Saving local news also means saving the archives
Yes, the physical ones, but the digital ones, too. Because losing them means losing the only record many communities have of themselves.
Stephanie Pedersen had already been through two newspaper building moves by the time she got to Tacoma, Washington. In both those other cities, when the newspapers moved to new spaces, the physical archives moved to warehouses.
“It was very rare that we ever even went back,” she said. If it wasn’t a digital archive, “basically the archives went somewhere else to die.”
Related Knowledge Center: Local media
The hollowing out of the local news ecosystem has been well documented; in some communities, efforts are underway to reverse the growing news desert.
Related Knowledge Center: Inside the newsroom
As newsrooms struggle with rickety business models and precarious finances — as well as new technologies — they are deploying an array of editorial responses.
The Times and its critics | Washington Post mortem