I have made plain my feelings about newspapers, and their role in communities, in this time of media evolution. It is something I've thought about quite a bit, discussed at length, ranted and questioned.
Still, I was struck by the truth in Jason Cochran's article about what happens when papers, especially smaller regional ones, close down: whole archives (digital and print) are lost. That is, generations of a community's history vanish, along with a open access to public memory.
Cochran follows The South Florida Blade, part of the collection of LGBT newspapers which shut down after their parent company abruptly filed for bankruptcy earlier this year:
... its Website, which had hosted its archives for public use, could no longer take in money. So the plug was pulled. Everything went. Some of the staff was soon rehired at a salvaged version of the publication -- now owned, tellingly, by a web company -- but the data maintained by the old owners, as well as any backups that might have existed in the paper's offices, was destroyed.
I recently called the Blade's editor, Dan Renzi, to ask about the fate of all that written history. He couldn't chat right away, because he was an hour away from his office, at a library one county over: the only place he could find back issues of his own newspaper. "We used to scoff: Who saves newspapers anymore?" Renzi said, once we caught up. "And thank God they did."
Cochran goes on, making clear the broad public stake in this library of information:
Without the archive, the public loses access to years' worth of important journalism. "The loss of a newspaper is sort of the loss of a community's memory," says Mark Sweeney, who is in charge of preserving newspapers at the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill. "When you want to understand what a community is like, if you don't have your newspaper for that community, you've really lost something significant."
That includes the Blade's interviews with Florida Gov. Charlie Crist that provide a public record of his shifting positions on human-rights issues. And in the case of the Washington Blade, Renzi's D.C.-based sister publication, it meant that the first interview by a successful Presidential candidate to a gay publication in the U.S. -- a piece of American history -- was deleted.
Imagine if historians discovered that an abolitionist newspaper in the 1830s had interviewed Abraham Lincoln, and subsequently shredded the original story. Historians of the next century will likely feel the same way about our cavalier attitude toward preserving the events of our times.
What is especially interesting about this challenge that Cochran lays out is that it is not a matter of medium, exactly; this isn't a print versus digital "war." The need is for the profound archives of our media outlets to be accessible, safe, and intentionally curated for the public record. The problem is that neither print nor digital archives are safe from an abrupt disappearance, though it is probably true that it's much easier to lose all online copies of a newspaper than all print copies of it.
As Cochran points out, The Washington Post recognized the stake that the public has in preserving its journalistic record, and when the Washington Blade closed, it called on no less then the government to step up and ensure its availability. That hasn't happened. Yet. And there are all kinds of complications that make it difficult even for those fighters on the front line--libraries--to do what they do best, and what perhaps the public assumes they will do.
Libraries can store physical copies of a publication, Sweeney says, but they're not currently allowed to crawl the Web and save online content without getting the publishers' permission. ... The Library of Congress has not succeeded in persuading the (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) owners to let it take snapshots of its Web content, Sweeney says.
Not that there's never a savior. When the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News went entirely to the Web in February, a Denver library stepped in to receive its printed holdings. But unless papers publish stories of national significance, Sweeney said, preserving their contents usually falls under the purview of state libraries, historical societies, and universities -- none of which usually have the cash or manpower to contend with ever-complicating digital preservation methods. ...
Libraries alone can't take up the slack. Even if they could store back issues, they could only do that in physical form. While our society celebrates a shift to digital communication, and the supposed propagation of information at light speed, gaps in funding and accessibility make it impossible to research the past without driving to the local library to find a physical copy.
Cochran conjures an interesting phrase to describe what's happening (or, more accurately, not happening): "the wisdom gap." He notes that even if the highest level of government did decide that it was in the public interest to preserve the memories of our communities, that isn't an entirely comforting solution given, for example, recent revelations of the Bush administration's "catastrophic" bookkeeping.
What we're left with, then, is a paradox: we live in a time where we have quicker and more expansive access to information than ever before. And we are leaving no trace of it.
Image Credits: Creative Commons (Alex Barth; pedrosimoes7; eddie.welker)
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