Educating Journalism Students About News Archives: A Global Comparison With Special Focus on Spain and the United States

Abstract

Journalists and news archivists are natural allies. Journalists require previously published reporting as context for their new stories. Archivists ensure that material is preserved for future retrieval. Local news archives serve as a cultural, legal, economic, and genealogical resource for their communities. Now, the archiving function in news organizations is relegated to information vendors with little input from journalists. Rarely are journalism and archiving coupled in programs that train future professionals. This article explores the current state of journalism and library science education globally and suggests ways to strengthen education in news archiving in these programs.

Automation and Adaptation: Reshaping journalistic labor in the newsroom library

“…Newsroom librarians also mirror the duties of research librarians by developing taxonomies of knowledge and by structuring information flows so that non-specialists can further mine the data (Goode, 1961; Julien and Genius, 2011). In the context of journalistic practice, this knowledge translation performed by newsroom librarians is vital; for reporters who are professionally trained in American journalism schools rarely receive instruction on how to work with archival material (Domínguez-Delgado et al, 2019). Unlike their peers in academic institutions, however, newsroom librarians have rarely been formally trained or hold degrees in library science (Busterna et al, 1991).…”

Exploring News Tagging on Spanish Digital Press

“…Thus, at the same time of publishing online news items journalists must tag them, these tags being reviewed by news librarians only in those newsrooms which still count on these professionals (Rubio Lacoba, 2012:75; Marcos Recio & Edo, 2015:398‐399). Hence the special need, in the current context, that university journalism education provides an appropriate training in news libraries to future journalists (Domínguez‐Delgado et al, 2019, 2021).…”