A clear tub of five years of newspaper clippings are basically all I have to show for my first journalism job. All that work was published online, too. But with several changes in the content management system in the 26 years since I started at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, only four of those stories still live on that newsroom’s site.
I’ve reported on the work journalists have to do to save their own digital archives for years. And I’ve always thought of it more as an individual issue. But of course it’s way bigger than that. When I reported my book on old Florida hotels, newspaper archives through newspapers.com were a huge and vital part of my research. Often, the hotels claimed they’d opened in different years than reporting at the time showed. The polished stories those places told about their own history were sometimes different than the actual reported record of what happened.
Maybe it seems silly to worry about that and the beginnings of old hotels. But if people can’t access that first draft of history, any person, institution, group or government can rewrite, reshape and bend it to fit their own narratives.
That first draft matters. And people have to be able to access it.
Earlier this year, we announced a new program Poynter is part of called Today’s News for Tomorrow. This Press Forward-funded project from the Internet Archive, IRE and Poynter will work with 300 local newsrooms of all shapes, sizes and mediums over the next two years to make sure those drafts get preserved and people have access to them.
We’ll host three groups a year, with three live virtual sessions and three asynchronous sessions for the newsrooms chosen to take part.
Here’s what that means:
“Participating newsrooms will receive access to the Internet Archive’s fee-based web archiving and digital preservation services at no cost,” said Anna Trammell, Internet Archive’s Community Archiving Program Manager. “These are tools that libraries and archives around the world use to ensure their web-based content and other digital assets are preserved according to archival standards and best practices.”
Basically, Internet Archive will do the preservation work for you.
Those newsrooms will also be invited to take part in the first-ever National Summit on Local News Preservation, which takes place alongside IRE’s annual conference next June.
“In the final stages of the project, we’ll be partnering with participating newsrooms to support access to their digital assets through a shared collections portal,” Trammell said, “which will serve as an essential research tool for journalists and other users.”
Anna, Laura and I will be talking about our project and taking questions in an information session this Friday, Dec. 5, at noon Eastern. Please join us.
People get their news online now. That record needs to be findable in the future.
“In the current reality of misinformation and disinformation, having a record of what's happened through the lens of journalism is a comfort,” said Laura Moscoso, IRE’s training director, “and should be everybody's goal.”
|
