture of the Data Terms toward demands applies here with equal force.
8.2. Displeasure is not a ground. Embarrassment is not a ground. The grounds are those of Article 6, and a demand that does not meet them is declined.
8.3. Where a demand carries legal compulsion binding on us, we comply no further than the compulsion requires, state what was done on the affected surface, and keep a dated record of what was removed and under what authority, to the full extent the law allows us to speak.
Article 9 — Preservation Beyond Our Walls
9.1. Readers keeping personal copies of what they read are reading, as the Access Terms say, and need nothing from this page.
9.2. Public memory institutions — libraries, archives, and preservation projects — are not adversaries of this record; they are its insurance. The mechanics of automated preservation are governed by the Machine Terms at massachusettstimes.us/terms/machine; the posture they will find there toward preservation is hospitality.
Article 10 — The Record Outlives Its Technology
10.1. The record is served on the open web at massachusettstimes.us, as pages readable in a standard browser, and we keep it in forms that can be carried forward.
10.2. When formats age, we migrate the record rather than strand it. No work of ours is to become unreadable because the technology it was born in died.
Article 11 — The Archive Survives Us
11.1. If The Massachusetts Times Company's business changes hands or form, the archive travels whole to the successor under the assignment article of the Terms of Use, on these same terms. The record is not an asset to strip from the institution; it is the institution.
11.2. If a publication of ours ever ceases to publish, its archive does not cease with it. Before anything goes dark, the archive is to be kept served under these terms or conveyed to a preservation home that will serve it to the public, and the wind-down of a publication is conducted in that order.
11.3. This article is written against the common fate of closed publications — records vaporized with the brand — and it binds us and our successors alike.
Article 12 — What Permanence Does Not Promise
12.1. Permanence is the record's continuity, not a warranty of uninterrupted service. Outages are governed by the Access Terms and the Terms of Service: when the lane fails, our obligation is to restore it.
12.2. We do not promise immunity from catastrophe. We promise conduct and order: redundancy kept, restoration first, and the duties of Articles 2, 6, and 11 standing through whatever happens to us.
Article 13 — Changes to These Terms
13.1. Any narrowing of these commitments is a material adverse change and takes effect no earlier than thirty days after we publish a dated notice, as the Terms of Use require. Silence is not notice, and continued reading is never consent.
13.2. No change reaches backward. What was published into the record under these terms stays held under them; a later edition of this page cannot unmake the permanence an earlier one promised.
Article 14 — The Spine These Terms Share
14.1. These Archive and Permanence Terms incorporate the Open Covenant and the general articles of the Terms of Use: the reader's canon, one-way severance, assignment to successors, the record of versions, and the governing law and open courts carried by the Dispute Terms.
14.2. Where these terms and any other page we publish could be read to conflict about the keeping of the record, the reading that keeps more of the record, more honestly, governs.
Article 15 — The Record of These Terms
15.1. The current text of these Archive and Permanence Terms lives at massachusettstimes.us/terms/archive, with its effective date at the head. Prior versions and their dates are kept and published alongside it — this page obeys itself.
These terms are part of the Terms that govern this publication.