Over at The Atlantic, David Beard writes about The Libraries Bringing Small-Town News Back to Life. The story’s not, to my mind, a recommendation that Whitewater’s library should publish a news site – Whitewater has digital and print publications in town and nearby. The story’s interesting for how important accuracy is to news publishing:
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?
Whitewater has more one place to turn for community events, including the Banner under a new publisher. (The site is significantly cleaner in formatting, and so easier to read and faster to load, over the last two weeks. It looks sharp.)
Whitewater’s publishing problems have been when politicians, themselves, report the news (or intimidate weak reporters), including by way of dodgy data, skewed studies, etc. The error of local politics – a grave one, truly – has been its striving manipulation of information and thereby of local culture.
Jeff Bezos both runs Amazon and personally owns the Washington Post. That’s not a political conflict, however, because he’s not a politician, not an officeholder. In any event, I’ve long felt that more private voices are better than fewer. See New Whitewater’s Inevitability (“But I don’t believe — and will never believe — that the present or (certainly) the future revolves around one website, one blog, one city official, one politician, or one group. Of course not — our city is 14,622, not a few or even a few hundred….That doesn’t bother me — I like it, and hope for more and still more. Each and every thoughtful person in this city will benefit from an expanding marketplace of ideas.”
Perhaps some towns will see libraries produce more news, but that’s hardly necessary, especially in Whitewater. What is necessary, everywhere, is a commitment both to sound reporting and to independent commentary (different matters, surely) on political, economic, or other policy topics.
That’s why Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life seems so relevant, and so worth beginning today.