Local news is disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers. 213 counties have no local news outlet at all and another 1,524 have just one. Newsrooms continue to shrink, close, and merge, often with no plan in place for the long term preservation and access of their archives. Online content that continues to be published by newsrooms is also at risk. According to the Pew Research Center, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are already gone and nearly a quarter of news webpages contain at least one broken link. The local record of our communities is vanishing in real time.

This urgent challenge is what brought two very different professions together on June 17 in National Harbor, Maryland. Hosted by the Internet Archive with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the National Summit on Local News Preservation gathered journalists, editors, archivists, librarians, and researchers to start a conversation between the newsrooms producing local journalism and the memory institutions preserving it. This event was a part of the Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program, an Internet Archive initiative supported by a grant from Press Forward. The program provides training, tools, and support directly to up to 300 newsrooms nationwide and helps develop collaborative partnerships between archives and news organizations. 

Librarians and archivists understand what’s at stake and have been working to address these challenges for a long time. Local news supports a range of information needs for the historians, scholars, students, and citizens they serve. Frequent updates, complex multimedia content, and paywalls are just some of the obstacles they face when working to capture online news while still stewarding decades of journalism produced on physical formats. Journalists also understand how valuable their work is as a record of the communities they cover. Faced with reduced staffing and shrinking budgets, they are forced to focus on tomorrow’s deadline, not who will need access to this story fifty years from now. While the challenges and urgency are well understood by both sectors, there are few models for working together to address this crisis. Taking steps towards developing an actionable plan was the purpose of the Summit.

The day mixed expert panels with structured discussion. Panelists tackled hard questions: conflicts over rights and revenue, how to connect communities to archived news, and how libraries and newsrooms can realistically partner together. One panel focused on the particular difficulty of preserving local TV news and photojournalism. Case studies were shared from the professionals doing this work right now in newsrooms, public libraries, state libraries, non-profits, and research groups. 

Then attendees worked together in breakout discussion groups built around five topics: Access and Discovery; Infrastructure and Technology; Organizational Culture and Partnerships; Rights, Revenue, and the Public Good; and Sustainability and Advocacy. Each group named the obstacles in their area and drafted short and long term recommendations aimed at addressing them. Common themes emerged from across all of the groups. Several groups advocated for immediate action across both types of organizations stating that holding out for perfect standards or reliable national infrastructure would result in more information loss. Groups also kept returning to a point that publishers may find counterintuitive: making an archive discoverable and freely accessible tends to directly benefit newsrooms. And more than one group, working separately, proposed the same ambitious idea: a Report for America style fellowship that places archivists inside newsrooms to develop preservation plans and workflows that can be embedded into core operations. Those are just a few of the ideas that came out of the event. Later this summer, a full report will be published and shared widely. 

As some publishers block the preservation of their websites and local newsrooms continue to shrink, this work has never been more urgent. But the stakeholders who can do something about ensuring that local news persists, that it continues being produced and preserved, are thinking big and taking action. Many of them spent June 17 in National Harbor, working together towards a future where local news isn’t at risk of vanishing.

Interested in learning more or getting your local newsroom involved? Learn more about the Today’s News for Tomorrow program or contact us at tnt@archive.org.