Chuck Pettersen died on Tuesday. He was a successful high school football coach in the city of San Bernardino. He put in 31 years on the sidelines. I saw his teams play probably 20 times. Maybe more.

In this space I originally went on at some length about what I remembered about the man. He won 198 games and a CIF title, and suffered a tough loss in a second CIF final.

I posted that item, but was troubled by it all along, because as much time as I spent watching Chuck Pettersen’s teams play, the records I could access, from Abu Dhabi, UAE … are extremely limited. A brief, 1996 game story from the L.A. Times. Some CIF-Southern Section all-star teams.

I would have liked to have quoted the man, or been more specific about anecdotes that might have revealed something about his character. But I did not remember many of them well enough to use them, and access to records was essentially impossible.

So, maybe six hours after I posted the item, I took it down.

This is about the state of print journalism, especially online. The newspaper at which I worked, which was a thriving business entity for about 150 years, exists in little more than name. Last I heard, a handful of reporters work out of a rented office in downtown San Bernardino. A decade ago, that newspaper had 100 staffers.

That implosion is the case for hundreds of newspapers in the U.S., and about a dozen in the greater Los Angeles area. The Pasadena Star-News, the San Gabriel Tribune, the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot, the Burbank Leader, the Daily Bulletin of Ontario …

The Press Enterprise of Riverside recently was purchased by Freedom (the Orange County Register) and cuts are in progress.

So, print is dead. No news there.

What is increasingly alarming is how poorly the archives of all those newspapers, assembled over a century throughout huge swaths of territory, are not being kept up.

My old paper, the San Bernardino Sun, was late to the web concept, but things were being posted by the turn of the century, and were for the next few years, at the least.

However … I must have written 1,000 by-lined pieces from 2000 to 2008, and practically none of them can be found on the Sun site. Or any site. If one comes up, it generally comes off the Daily Breeze site, a newspaper owned by the same organization that owns the remnants of The Sun.

This is bad. Because newspapers stopped keeping clip files (actual bits of newspaper) in the past decade, sometimes turning them over to a local library or school, but not accessible to journalists on deadline, in most cases.

Now the “eternal” electronic files are beginning to disappear.

Go to a wiki page of some historical person or event, and click on a few of the sources listed, at the foot of the entry.

The number of broken links is quite high. Especially for anything older than about five years. That story must exist, but not through the link you are looking at.

What happened to that source? A new system that didn’t pick up the previous data? Some glitch in the system which doesn’t allow outsiders to see the stuff from the previous generation of machines?

Information is disappearing off the web.

OK, yes, perhaps it exists in some cached form, if you want to spend the time tracking it that way, or do an expensive LexisNexis search. And given how few reporters are still manning the walls of daily journalism, no one has time.

Just this week, it was revealed that U.S. News & World Report is deleting all files in its archive that were filed before 2007.

This is a planned move. Not the semi-accident of not picking up the site from the newspaper who owned the site of another paper. It is about not caring, or probably an expense that cannot be borne.

What happens when a bill comes due, in the future, and some failing news organization (U.S. News) decides it can’t be bothered to carry forward all that “old stuff”.

I am confident Chuck Pettersen was a good guy and good coach. But past that … I am not confident enough in my memory to leave the original post up. Plus, I felt I could not adequately reflect the personality of the man.

In theory, the web was supposed to save everything. In practice, more and more is becoming inaccessible. Those eternal records are nothing of the sort.