From The Atlantic:
When a teenager began firing on students in Marilyn Johnson’s old high school east of Cleveland, Johnson searched everywhere to find out what was happening. She first saw the news on CNN, but she found out more on the town library’s Facebook page. The site was “the best, most detailed place to get breaking information,” she says.
Johnson had published an acclaimed book on the digital and community future of libraries just two years earlier—This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All—but she hadn’t predicted that the sharp decline in original local news could propel librarians into action. Since that 2012 shooting, more local newspapers have folded or shrunk, and a few libraries have ventured in to fill the vacuum.
It makes sense that librarians would get it right. Librarians understand the value of accuracy. They are familiar with databases. Americans by and large trust librarians, actually much more than they trust journalists. And in a nation where traditional local news outlets are cutting back, their advertising coffers drained by Google and Facebook, their ownership increasingly by hedge funds or other out-of-town enterprises, where else can a citizen go? In some communities, the questions are basic: Who will sift through and list the best events so residents could decide whether to participate? Who would understand what makes an area distinctive and would get its history right?
In New Hampshire, Mike Sullivan found himself in such an existential conversation last year. Town leaders and citizens bemoaned their bedroom community of Weare’s transformation into a “news desert” after a quarterly print publication closed the previous year. In Weare, best known as the longtime home of the former Supreme Court justice David Souter, the town’s senior club didn’t even know about the town’s senior exercise club. The community needed something, maybe a weekly paper, to let residents know what was going on.
By the time the conversation ended, Sullivan, the town librarian, had added eight hours to his workweek. He was now a weekly newspaper editor, too.
Link to the rest at The Atlantic
That’s a town government newsletter, not a newspaper.
And yes, it’s not a bad idea, but it’s weird to dump it on the librarian unless the library’s not being used.
By the time the conversation ended, Sullivan, the town librarian, had added eight hours to his workweek. He was now a weekly newspaper editor, too.
Public funds for a newspaper? All the news the city council sees fit to print.
I love libraries. Grew up in a library family–my father a longtime employee.
I get the argument made here, but think it ill advised.
Better for librarians to sponsor events about how to start a local digital news service in your community and to point out all the ways they can help with research, materials, even computers for internet access.
The first time a public library gets caught in one of our nation’s horrible politicized frolics –where we can’t agree on the facts even when confronted with the facts– it will do more harm to the library than any good that might have been accomplished by the library venturing into publishing local news.
Again, I do love libraries, but they are confronted with overwhelming opportunities for mission creep far beyond their budgetary capabilities. I say, let them focus just a bit and stay closer to shore–for their own good and ours.
As a library trustee, I agree completely. I’ll also say that librarians are not journalists. Their calling is to check and preserve facts, not to ferret out facts to check and preserve.