Preserving digital local news

Much local news -important documentation of local history -is being lost. The fact that a lot of news media is now available digitally, presents new opportunities but also new challenges for such preservation. We explore issues and approaches for collection and management of born digital local news. Purpose Design/methodology/approach/findings We examine several specific bottlenecks for implementing this project. For instance, we estimate the size of the problem by estimating how much local news is generated in one US state. We then consider the difficulties in capture, storage requirements, selection, access, and sustainability. We focus on difficulties in selection. Finally, we explore a number of business models for handling these challenges. While none of the business models offers an ideal solution for the preservation of local news, especially not for multimedia sources, we believe that some of them provide partial answers which should tried. Newspaper Web sites and streaming radio stations should be downloaded. The possibility of capturing video from cable distribution points could be explored. Originality and value Preserving Local News If news is “the first draft of history” , what should we save for the future historians to tell them about our times and ourselves? This is an urgent task given that increasingly news is available only digitally and that digital content is ephemeral. Thus, digital preservation has triggered intense activity. However, the proliferation of news and the ease with which it is now disseminated are making it difficult to preserve. While some attempts are underway to save national news media, attempts to save local news are sporadic. There are many reasons to have primary sources for local history (Gottschalk, 1969; Lowenthal, 1995). Such a historical record can help local citizens in understanding their local community. It can be a resource for genealogists who track the activities of their ancestors. In some cases, local news can have national or international impact. For instance, records of local reports are invaluable in writing the history of the U.S. Civil Rights movement. At a more generic level, evidence such as that collected from local news, can be useful for statistical analysis of social trends. For these reasons, we believe that there is a modest but steady demand for such historical materials. Further, a comprehensive collection would probably exhibit a “long-tail”; that is, a steady demand for particular items, any one of which is of low priority, but cumulatively they are sufficient to justify the preservation effort. Preservation of local news has long been recognized as a role for libraries (Phillips, 1995). The simplest approach is to collect and put old newspapers on a shelf. More ambitiously, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC) have supported microfilming old newspapers under the United States Newspaper Project (USNP). Recently, there has been a effort to digitize the 1 This quotation is attributed to Philip Graham