Poynter: “Saving Local News Also Means Saving the Archives”

From Poynter Institute:

In RJI’s 2021 report, “Endangered But Not Too Late: The State of Digital News Preservation,” the report’s authors write: “What if, because of the mind-boggling complexity of modern digital publishing systems, our first draft of history is dissolving? That’s the unfortunate fact of what’s happening right now in newsrooms across the country. Quietly, in the background of the news industry’s public struggles is a nearly invisible but dramatic decline in efforts to preserve our daily news. In the rush to get the news out, with shrinking resources in the face of expanding competition, today’s newsrooms are finding it difficult to devote money or staff time to what seems like an insurmountably daunting effort to save its growing array of digital news content.”

It’s been more than a decade since Edward McCain, who worked as the digital curator of journalism at RJI and the University of Missouri Libraries, started sounding the alarm about the issue.

“I still think we have a long way to go,” he said. “There continues to be a decent amount of support for digitizing. There’s still not nearly enough funding and support for born-digital news content and the preservation of that content. I just don’t think it has really sunk in that, in my mind, the digital work is more fragile, it’s more ephemeral, than the printed pages.”

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Several projects are approaching preserving an array of local news archives in different ways.

“Moving image archivists have been studying and working to address this problem for decades,” said Becca Bender with Channel US, which grew out of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ work. “And in some ways, the game keeps changing because stations are being sold. It’s a moving target, and that’s one of the things that makes it so challenging from a preservation standpoint.”

As more local television stations merge into bigger and bigger corporations, “there’s an even greater urgency to say this is the history of these local communities and it is no longer owned by local entities.”

The Archival Producers Alliance is working to “restore, preserve, and provide access to local television news archives across the United States,” according to its site.

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Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Funding, Libraries, News, Preservation, Publishing