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Future-Proofing the News: Preserving the First Draft of History
News coverage is often described as the “first draft of history.” From the publication in 1690 of the first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, to the latest tweet, news has been disseminated to inform its audience about what is going on in the world. But the preservation of news content has had its technological, legal, and organizational challenges. Over the centuries, as new means of finding, producing, and distributing news were developed, the methods used to ensure future generations’ access changed, and new challenges for news content preservation arose. This book covers the history of news preservation (or lack thereof), the decisions that helped ensure (or doom) its preservation, and the unique preservation issues that each new form of media brought.
All but one copy of Publick Occurrences were destroyed by decree. The wood-pulp based newsprint used for later newspapers crumbled to dust. Early microfilm disintegrates to acid and decades of microfilmed newspapers have already dissolved in their storage drawers. Early radio and television newscasts were rarely captured and when they were, the technological formats for accessing the tapes are long superseded. Sounds and images stored on audio and videotapes fade and become unreadable. The early years of web publication by news organizations were lost by changes in publishing platforms and a false security that everything on the Internet lives forever.
In 50 or 100 years, what will we be able to retrieve from today’s news output? How will we tell the story of this time and place? Will we have better access to news produced in 1816 than news produced in 2016? These are some of the questions Future-Proofing the News aims to answer.
All but one copy of Publick Occurrences were destroyed by decree. The wood-pulp based newsprint used for later newspapers crumbled to dust. Early microfilm disintegrates to acid and decades of microfilmed newspapers have already dissolved in their storage drawers. Early radio and television newscasts were rarely captured and when they were, the technological formats for accessing the tapes are long superseded. Sounds and images stored on audio and videotapes fade and become unreadable. The early years of web publication by news organizations were lost by changes in publishing platforms and a false security that everything on the Internet lives forever.
In 50 or 100 years, what will we be able to retrieve from today’s news output? How will we tell the story of this time and place? Will we have better access to news produced in 1816 than news produced in 2016? These are some of the questions Future-Proofing the News aims to answer.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
274 pages, Hardcover
Published January 26, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 9, 2017
Review title: Old news is no news
Those of you who read my book reviews regularly know that I call my profile on Goodreads "The catholic reader" because of my wide reading tastes. But even you few readers probably wonder why I am reviewing what is essentially a 100 or 200 level journalism textbook introduction to a course on news media archival processes and problems. Which I am about to tell you.
I found this book on my local public library's new nonfiction shelf (and we might well also question why a small public library is buying this book) as I often do by scanning the titles, pulling out a pile of books that look interesting based on the title, and then narrowing the selection down to a readable handful based on a closer review of the books I've pulled out. Serendipity is a wonderful thing, and one reason I don't enjoy buying books online or downloading books to read on my tablet is missing the opportunity to find the unexpected or unsought. So why did this one make it to the checkout counter?
First, my most recent review was of The Last Outlaws, a history of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, and a large portion the book's bibliography consists of newspapers that covered the exploits of the outlaws. Local newspapers provided sometimes dubious details and spurious speculation, while large Eastern papers provided sensationalist coverage that amounted to the outlaws' own press releases. Without access to the archives of those papers, the author could not have provided as much detail, and his history would have been diminished and arguably impossible to write.
Second, I recently read Twenty-six seconds, a history of the Zapruder home movie that captured the JFK assassination, which mentioned as part of the US government's effort to estimate the economic value of the film a comparison to the equally famous radio broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster ("Oh, the humanity!"). In deciding whether to check out Future-proofing, I happened to look up the Hindenburg in the index and learned that very little radio news recording survives from that era (1937); this famous bit of audio exists only because the newsman was experimenting with cutting-edge recording technology on what was supposed to be a routine story. The creation and preservation of the recording was a near miss thing.
So with these two recent points of reference, I realized how much my nonfiction reading depended on news archives, and wondered how the news is preserved, archived, and searched. And what will happen to news media in the digital world: what resources will be available for writers of the next generations to write the history of today?
Hansen and Paul start with the preservation of newspapers from the first American newspaper printed in 1690 (their scope is explicitly limited to American media), when it quickly became evident that preserving back issues would be difficult due to the cost of newsprint and its potential for reuse, potential for loss to fire and water damage, and the size of bound volumes of back issues. After newspapers, the authors move on to separate chapters on illustrations and photographs, newsreels, radio, television, and digital news. Each chapter follows the same format: discussion of the rise of the news technology and the industry it drove, why the media has been lost, how it is preserved, preservation challenges with the media, and a short case study specific to the media. Technical obsolescence is a common theme, as each new technology enables ways to share more news with more people more quickly, but creates the seeds of its own future preservation issues: photographs with fragile glass negatives, newsreels with rapidly disintegrating film and dangerous chemicals, audio with rapidly changing record and playback technologies that result in orphaned content, news web pages with unmonitored updates and dead links.
In addition to common formats, Hansen and Paul identify common themes:
Currency--by definition newsmakers are focused on tomorrow's deadline or tonight's breaking news. Yesterday's story is literally old news, and news organizations in an increasingly competitive marketplace have few dollars for staff, tools, and facilities to collect, preserve, and index news archives.
Copyright--who owns the news after it is no longer current, and how do news organizations deal with transferring copyright when they hand over archival materials to libraries, archives, and museums? This was a major problem with the Zapruder film, and remains a problem even more so in the digital age as news web pages may be a combination of copyrighted content, third party links, and dynamically placed ads.
Costs--maintaining and making archives accessible has been a major issue even when news organizations donate archival material at no cost. Preservation of deteriorating originals can be very expensive in time and money, and buying or maintaining old display/replay technologies can be prohibitive or impossible as manufacturers go out of business or switch to newer technologies.
Context--even where material has been saved often times it is stripped of its original context. Newspapers often maintained "morgues" of clippings, which leaves no context of where in the paper it was originally printed, and what content or advertising was near it. Newsreel film was often cut into strips for each subject so that reassembling what movie viewers would have seen 70 years ago is impossible.
Commercial possibilities--in spite of all these problems, there are still times when media organizations see a chance to make money from their archival material. Hansen and Paul document these few successes, and highlight those times when content has been saved and preserved by individual collectors at their own cost.
As you might guess, the successes are outnumbered by the challenges and lost content. Luck and devotion to old news motivates collectors, and museums and academic institution archives sometimes have the much needed resources to preserve and index material. Government regulations and funds are less often effective, most notably in the guise of public broadcasting organizations (NPR and PBS). And the digital age, with its unmoderated web pages and disappearing links, have only made the problems worse even as content is created in digital formats more amenable to saving.
So will my grandchildren have history of my lifetime? More likely yes than no, but perhaps diminished through the disappearance of news content of the time. What will they be able to read about Donald Trump, global warming, and the other issues that are social media and twitter posts today? The first draft of history has been written, the second draft awaits. Perhaps we will say that the history is written by those who preserved their first draft.
Those of you who read my book reviews regularly know that I call my profile on Goodreads "The catholic reader" because of my wide reading tastes. But even you few readers probably wonder why I am reviewing what is essentially a 100 or 200 level journalism textbook introduction to a course on news media archival processes and problems. Which I am about to tell you.
I found this book on my local public library's new nonfiction shelf (and we might well also question why a small public library is buying this book) as I often do by scanning the titles, pulling out a pile of books that look interesting based on the title, and then narrowing the selection down to a readable handful based on a closer review of the books I've pulled out. Serendipity is a wonderful thing, and one reason I don't enjoy buying books online or downloading books to read on my tablet is missing the opportunity to find the unexpected or unsought. So why did this one make it to the checkout counter?
First, my most recent review was of The Last Outlaws, a history of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, and a large portion the book's bibliography consists of newspapers that covered the exploits of the outlaws. Local newspapers provided sometimes dubious details and spurious speculation, while large Eastern papers provided sensationalist coverage that amounted to the outlaws' own press releases. Without access to the archives of those papers, the author could not have provided as much detail, and his history would have been diminished and arguably impossible to write.
Second, I recently read Twenty-six seconds, a history of the Zapruder home movie that captured the JFK assassination, which mentioned as part of the US government's effort to estimate the economic value of the film a comparison to the equally famous radio broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster ("Oh, the humanity!"). In deciding whether to check out Future-proofing, I happened to look up the Hindenburg in the index and learned that very little radio news recording survives from that era (1937); this famous bit of audio exists only because the newsman was experimenting with cutting-edge recording technology on what was supposed to be a routine story. The creation and preservation of the recording was a near miss thing.
So with these two recent points of reference, I realized how much my nonfiction reading depended on news archives, and wondered how the news is preserved, archived, and searched. And what will happen to news media in the digital world: what resources will be available for writers of the next generations to write the history of today?
Hansen and Paul start with the preservation of newspapers from the first American newspaper printed in 1690 (their scope is explicitly limited to American media), when it quickly became evident that preserving back issues would be difficult due to the cost of newsprint and its potential for reuse, potential for loss to fire and water damage, and the size of bound volumes of back issues. After newspapers, the authors move on to separate chapters on illustrations and photographs, newsreels, radio, television, and digital news. Each chapter follows the same format: discussion of the rise of the news technology and the industry it drove, why the media has been lost, how it is preserved, preservation challenges with the media, and a short case study specific to the media. Technical obsolescence is a common theme, as each new technology enables ways to share more news with more people more quickly, but creates the seeds of its own future preservation issues: photographs with fragile glass negatives, newsreels with rapidly disintegrating film and dangerous chemicals, audio with rapidly changing record and playback technologies that result in orphaned content, news web pages with unmonitored updates and dead links.
In addition to common formats, Hansen and Paul identify common themes:
Currency--by definition newsmakers are focused on tomorrow's deadline or tonight's breaking news. Yesterday's story is literally old news, and news organizations in an increasingly competitive marketplace have few dollars for staff, tools, and facilities to collect, preserve, and index news archives.
Copyright--who owns the news after it is no longer current, and how do news organizations deal with transferring copyright when they hand over archival materials to libraries, archives, and museums? This was a major problem with the Zapruder film, and remains a problem even more so in the digital age as news web pages may be a combination of copyrighted content, third party links, and dynamically placed ads.
Costs--maintaining and making archives accessible has been a major issue even when news organizations donate archival material at no cost. Preservation of deteriorating originals can be very expensive in time and money, and buying or maintaining old display/replay technologies can be prohibitive or impossible as manufacturers go out of business or switch to newer technologies.
Context--even where material has been saved often times it is stripped of its original context. Newspapers often maintained "morgues" of clippings, which leaves no context of where in the paper it was originally printed, and what content or advertising was near it. Newsreel film was often cut into strips for each subject so that reassembling what movie viewers would have seen 70 years ago is impossible.
Commercial possibilities--in spite of all these problems, there are still times when media organizations see a chance to make money from their archival material. Hansen and Paul document these few successes, and highlight those times when content has been saved and preserved by individual collectors at their own cost.
As you might guess, the successes are outnumbered by the challenges and lost content. Luck and devotion to old news motivates collectors, and museums and academic institution archives sometimes have the much needed resources to preserve and index material. Government regulations and funds are less often effective, most notably in the guise of public broadcasting organizations (NPR and PBS). And the digital age, with its unmoderated web pages and disappearing links, have only made the problems worse even as content is created in digital formats more amenable to saving.
So will my grandchildren have history of my lifetime? More likely yes than no, but perhaps diminished through the disappearance of news content of the time. What will they be able to read about Donald Trump, global warming, and the other issues that are social media and twitter posts today? The first draft of history has been written, the second draft awaits. Perhaps we will say that the history is written by those who preserved their first draft.
October 7, 2020
Having recently completed a degree in history, and relied on old newspapers and magazines for a number of my papers. I also come from a journalism family so I've always appreciated the description of journalism as the first draft of history. So naturally, the title of this book caught my eye. While written by two professors, they do make an effort to avoid dryness and make it interesting to a general audience. They are partially successful. Due to the format of the book, there is some unavoidable repetition.
Each chapter focuses on one medium: Newspaper, newsreels, radio, television, and various digital platforms. Within each chapter, we get a concise history of each medium. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Next the authors begin to talk about the challenges to preservation of individual issues or newscasts. Let's face it, why would someone bother to record individual broadcasts, for example, when there will be another one today and more of them tomorrow. Who would possibly have the space for that? And sticking with the broadcast example, until the late 1930s to mid-1940s, there really wasn't a convenient way to record radio newscasts on a daily basis. As far as newspapers go, again, there will be another one tomorrow and the day after that. What's the point of saving yesterday's news? They obviously weren't thinking of historians.
The repetition comes in because the act of saving old news was often left to individual collectors before the media companies, universities and libraries began to acknowledge the importance of this media. This story is repeated across the media world and throughout the late 19th and the 20th century.
Fortunately, it is a relatively short book so any repetition you run into doesn't drag on for too long. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, albeit for personal reasons.
Each chapter focuses on one medium: Newspaper, newsreels, radio, television, and various digital platforms. Within each chapter, we get a concise history of each medium. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Next the authors begin to talk about the challenges to preservation of individual issues or newscasts. Let's face it, why would someone bother to record individual broadcasts, for example, when there will be another one today and more of them tomorrow. Who would possibly have the space for that? And sticking with the broadcast example, until the late 1930s to mid-1940s, there really wasn't a convenient way to record radio newscasts on a daily basis. As far as newspapers go, again, there will be another one tomorrow and the day after that. What's the point of saving yesterday's news? They obviously weren't thinking of historians.
The repetition comes in because the act of saving old news was often left to individual collectors before the media companies, universities and libraries began to acknowledge the importance of this media. This story is repeated across the media world and throughout the late 19th and the 20th century.
Fortunately, it is a relatively short book so any repetition you run into doesn't drag on for too long. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, albeit for personal reasons.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews