Local News, Reporting & Editing
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.
By: Kristen Hare, April 9, 2026
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.”
If news is the first draft of history, the loss of local news archives means a loss of memory, culture, identity and, sometimes, reality.
So in Tacoma, when it was time for the News Tribune to move out of its building during the pandemic, Pedersen knew what she did not want to happen again. Because a few journalists in the newsroom had good relationships with local librarians, they checked in to see what could be done. And, no surprise, the librarians wanted to protect those archives, which included photos, clips and research.
That first draft has been digitized and preserved and now is accessible to anyone through the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Reading Room. It’s beyond what Pedersen, the senior vice president of local news for McClatchy and executive editor of the Tacoma News Tribune and The Olympian, ever imagined more than a century of local news might become. And it’s exactly what more than a century of local news should offer to its community.
“The public should be able to access these archives in a way that helps them and helps us document history,” she said.
In most places, though, that’s not the case. Whether it’s decades of newspapers, photographs, VHS tapes, cassettes or digital coverage, most newsrooms are so focused on the present that they’re neglecting the past and how vital it is to understanding the future.
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We lose archives in a few ways. A newsroom moves and file cabinets full of photos, clippings, recordings and news get lost or forgotten. A newsroom closes and its work gets trashed. A newsroom merges with another and the archives become inaccessible “assets.” Or a newsroom makes changes to its technology and the digital work just disappears.
“It’s a slow-motion disaster,” said Neil Mara, whose career includes working as the technology director at the McClatchy newspaper group and a 2019–2020 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship aimed at stopping the loss of born-digital archives, which was part of an RJI initiative called Dodging The Memory Hole.
While it’s easier to imagine the loss of physical archives, particularly irreplaceable photojournalism, born-digital work is also at risk. The internet, it turns out, might not be forever.
In RJI’s 2021 report, “Endangered But Not Too Late: The State of Digital News Preservation,” the report’s authors write: “What if, because of the mind-boggling complexity of modern digital publishing systems, our first draft of history is dissolving? That’s the unfortunate fact of what’s happening right now in newsrooms across the country. Quietly, in the background of the news industry’s public struggles is a nearly invisible but dramatic decline in efforts to preserve our daily news. In the rush to get the news out, with shrinking resources in the face of expanding competition, today’s newsrooms are finding it difficult to devote money or staff time to what seems like an insurmountably daunting effort to save its growing array of digital news content.”
It’s been more than a decade since Edward McCain, who worked as the digital curator of journalism at RJI and the University of Missouri Libraries, started sounding the alarm about the issue.
“I still think we have a long way to go,” he said. “There continues to be a decent amount of support for digitizing. There’s still not nearly enough funding and support for born-digital news content and the preservation of that content. I just don’t think it has really sunk in that, in my mind, the digital work is more fragile, it’s more ephemeral, than the printed pages.”
Read more: Saving local news also means saving the archives – PoynterContinue/Read Original Article: Saving local news also means saving the archives – Poynter
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