Let the Sunshine In | Peer to Peer Review
What libraries and news organizations have in common Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Mar 17, 2011 |
| Photo by Debora Miller |
It's Sunshine Week, the annual reminder that open government is good for democracy, that information is important, that freedom is protected when people are vigilant about their right to know what our government is up to. Started in 2002 by a Florida association of news editors who were concerned about legislative efforts to weaken access to public records, the national coalition behind Sunshine Week includes our own American Library Association.
It's a good reminder to reflect on how much we benefit from public government information. Thanks not only to the availability of government information, but its public domain status, we have all kinds of mashups and remixes of public data.
It may also be the right moment to observe a moment of silence for the Statistical Abstract of the United States, my favorite little block of data, the singe book of factoids that I would want on a desert island, a steady companion of library ready reference shelves since 1878. Sniff. It sounds as if the funds are being redirected to a new program for disseminating data, but I still want my handy little guide to who's collecting numbers on what. It's one of the few books on our ready reference shelf (apart from style manuals) that still gets regular use.
Partly cloudy
Another thing to celebrate during Sunshine Week is that the annual State of the News Media report is published. As an old-school news junkie, I anxiously await the assessment of the Fourth Estate. For the past two years I felt as if I was reading an autopsy, but this year, things are not quite so grim—either that, or grim is the new normal.
Online audiences are hungry for news, and newspapers are slowly making the adjustment. The good news is that online advertising revenue is up, with online spending outpacing print ad placements. The bad news is that that a large chunk of that money goes to search engines. And the new metrics of online readership are confusing. Though more data is gathered about reader preferences than ever before, it's not standardized and it's hard to gather useful data across platforms. Overall ad revenue is down more than six percent, continuing a trend. News organizations are realizing that they are no longer in control of delivering the news. Aggregators and packagers—Google and Apple among them—are taking a percentage of dollars and collecting information about readers in a way that leaves news organizations less in control and more out of touch with their audience. (This concern was also explored this week at the SXSW conference.)
New media journalism hires managed to balance layoffs in 2010 after two years of massive job cuts, but many of the hires (around 1000) were made by AOL, which acquired Patch.com and absorbed the Huffington Post. It's not clear how sustainable entrepreneurial online news initiatives like this will be. Though it's good to see new jobs being created for professional journalists, put this shaky balance of new jobs and layoffs into perspective. Over the past decade, 30 percent of newspaper reporters lost their jobs.
The report explores how willing people might be to pay for online access. Now that consumers have grown accustomed to paying for mobile access, the notion that everything online should be free may be fading.
Just today, the New York Times has publicly placed its bets, announcing the details of a new plan to charge regular visitors to their website, a more nuanced approach than their unsuccessful "Times Select" program that put much of their most talked-about content behind a paywall. To keep the buzz going, readers will be able to access it without limit from Twitter and Facebook, and with only some limits from Google. I'm not clear on how a click through from this column will be counted—and nobody's sure if it will work.
The daily mirror
Perhaps it's because my father taught journalism and I grew up with the smell of ink and newsprint as much a part of breakfast as the scent of toast and coffee, but the values and the concerns of the news media and libraries have always seemed linked to me. Like news organizations, we're struggling to hang on through tough financial times. We're doing our best to adjust to digital preferences of our readers, but our content is increasingly packaged by third parties. Not only does that drain our budgets, it makes it harder to sustain a library (or a news organization) that is shaped by a close relationship with our unique communities.
We know that people count on what we provide, but they aren't at all clear on how it gets there. If your journalism comes through Google News and your scholarly journal content through Google Scholar, how connected are you to the news organizations or libraries that fund the material? Will you even recognize their contributions or fight for them when money is tight? Both institutions are unsure exactly how our content will be accessible on mobile apps, but we know that's what our users will expect. Both journalism and libraries are affected by the concentration of ownership and by the fact that those who make the decisions are driven by profit, not by a belief in free inquiry. We know how this has worked out in publishing; now seven of the top 25 newspapers in the nation are owned by hedge funds whose only purpose is to turn a buck. This has not worked out well elsewhere in the publishing industry.
Journalists and librarians have to constantly redefine our work, and professional education has to adjust so it can prepare us for job descriptions that haven't been written yet. But one thing hasn't changed dramatically: our core values remain steady. Both professions support access to information, an even-handed approach to the facts, a sense of obligation to the public, and support of open government and open debate.
When everything around us seems to be in a chaotic state of flux, it's good to know that we have a moral compass to help us find our way. Without that, we'd really be lost.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
