This is PBS St Louis. So get ready to store hundreds of hours of this:
Ghostalmedia
I’m from space!
And IT staff is often a lot of young folks who are building their resume and make really dumb rookie decisions. I was once that rookie.
Agreed. Although sometimes these smaller affiliates don’t have super-seasoned IT talent. The jobs for the department heads at these organizations often make what an intern or college grad would make in the private sector at an unremarkable mid-size tech company.
You often get people making questionable decisions simply because they don’t have seasoned IT people in the building.
All in all, this was dumb, but it also feels like a story I’ve seen before. The nonprofit media isn’t funded, and the cracks are showing.
This looks like this is isolated to KETC’s locally produced shows for Missouri. They appear to be a smaller affiliate and they don’t make a ton of stuff that contributes to national and international broadcasts.
Since they have a smaller audience I imagine it’s going to be harder for KETC to find community-created backups of their stuff.
I also imagine that if Missouri gave more of a shit about public broadcasting, this affiliate would be operating with better funded / more experienced IT staff. These little affiliates really rely on a lot of volunteers and green IT folks who do the work for the experience.
Does the local St. Louis affiliate produce anything that lots of people would want to seed? They look like a smaller affiliate compared to the WGBH and WNETs out there.
I imagine KETC is a really small shop that mostly broadcasts stuff others have made, plus hyper-local content that isn’t expensive to make.
More specifically, this PBS affiliate (Nine PBS St Louis). It wasn’t PBS proper. This only impacted local programming archives. But that’s still a loss for the local community.
PBS likely does much better than this. Heck, a lot of their stuff is backed up in the Library of Congress.
Replying to @eleijeep@piefed.social
It’s more of a tool than a law.
The right to delete and edit PII is already covered in older laws like CCPA / CPRA.
This act funded the creation of a central portal that allows people to easily make deletion requests (DSAR). Previously you needed to file these with a company individually, or you needed to pay for a service to auto-file DSARs for you.