After 300 Articles Vanished Into the Abyss, This Tech Writer Knew He Had to Find a Way to Protect His Work in the Future

Kane Fulton lost hundreds of articles when the publication he wrote for changed their CMS. His work was gone for good and Kane immediately started to look for a solution that would make sure this would never happen to him again.

Hi Kane, thanks for agreeing to share your experience with Authory so far. Please tell us a little bit about your background in writing and marketing.

Before becoming a tech writer, I ran an online music website in my early 20s and spent a lot of time pointing a dictaphone in musicians’ faces. Free CDs and gigs can’t pay the rent, so I switched focus to my other passion — tech — in the hope of carving a proper career out of writing.

Name: Kane Fulton
Authory page: authory.com/KaneFulton
Number of articles: 515
Number of publications: 7

After university, I secured internships at CNET UK and the Yorkshire Post, and after racking up a few bylines I convinced Computer Weekly to allow me to contribute to its business tech blog. Following, I landed my first proper journalism gig at Information Age magazine, where I covered the enterprise IT industry.

I made the switch from B2B to B2C journalism a few years later when I joined TechRadar as Computing Editor. Keen to write about other areas of tech including entrepreneurship, I joined what would become Tech Nation in 2017 and have been writing about digital tech startups and scaleups ever since.

You have been using Authory for more than a year now. What did you look for initially?

I was sold on Authory as soon as I read its initial premise — that it would backup my online published articles automatically.

I had been manually downloading my articles into Evernote using the Evernote Web Clipper for some time, and I wanted something that would take care of that process automatically. At that point, anything else was a bonus.

“I was sold on Authory as soon as I read its initial premise — that it would backup my online published articles automatically”

I wanted a service that could do this after around 300 articles that I have written for Information Age vanished into the abyss — I assume when they changed CMS. I thought that was a shame because it meant that I could not go back through old articles to look for opportunities to follow up with companies that I had interviewed during my tenure at that publication. I could have avoided that problem by archiving my articles, which is when I looked into Evernote.

By now Kane has written more than 500 articles and they are all easily accessible via his Authory page.

And how has Authory worked for you? Have your expectations been fulfilled?

Authory has worked brilliantly as an automatic archiving tool. I particularly like the way it archives all of your published articles and directs visitors to the original publication source while providing access to the original raw text in the back end.

Aside from organising my published articles into different categories, I must confess that I have not made full use of Authory and plan to download my article archives for storing in Google Drive in the future — so I would love to see some kind of automatic integration there.

I also like the way that Authory easily redirects from a domain name — I have kanefulton.com pointing to my Authory page, which then links out to my other profiles (such as social media and my photography website).

You’ve told me that you use Authory as evidence/proof where you’ve been published. Could you explain what exactly that means and how it has worked for you?

Authory came in useful for a very specific use case where I had written around 40 buying guides for a tech publication.

Due to the nature of these articles, which were originally written with SEO in mind, they had been continually updated and added to by various journalists after I had left the company. However, the buying guides still had my byline attached — and this meant that I was still being pitched to by companies who wanted their products adding to them.

At this point, I had the option of emailing the publication and requesting that my name was taken off the articles. However, this would mean that any evidence that I had written them would instantly disappear.

Using Authory, I was able to generate an automatic archive of all of those buying guides that I could access in Authory’s backend. I was then able to ask for my name to be removed from those articles without losing a historical trail of what I had written.

Regardless of what happens to the original, Kane will always have a beautiful back up of all his articles in his Authory account, images included.

What would you say to your writer colleagues about Authory?

I think anyone who values keeping a historical trail of their published content should consider Authory.

I believe there is value in retaining records of what you have written — from being able to follow up on old ideas that you have covered in the past, to keeping and archiving evidence of your output that you may want to show to future employers. Being able to reflect upon your previous efforts allows you to continuously improve, generate original ideas and keep a record of contacts and interactions.

“Anyone who values keeping a historical trail of their published content should consider Authory”

Kane Fulton, authory.com/KaneFulton

Thanks, Kane!

Kane and thousands of other writers and journalist are using Authory to take control of their content and their audience. Join Kane with a free 14 day trial at authory.com.