Questions for community journalists/News Futures community members

Could you briefly summarize your professional background and how it informs your perspective on journalism?

How would you characterize your dream local news/civic media landscape? Are there any existing models or practices that point toward that place?

What excites you about the potential collaborations between local news and libraries? What support or asset do you think libraries have to offer community journalists, and vice versa?

Library Futures’ 2021 report with the Albany Public Library pointed to the existing appetite, among both librarians and community members, for public libraries to play a role in curating/aggregating local news for and with their community. On the local news side, what do you see as the potential opportunities or barriers to getting local news into public libraries?

I’ve been talking with librarians about the potential for creating institutional access for their patrons to local news/independent media in the way they do with NYT. This would both create broader public access and use library collection funds to support independent creators. How important does that feel to you?

Relatedly, given that the current trend of hyper-individualized platform-based subscription media/journalism (i.e. Substack) is probably not our ideal model, does figuring out how libraries can provide access to these sources from a tech/operations side move us any closer toward the dream model for independent local news/civic media?

The 2023 Roadmap for Local News identified the need for a shared open-source tech and operations infrastructure for local news/civic media orgs. Are you aware of any movement on this front? Is this something you hear the journalists in your network talking about?

I want to acknowledge the political moment we’re now in. What does it mean to be doing community journalism at this moment? What specific challenges do you face as someone working to make sure people have access to quality information at a moment when so much information is being disappeared and civic infrastructure is being torn apart?

Is there anything else about libraries + local news you’re curious about? What haven’t we touched on?

Questions for librarians

What excites you about the potential collaborations between libraries and local news? What support or asset do you think libraries have to offer community journalists, and vice versa?

In your role as a librarian, have you ever done reference for or provided some other direct support to a journalist or civic media creator?

What might it look like for libraries to acquire/make discoverable non-mainstream/local news like they do for mainstream news outlets, like NYT? What are the barriers to this aside from budgets?

How much are libraries paying for institutional subscriptions for mainstream news outlets, like NYT for example?

To what extent do vendors like EBSCO, NewsBank, etc. create barriers or chokepoints to libraries acquiring/disseminating this kind of non-mainstream news content?

What changes to common library systems, practices, or vendor relationships would be required to overcome these challenges? (in your dream scenario)

What about on the programming side? Might partnerships between local news outfits and libraries to co-create news (with patron participation) be a step toward making non-mainstream and local news content accessible? Some existing examples of such partnerships: Civil Beat in Honolulu or this project between the Albany Public Library and Albany Times Union (which was facilitated by LF)

What questions did I not ask? What excites you about the potential collaborations between local news and libraries that we haven’t yet touched on?

How might the current political climate (read: federally sanctioned hostility to quality information for the public good) create challenges (or opportunities) for this kind of work?