Threats to Newspapers are Opportunities for Libraries
An interesting idea blows in with the spring breeze this Monday in a guest post from Scott Nicholson, Associate Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and director of the MSLIS program. Nicholson also heads up the Library Game Lab of Syracuse where he does research on the intersection of games and libraries. Check this out:
With each passing week, we continue to hear news of the newspaper industry collapsing. Newspapers are closing down or scrambling for new models for journalism. Many of us are watching this happen from the sidelines, shaking our heads about how sad it will be without the newspapers in the library. Will we stand by and watch as other print industries struggle in the same way? What will happen to libraries after these other industries close if we do not act? It reminds me of Niemöller’s famous poem, the last line of which is “When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”
We need to be concerned about the loss of a community’s newspaper. While the role of passing on local community news is still being done through other organizations such as local television stations, newspapers have been the significant players in the role of creating and maintaining an ongoing community history. Most of the history of local communities since the mid-19th century has been captured by newspapers; any scholar doing historical research spends a significant amount of time with a newspaper history of local culture. If newspapers disappear, who will create and preserve the heritage of a community? Googlepedia is not focused at the local community level and has little way of determining events that are important to a local community.
Who will maintain the ongoing record of the events of a local community? There are several cultural institutions that could do this. If there is a strong local history museum or local archive for a community, then that organization could step forward to become the primary source for the preservation of cultural heritage. If there is not such an organization in a community, then the closure of newspapers represents an opportunity for public libraries. Librarians are trained in building collections, in describing those collections, and in making those collections available. In addition, libraries understand the local communities in which they are placed, so they have the knowledge about what is important that Googlepedia lacks. The public library can see the local news items as a collection to be maintained and made available online, and can play a significant role in the preservation of local cultural heritage that newspapers have played in the past.
This is a new role for libraries. Libraries typically gather what others create, but do not create the items themselves. If the newspapers close, who will create these news items for the collection? There are several possibilities:
- The local television stations continue to create local news items. While video clips are not as easy to scan as newspaper articles, the library could partner with local television stations to create a single community archive of items significant to the history of an area. Many stations will also have transcripts of their stories, and these could be embedded in the search functions.
- As libraries become more participatory places where library patrons create items as well as consume items, the members of the community could become the journalists for that community. The library can lead an effort to empower members of the community to create news items, training them on what is important to collect and how to present the news in a standardized form so that it can be easily archived.
- Libraries can reach out right now to their struggling newspapers and discuss a partnership. While libraries know about the development, organization, and access of collections, they typically have little experience in collecting interviews and oral histories and knowing how to create these news stories. There are journalists at closing newspapers who might be thrilled with the idea of working for a library as a news director, organizing the collection of stories, training librarians and community members in how to collect the local news, and continuing their work in a different setting. The newspapers have a network of advertisers who might be able to help fund a projects.
If we stand by and watch as newspapers shut down and the journalists scatter to other jobs, we lose the opportunity to create partnerships that could preserve at least the goal of the newspaper – to create an ongoing record of the history of a local community. A partnership formed now between newspapers and libraries would be good for both – it would increase the role of the library in a local community and allow an important cultural preservation role of newspapers to continue. There is a very short time window as newspapers collapse in which to develop these partnerships, so I would encourage local public libraries to contact their local newspaper and talk about what kind of a partnership model might make sense to allow both organizations to continue and to build community engagement in this new role of a shared collection and preservation of cultural heritage.
There are 16 Comments to "Threats to Newspapers are Opportunities for Libraries"
It would be interesting if we could find a way to position the public library as an organizer/filter of the mass quantities of citizen media. A couple of months ago when the plane wet down in the Hudson river, I followed the story through citizen accounts on Twitter 20 minutes before the NY Times picked it up. As more and more reporting is done as a mass aggregation of brief, individual accounts, it would be useful for an institution to step up and organize it into meaningful timelines and stories before it is lost in a sea of information. The Times got the full story about the plane in the end, and they got it in better detail than a million people with cellphones: but years later, the citizen account via Twitter and phone cams etc will provide a different kind of window into the event and the time we live in. I’d be proud to see public libraries be a part of that…
I love it when people read my mind, and give my thoughts back to me with much more eloquence than I could. As less and less locally important information is being put to press, libraries have a great opporunity (responsibility) to find new ways to collect and preserve this information. Unfortunately, collecting and preserving digital records (like Tweets) is a much bigger challenge for small libraries than was purchasing and holding onto the local paper (despite the challenges of newsprint).
Good timing! I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues myself, and it’s left me deeply depressed about the future of democracy in the U.S. Nicholson’s post raises some very important and interesting questions and offers some possible ways libraries can fill the gap left by newspapers, but I admit to being very skeptical as to their feasibility and desirability.
I think that creating archives of local TV news reports could be a good idea, but I don’t know how informative such an archive would actually be. Local TV stations don’t exactly create a vibrant, rich record of what happens in a particular community or at the national and international levels. Once in a while there’s something actually worth paying attention to on the local news, but these instances are few and far between. Most of what you’ll see on a local news broadcast is either total fluff or episodic violence and mayhem. TV news simply can’t compare to the depth of reporting that a newspaper provides, especially the big important papers like the Times (even though the quality of print journalism has declined dramatically in recent decades, owing largely to corporate consolidation and concomitant commercial pressures). It is even more beholden to commercial/advertising pressures, and its compressed time frame favors sound bites and prevents issues from being examined in depth. If TV news (especially local news) is going to be our main source of information in the coming years, that’s not good at all.
I’m also not sure if doing journalism is something that libraries have the capacity for, or if that’s even something that we should be doing at all. Especially in this horrible budget climate, many libraries are not going to have the resources to hire additional staff or devote the time of existing staff to learning the fundamentals of journalism. I would also be against having advertisers fund journalism projects. Advertisers do not have the common good or the health of democracy at heart, and there could possibly be conflicts of interest if such an arrangement were set up. It would be great to have organizations come into our libraries and train our patrons as to how they could become citizen journalists in their local communities, but I’m not sure if we necessarily have the capacity to do more than that, at least in the short term.
On a broader level, I’m concerned about the potential hyperlocalization of news gathering that such a project seems to imply. It’s definitely good to have information about what is going on in your neighborhood, but newspapers are some of the only institutions with the resources and the trained professional staff to do journalism at the national and international levels. We’re going to get less and lower quality news in these areas if these trends continue, and that’s not good. If we want to have a healthy, vibrant democracy we need to know what’s going on at the national level and around the world. It also takes considerable resources and skill to do hard-hitting, investigative reporting, and libraries and local non-profits probably won’t be able to suppport such necessary activity.
There’s a good article in the latest issue of The Nation that addresses these issues and calls for government intervention to stimulate the newspaper industry and invest in public media. I think the authors are bang on: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090406/nichols_mcchesney/4
I also just stumbled upon this article that addresses related points: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090323/us_time/08599188682600. Two important bits from that article: 1) the demise of local papers appears to be related to a corresponding drop in local civic and political engagement, and 2) papers are the primary information source for most other media outlets, so TV, radio and web journalists are going to have less information to work with. Not good.
@Chris:
You say “I’m also not sure if doing journalism is something that libraries have the capacity for, or if that’s even something that we should be doing at all.”, and I’m pretty sure I agree with that.
I also don’t necessarily see an activity like clustering citizen media to tell a more coherent story as work for a librarian; rather I see librarians training patrons to do so. This kind of training is like showing someone how to write their own resume without actually just writing their resume for them. The other day I heard a woman ask a man for a cigarette. 10 seconds later she asked him for a light, to which the man responded “You want me to just smoke it for you too, lady?” As librarians we provide the cigarette and the lighter, but if we smoked all of those cigarettes we’d be going through 4 packs a day awful fast. (yes, I know this is a rather perverse metaphor, thanks)
Anyways… it may be off topic from the author’s intent w/ this post, but…
We really could be teaching patrons to act as a new kind of journalist; we could be training people to create a thoughtful documentary out of the many disparate voices of people who happen to be in the right place at the right time with their phone/camera. Definitely not a core part of the public library mission right now, perhaps it never will be, but I think that if nothing else it sounds like an awful lot of fun. That is the beauty of this argument for content creation and participation in the library… fun…
Interesting post and discussion so far. I attended a reference services symposium at Columbia two weeks ago: https://www1.columbia.edu/sec/cu/libraries/bts/symposia/reference/2009/program.html. The keynote speaker is the Dean of Journalism at Columbia and he spoke a bit about the threat to journalism as well as the similarities and differences between journalism and libraries. He said that journalism, public schools, and libraries have one thing in common and that is education.
Re: “I’m also not sure if doing journalism is something that libraries have the capacity for, or if that’s even something that we should be doing at all.”
You’ve missed a key point – Libraries don’t currently have the capacity for journalism, but newspapers do! My proposal is that the library reach out to the local newspaper (now, rather than waiting for them to fold) and see if there are resources/people in the newspaper organization that fit in with the library’s goals.
There are well-trained journalists in newspaper rooms across the countries who are losing their jobs. These newspapers do have some type of revenue streams as well, but those streams are not enough to support the existing infrastructure of a newspaper. The streams might be enough to support an operation of some type if the infrastructure were shared with another organization.
Rather than sitting by and watching the newspapers collapse, libraries could explore how to partner with the newspapers, to share infrastructure and costs, and keep some of the functionality going to continue creating a community information resource. If public libraries are looking to step up in their role of community hub, this would serve to solidify that role.
Instead of letting those skilled journalists leave behind their community knowledge and ability to collect news as they go elsewhere for jobs, the libraries could work to employ some of the journalists, using some of the existing revenue stream of the newspaper. The library certainly can’t absorb all of the costs of running the newspaper, but perhaps there are elements of people and revenue that could be absorbed to create new organizational capacity.
Yes, I know there are a hundred reasons why this can’t work in our current structure, but guess what… _everything_ is changing (including our current structure)!
If you are out there in a public library, why not call up your local newspaper and have a meeting? Explore the possibilities! Newspapers are looking to get creative to survive, and we could provide that platform. This is a time-sensitive issue; the longer we wait to meet and reach out, the greater the chances of the newspaper shutting it’s doors and losing this opportunity to make something greater than the sum of its parts.
mmmmmmmmaybe its because I am in NYC (Brooklyn) that I have a hard time taking the leap with this one: this may be a very different situation in smaller towns. Regardless, as a matter of principle I think the press has to be a separate entity that is just as likely to to expose and criticize public library policies as it is to bless us with complements. It keeps us real, it keeps us honest, and it assures that the library adheres to serving the needs that its community actually wants served.
Interesting idea, but… libraries are often not independently funded and thus answer to the city/county government in which they sit. That suggests considerable constraints on the capacity to pursue independent-minded journalism.
That said, one strength for libraries is local history, and they can serve as archives of oral history (and create more). They could perhaps also serve to collect/organize/link to local blogs that help provide a picture of the community.
I was just going to say the same thing, Nate. I couldn’t imagine a collapsing NY Times somehow becoming integrated with in some fashion with NYC’s three library systems. Who is going to do national and international reporting? How would we pay them and who would pay them (by “them” I mean journalists)? Where would they be physically housed? The scope of such an integration would be mind-boggling.
We should be deeply concerned with the fate of journalism, because that’s ultimately where the information that becomes the knowledge that we collect, organize and disseminate comes from, but I would agree with Nate and Norman that news gathering and libraries should remain basically separate (news gathering and pretty much every other institution in society should be basically separate, for that matter). As librarians and concerned citizens, let’s push the government to provide economic stimulus to the newspaper industry so that it can remain a vital and independent component of our society rather than trying to fold its functions into other institutions.
This is a reason why I’m not all that thrilled about the idea of the library as “community hub” sometimes. It just seems to be a way of legitimizing the collapse of other social institutions and throwing the attendant problems into the lap of public libraries, especially in cities.
Guys, do you remember that big Eagle in the lobby of Brooklyn’s Central Library that guards the front entrance? The, uh, Brooklyn Eagle? That’s (if memory serves) from the local newspaper (1841-1955 RIP) which is already physically housed in the library and a fundamental part of the Brooklyn Public Library’s holdings in local history. I wasn’t there when the local newspaper of Brooklyn became part of the Library- perhaps someone else can speak to that bit of history? What happened when Brooklyn stopped having a vital newsroom in 1955? New York City is not so different from everywhere else…
Emily, that would indeed be an interesting thing to look at. But even after the Eagle folded, it became the Brooklyn Daily Bulletin, and to this very day it publishes daily as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. So Brooklyn still has a local daily paper, even if its circulation probably isn’t all that high (but the Times, the DN and Post all cover Brooklyn too). Also, there were numerous other daily papers in the city at the time, including the Times, the Daily News, the Post, the Herald-Tribune, the Daily Mirror, etc. etc. Not to mention the enormous number of daily and weekly papers published in languages besides English and by political organizations that covered life in all the boroughs and outside the city. The huge difference is that a lot of places are looking at not having any papers at all, with nobody else waiting in the wings (either in print or on the web) to pick up the slack in an adequate fashion.
@Chris, re:
“This is a reason why I’m not all that thrilled about the idea of the library as “community hub” sometimes. It just seems to be a way of legitimizing the collapse of other social institutions and throwing the attendant problems into the lap of public libraries, especially in cities.”
I definitely sympathize w/ that first hand… it is a problem. When I speak of libraries as a community hub, an admittedly ambiguous term, my intention is to cull an image of a public space that can be used for community organizing and has information/knowledge professionals to support whatever activity the community might be up to, as long as it fits within the ‘Library Bill of Rights’.
Are we good w/ that?
I’m taken with the idea of reinventing(see this post for another aspect: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/03/25/reinvention-not-rescue/) and have to admit the concept presented here raises some questions in my mind, but I think that’s what it supposed to do and we work to figure them out. We may not end up being the replacement for the newspapers/journalists but we have been keeping clipping files for a very long time. Is this the “new” clipping file? Some definate technological challenges, but also some new opportunitites. Thanks for making me think!
In some ways, I’m finding the fact that people don’t really know what we do in a library except checkout books rather frightening. We are madly reinventing ourselves in a lot of creative and exciting ways, like linking with newspapers and there are a lot of people not even noticing! David King was at SXSW and found a lot of the geeks there didn’t even know you could access the catalog online! There’s something scary about geeks not knowing about a pretty mundane but basic technology. Maybe it’s too mundane and old tech to catch their interest. We all know the catalog needs serious improvement, but there are some things it does pretty well. Chris Brogan loves to work in bookstores because he is surrounded by books!!! Why isn’t a library the place where people think to about being surrounded by books? I’ve sort of wandered, but I think they are related paths – at least in my mind!
Yeah, that way of looking at the community hub vision is totally positive. I should have been more clear in referring to the ways in which the concept is sometimes stretched to the point where the libraries are made to take on social service functions that should be handled by other institutions (most obvious: the almost complete lack of adequate, publicly funded childcare that we wind up being the de facto providers of). But the actual idea of library as community hub is great. Didn’t mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater there.
[...] one go. For now.) People can start their own conversations in the newspaper. That made me think of this guest post for the PLA by our own Scott Nicholson suggesting that libraries could be the answer to the newspaper crisis. [...]