Breaking the Mold: How Digital News Production Changes the Preservation Paradigm

In the last decade the continuing digital revolution and the emergence of mobile and other new communications platforms have radically altered life cycle of news. News gathering, reporting, editing, and distribution in the digital environment increasingly rely upon robust, multi-purpose content management capabilities deployed by large media organizations like the BBC in the U.K., The New York Times in the U.S., and Grupo Clarín in Argentina. In addition, most news published and broadcast today appears in digital formats that depend upon interaction and linkages to other networked content that may reside on entirely separate platforms and cloud repositories. This technical “sea change” challenges the mechanisms upon which research libraries have traditionally relied to preserve news for future generations of scholars and researchers, mechanisms such as legal deposit, print subscriptions, and microform and digital reformatting. The author of this presentation examines the dynamic technologies used in news production today, and the implications those technologies have for library preservation strategies. The author also reflects upon the broader societal functions that libraries fulfil in preserving news, and suggests how library roles must evolve new strategies to remain relevant in the electronic news environment.