In public relations, it is oft-said that "today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper". But in the modern world, that could not be further from the truth.

If you wanted to find a local news story from thirty or forty years ago, you would be hard-pressed. You might see if the newspaper themselves have back issues — potentially, but don’t be so sure. Then, you might try the library. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be surprised if you ended up trying to find a quirky newspaper collector in the local area.

The lesson is that lots of news stories from the pre-Internet age have, more or less, disappeared into the annal of history. Faded into obscurity.

But, today, stories that are written online will usually end up staying on the Internet for years, decades, and even beyond. Even if the website itself is taken offline, the article will usually stay up for posterity on Wayback Machine.

And this isn’t just national newspaper stories — or even local paper articles. It’s blogs, forum posts, and social media accounts too. Once something is posted online it is incredibly difficult to get it removed; it may go unnoticed for years — or even decades — but it is usually still there, sitting just out of sight.

Kentarō Kobayashi, the director of the opening and closing ceremony of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, found this out a couple of weeks ago. An old video surfaced of him making a crude and offensive joke, which the Prime Minister of Japan called "outrageous and unacceptable".

Within hours of the story breaking, Kobayashi was sacked. Interestingly, the video itself was from 1998, more than 23 years ago. Regardless of the positives and negatives of the sacking, it shows that the Internet — and digital content in general — has a long memory. A very long memory.

The first lesson for executives, shareholders, and entrepreneurs is that if there is something from 10, 15, 20 years ago that may be sitting hidden somewhere on the web, it is best to take action as soon as possible.

The second lesson is that before you post anything online, pause and think again. How will this be perceived in twenty years? You might just find out that more people end up reading it then than today.