Caryn Radick, the digital strategies librarian at Rutgers University Libraries, knows the value of digital archives. In conversation with E&P, Radick recalled her time preserving historical publications while serving as project director for the New Jersey Digital Newspaper Project. The initiative stems from a federal effort — the National Digital Newspaper Program, backed by the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities — to digitize newspaper archives nationwide.
“Newspapers were ephemeral; they weren’t often kept,” said Radick. “People just read them and threw them out, and then at some point somebody realized that it would be good to gather them up. After that, the realization was that paper only lasts for so long, depending on preservation circumstances, so microfilming them would be the good step for preserving them, and then people would be able to access them, as long as there was a light source and a magnification source.”
As a librarian, Radick helps people find information found in physical stacks and on servers. Personally, she’s used searchable archives to research her family’s genealogy and to learn about 1940s-era advertisements.
Today, digital archives provide not just more easily accessible and searchable content, but all the metadata associated with it.
Radick remains agnostic on how AI may be used by journalists and the broader public to tap into news archives. But in classic librarian fashion, she hopes people get lost in them.
“The thing I always liked as an archivist was potentially being able to do something that gave someone the key to whatever they were looking for,” said Radick. “It just turns on that little light bulb of curiosity.”
For professional newsrooms, a digital archive has a long list of useful applications: research and factchecking; preservation of institutional memory; beat onboarding; discovering patterns and seeing trends over time; producing anniversary and retrospective coverage; mining sources; generating story ideas, planning follow-ups and more.
Introducing AI
Former Modesto Bee publisher Eric Johnston believes journalism’s past is its future.
“[Publishers] have this huge asset of intellectual property of content that they’ve created over the last 10 to 100 years — the most recent of which is stored digitally,” Johnston said.
After decades working as a journalist and transformational executive in newsrooms, Johnston ventured into the world of artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded LiquidAmber (an AI developer that created a research tool of the same name) and serves as the company’s CEO. It enables newsrooms to tap into their archives, to search, find and access past content. But it also allows journalists to wrap context around that content, to discover trends over time and create infographics based on their queries.
Johnston explained that the technology isn’t meant to replace reporters; instead, it’s intended to help better inform their reporting, to bring them up to speed on their beats — particularly valuable for new hires and as institutional knowledge dwindles due to layoffs and retirements.
Creating and maintaining digital archives has been a challenge for news media publishers. Funding continues to dry up for large-scale digitization efforts, and self-funded projects often can cost as much as a reporter’s annual salary, Johnston said. But a digital archive has inherent value and utility for a newsroom.
“In an ideal world, we can take this technology and make it really effective for not only new reporting and for journalist use, but for consumers, such that communities can find a greater asset value in the archives,” said Johnston. “And you might see community foundations offering to grant the digitization of archives because it would benefit their community.”
Tandy Lau is an award-winning journalist currently based in Jersey City. He currently works as a staff reporter covering public safety for the New York Amsterdam News in Harlem. He can be contacted at tandylau1995@gmail.com.
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