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Article Excerpt
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The quote used in the title comes from Jane Buckingham, founder of Intelligence Group, a market research firm. She's quoting a college student. This rising expectation about news delivery is significant in terms of understanding what is happening to news sources in the Internet Age.
Things are changing in the field of journalism. Just look at your local newspaper: Want ad sections have shrunk; news sections and special features have been cut back. Many newspapers--even nationally distributed ones such as the Christian Science Monitor and USA Today--have announced plans to cut back to just one or a few print issues each week. The cover story in the Nov. 3, 2008, Advertising Age asked, "Will print survive the next five years?" Journalism, as we know it, has reached a major tipping point.
For searchers, this poses a major challenge. We need qualified, trusted sources for news and information. We have always trusted archived print publications (or microfilm and its web successors) whenever we've needed to verify facts or do comprehensive or historical research. If print is dead or dying, is the web mature enough to provide an adequate alternative? Where will we find the quality of information that we need now and in the future?
The Interview Commences
In order to find answers, I went to two people who understand these issues from important perspectives--both have M.L.S. degrees and have worked as newspaper librarians and both currently work at a major journalism school teaching the next generation of journalists. Nora Paul, Kathleen Hansen, and I sat down to talk about the future of journalism and information in late November 2008.
Professional searchers have a major advantage when it comes to finding information, but the internet has the potential of leveling the field with unprecedented access for everyone--of course, we have to assume that the information available is worth finding.
In some areas, the internet has made a real contribution. For example, governments have made good use of the internet to create a level of transparency that has never existed before--but on the other hand, we also have actions like the Bush administration's work to limit, or even destroy, EPA information.
Bloggers and websites also provide key information today, but they may not be here in the future. Bibliographic control is nil on the internet, and information professionals seem to have little influence on these developments. There are wonderful things out there today--ideas, information, and perspectives--far more inclusive than anything we've had before, but we have no guarantee of access to really any of this in the future.
NP If you compare this to 50 years ago, we have a million times more access to the record, being able to see what newspapers across the globe are saying about some issue or topic today. It would have virtually been impossible to get that same type of coverage--and accumulation of coverage--through any other medium--radio, print, or television.
At least now there is a whole lot more access than there used to be. What has changed are the structures for saving information--microfilm, etc.--but the range of access to information today is truly unprecedented.
That works for today, but how much of what you can easily access today will still be accessible in another 10 years?
KH I wrote a book with Shannon Martin called From Hot Type to Hot Link: Newspapers of Record in a Digital Age 10 years ago and, at that point--which might be considered the start of the Digital Age--we were just concerned about access and archiving of what was being put up on newspaper websites. And, there was nothing that was being kept.
The staff of the very first newspaper to go online aggressively, the San Jose Mercury News, announced at a conference presentation that they felt like kicking themselves because they had saved nothing from the initial launch of the website--no screen captures, nothing. Someone in the back of the room said that he had printed off some screen shots--and he was swamped by requests for copies after the presentation.
Media organizations 10 years ago were being encouraged to capture their sites on a regular basis, to try to gauge the development of their websites. In terms of the content of news websites, information is there for the first 2 weeks and then it goes away--some content goes into the paid archives and some of it just disappears.
Recently the ombudsman for the Manchester Guardian was here at Minnesota and said that she gets requests from the public all of the time to change things in the paper's database. A restaurant manager, for example, had a bad review in their paper a year before and asked that, because of changes to the management or menu, the bad review be removed from the website. The ombudsman said that they are actually going back and making the changes. Now, that scares me. Even for cases of libel, how can you go back and change the record? That's absolutely extraordinary.
NP If we were really doing a great job of information context and quality, you could go back and link the older, original article to the new content. That would make far more sense.
Databases already do that by linking or adding notes about updates or revisions or corrections.
KH The ombudsman said that she'd love to be able to go back into the database to annotate or link pieces but that there's absolutely no money to do that.
NP Issues like this are what is exciting to me about the semantic web. Here's what we are saying about this issue now, here's what we used to say, here's what other people are saying--we can link all of this as people are using the databases, the websites. It is very intriguing to think that we can make these linkages intuitively as we navigate over the web.
KH The concept of anything "of record"--newspaper of record, database of record--as a concept, that's gone, or is going fast. The National Archives itself is trying to deal with the fleeting sense of permanence that we have today.
NP If you think about collections, they never were very comprehensive. We did have a picture of each page of...
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