News

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Landscape

Preserving news (newspapers, news broadcast and wire service content) in the 20th century posed significant challenges for libraries and archives. Issues of publication frequency, physical size and poor paper quality, multiple editions, and title changes conspired to hamper library efforts to comprehensively preserve and catalog newspaper back files. Collaborative programs like the Foreign Newspaper Microfilm Project, the United States Newspaper Project, and the International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) were created to meet these challenges. Focusing on long-term accessibility, these programs promote systematic cataloging and strategic preservation of newspapers in print and on microfilm.

The past two decades have seen the production and consumption of news change dramatically. The “life cycle” of news (from sourcing of content to distribution of news products) is no longer a linear process culminating in a fixed, tangible "edition," as it was in the print era. It is now a continuous loop of gathering, processing, versioning, output, response, and update. Therefore preserving the record of digital journalism calls for new strategies. CRL's 2011 report Preserving News in the Digital Environment: Mapping the Newspaper Industry in Transition explores in detail the new life cycle of electronic news, and suggests implications of this new life cycle for preservation.

Some national libraries, research libraries, and historical societies have in fact begun to ingest digital news content. Pilot programs are testing ways of collecting the electronic equivalent of the “paper of record.” To date, however, those efforts capture only a small fraction of the ouptut of the major news organizations, and very little of the content produced by “citizen journalists,” bloggers, and the like.

Legacy content, on the other hand, is becoming widely available as digitization efforts provide web access to historic news collections. Here there is little uniformity of practice, however, as a host of commercial and non-profit players implement a variety of metadata applications, create “silos” of content that prevent cross-searchability, and impose often restrictive conditions of use and licensing terms.

Libraries might bring considerable collective resources to bear on these challenges through concerted action on several fronts: by "collectivizing" the library market for commercially produced news databases; working with publishers, aggregators, and other repositories to ensure adequate archiving of digitized legacy content; increasing the amount and granularity of available information on the newspapers and news content held and digitized by libraries, aggregators, and publishers; and by encouraging persistent archiving by the producers of electronic news.

A June 2013 forum produced a new strategic agenda for news preservation, which is outlined in the Summer 2013 issue of CRL's Focus on Global Resources newsletter.

CRL Collections

CRL has vast holdings of newspapers from all regions of the world; and collections of scripts, transcripts, and translations of news reports, produced or compiled by the British Broadcasting Corporation, CBS, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and the Voice of America.

Newspaper holdings include over 16,000 titles, more than 10,000 of which are published outside the U.S. CRL endeavors to collect extensive and, whenever possible, complete runs of newspaper titles, and its holdings of some titles are the most complete in existence. All newspapers can be searched in CRL’s catalog. The catalog's newspapers "scope" also allows users to browse by country or state of publication.

Within CRL's U.S. newspaper holdings, some major strengths are:

CRL collecting in this domain continues. CRL has current subscriptions to news titles, purchases and produces microfilm of selected international publications, licenses and digitizes collections, and obtains additional acquisitions through CRL’s purchase programs.

The references below feature strengths of CRL’s holdings. Links point to more detailed descriptions in our catalog, as well as digital versions of the content or digitized finding aids for microfilm where available.

African-American Newspapers

Black newspapers

Temporal Coverage: 1925-present (varies)

In 1965, the Center began subscribing to about 20 papers intended primarily for Black communities in major U.S. cities. The Center maintains current subscriptions to numerous titles.

State	City	Title	Link	Dates
California	Los Angeles	Los Angeles sentinel	(#9505770)	1946-
Illinois	Chicago	Muslim Journal	(#12063707)	1985-
Louisiana	Shreveport	Shreveport sun	(#20606995)	1966-
Maryland	Baltimore	Afro-American	(#7642696)	1915-47; 1988-
Massachusetts	Roxbury	Bay state banner	(#6749070)	1972-
Michigan	Detroit	Michigan chronicle	(#2264134)	1943-
Missouri	Kansas City	The call	(#16736831)	1925-
New York	New York	New York Amsterdam news	(#13416782)	1962-
Ohio	Cleveland	Call and post	(#9964681)	1934-
Pennsylvania	Philadelphia	Philadelphia tribune	(#2266077)	1912-
Tennessee	Memphis	Tri-state defender	(#9578018)	1951-

CRL has retrospective holdings of many additional Black newspapers. See the CRL Catalog for full details.

State	City	Title	Link	Dates
California	Los Angeles	Los Angeles times	(#3638237)	1886-2017
Colorado	Denver	Denver post	(#8789877)	1909-2017
Florida	Miami	Miami herald	(#2733685)	1911-2017
Illinois	Chicago	Chicago tribune	(#7960243)	1864-2017
Maryland	Baltimore	Sun	(#7909813)	1843-2017
Massachusetts	Boston	Boston Globe	(#1536853)	1872-2017
Michigan	Detroit	Detroit free press	(#10345127)	1871-2017
Missouri	Kansas City	Kansas City star	(#3555868)	1885-2017
	St. Louis	St. Louis post-dispatch	(#1764810)	1878-2017
New York	New York	Daily news	(#9541172)	1920-2017
Ohio	Cleveland	Plain dealer	(#7742580)	1885-2017
Pennsylvania	Philadelphia	Philadelphia inquirer	(#8733259)	1860-2017
Texas	Dallas	Dallas morning news	(#9475176)	1885-2013

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African-American Newspapers

Radical or Alternative Press

Radio Broadcast Reports and Transcripts

U.S. General Circulation Newspapers

United States. Foreign Broadcast Information Service

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