When a magazine goes out of print and/or out of business, do the original 'master files' for each issue still exist somewhere?

I think the bigger problem is when a publisher goes out of business, is there anyone left who cares enough to save the archives?

If lucky, there will be an acquiring publisher who cares enough to fold the archives into their own.

Otherwise it’s dependent on the outgoing editor in chief or some other individual to save that stuff and keep in in their garage until one day they die and their heirs send it to the dump.

NASA literally threw out the original video recordings from the moon landings when the office where they were stashed got moved

Most commercial publications in the USA and UK -- UPC/ISBN or not, regular or not -- will often send copies of their work to the national library (ie Library of Congress). That said, those copies might not be prioritized for digital viewing. So seeing them in-person might be the only way to access them.

As for whether the publishing houses keep them, it's probably very individualized, so who can say.

Perhaps worth noting, there was a SCOTUS decision in the early 2000s (New York Times Co. v. Tasini) that held that freelance journalists whose contracts did not specifically include an electronic distribution clause were entitled to damages when those articles were subsequently released on the web and to electronic news services like Lexis/Nexis.

Big publications like the NYT came to settlements that allowed them to pay to redistribute the older articles (by paying the original authors), but smaller publications may not have such a settlement structure in place and may not be allowed to redistribute the original articles without additional permissions.

FYI, I have a copy of the Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM version that came out in 2001... only to immediately disappear off the market for this very reason!

So much missed potential to train LLMs on 90s Teen Bop.

Archived versions of the final publications are often saved by libraries and such, as others have pointed out.

As for the source files that went into production...that is a more complicated set of issues. The business may have gone into receivership and the legality of who owns what gets messy. You'll need legit software licenses to use those files and many other details. If the publication ran ads, that could potentially be a factor, too.

Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s.

I remember those fondly.

It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no?

You're talking about capitalist organisations here... there's nothing about them that isn't short-sighted.

The raw files probably take up a few CDs’ worth of space for the entire run of the magazine.

Nope... just one cover page probably takes something around 300mbs at a minimum and could be a whole lot larger depending on the quality of the imagery used (if I remember my time in the printing/publishing industry correctly) Storage of already printed material in those days was always an afterthought.

Do they retain the files forever?

Highly unlikely - a lot of the storage just got dumped at one point or the other since there was really little reason (profit wise) to return to anything at all. There might still be an old Mac sitting around somebody's garage or backyard which still contains the stuff, but I won't be holding any hope out for that. There's always the chance that some employee still has the disks somewhere (you'd be amazed at how necessary it could be have proof that you actually did work somewhere and actually did work on this or that specific thing - the bosses were notoriously petty), and I suspect that's how a lot of stuff ends up on places like archive.org.

The corporates themselves don't give a shit - as soon as the profits roll in, it's all expendable as far as the overpaid geniuses in the fancy offices are concerned.

Further, a lot of that old media tied up in proprietary formats that simply don't exist anymore.

Fuck, half the equipment I used in local television news broadcasting 20 years ago is all up in smoke. Media from that time is on tapes that probably don't have easily findable tape decks to play them.

I would suspect its similar happens in print media.

In fact, I know it happens in print media because Adobe PageMaker was big for a long time. I used it to build and format my high schools newspaper when I was in my senior year. I was the layout editor because I was the only one who knew how to halfway use it.

Adobe InDesign was the successor to PageMaker and... for a while... you could convert PageMaker documents to InDesign documents, but they dropped that support years ago.

So you want an old Adobe PageMaker file from the 90's to recreate lost information from then?

Well you better figure out how to pirate both an old copy of Windows and the final version of Adobe PageMaker just to be able to fucking run it in a virtual machine or something. Adobe is fucking ruthless when it comes to copy protection.

End result: Why would a business hold on to documents it functionally cannot use because the proprietary program or hardware used to "read" it no longer functionally exists? They simply won't the cost of keep useless documents around is too high.

Hoping to hear an answer to this.

As someone who saved literal cases of gaming mags from the 90s-00s I'm ready to part with them hoping someone else will go through the effort to scan them and make them available. I just don't have the time or resources for that project and I've got a storage unit FULL of gaming gear that I need to empty. It's hard enough to go through the games and hardware, I just want to get rid of the boxes and boxes ofabysls and magazines but I don't want to trash them.

I know the Finnish National Library acquires and files a copy of every newspaper or magazine issue released in Finland, and many Finnish language ones released outside Finland. Other countries probably have something similar.