The Future is Digital, Local, and Read All Over: Visions for Library-Newsroom Collaboration
This post is part of a series of resources produced by our Student Interns in Spring 2025. The content does not necessarily reflect the official position of the organization.
How can libraries, journalists, and newsrooms collaborate to create the future of local digital news? Our new report Exploring the Future of Library-Local News Collaboration seeks to answer that question.
Libraries have long provided free access to news as part of their mission to lend, preserve, and acquire knowledge in service of the public good.
Your nearest public library branch probably makes some digital news content available to their patrons through subscription to databases like PressReader or NewsBank. Many also offer free digital access to The New York Times (though such offerings are potentially threatened due to recent cuts in federal funding).
While these services offer members of the public access to a staggering range of newspapers from around the world, they are often lacking when it comes to local news coverage. This lack of local news is due in part to corporate ownership of newspaper databases but also a result of the dearth of local news as newspapers die out at an alarming rate. Increasingly, the highest quality local news content is being produced by independent digital news sites whose content is not yet being collected by libraries.
Library Futures believes that closing this gap in equitable access to quality local news is a pressing concern for libraries. In 2021, we facilitated a collaboration between the Albany Public Library, Albany Times Union newsroom, and the social impact consultancy Hearken to explore sustainable solutions to improve digital access to local news for Albany residents. We learned a lot from the project, but perhaps most importantly, we got a public library system and a local newsroom to start thinking about each other as partners with a shared goal to meet the civic information needs of their community.
This year we watched the successful public launch of News Futures, a community of journalists and civic media practitioners working to build, in the words of the News Futures Charter, “a future for local news that is service-oriented, participatory, and reparative.” Inspired by News Futures’ call for cross-sector collaboration between the civic institutions that keep the public informed, we spoke with librarians and journalists in our community about where they see the greatest potential for partnership with one another.
Between February and April 2025, we conducted eleven semi-structured interviews with librarians, journalists, civic media practitioners, and people with expertise in both fields. Conversations were guided by questions about the resources and skills these professionals feel they have to offer one another, the challenges they could use each other’s support in overcoming, and their visions for a more accessible civic information landscape.
The resulting report elevates the most significant themes that emerged during the interviews in an effort to identify potential focus areas for future library-newsroom collaborations.
One major theme, for example, is that librarians want to make high quality local news more available to their patrons and local journalists want their content to be found by more people—especially the diverse audience that public libraries serve. To this end, some interviewees speculated about creating a digital consortium of local newsrooms across the country that would allow libraries to subscribe to custom packages of locally relevant content. Others would rather turn this problem on its head by developing library programs in which members of the public themselves create the local news they most want to read. We believe that public libraries are perfectly poised to support these initiatives.
Our hope is that this report encourages librarians and journalists who have been pondering these questions to begin reaching out to one another, building institutional bridges, and working to create an inclusive local news future for all.
Thank you to everyone who participated in these conversations:
- Sarah Asch
- Maria Bustillos
- Talya Cooper
- Sierra Sangetti Daniels
- Jennie Rose Halperin
- kate (k.e.) harloe
- Darryl Holliday
- Sarah Houghton
- Terry Parris Jr.
- Karolle Rabarison
- Teresa Schultz
About the Author
Thomas Alexander is an intern in the Library Futures 2024-25 Internship Program. He is an MLIS graduate of UCLA and an aspiring librarian—public or academic, anywhere he gets to help people run down the rabbit holes of their curiosity. He was inspired to become a librarian by his experiences first as a public library patron (shoutout LA County Library and Oakland Public Library), and then later as a library assistant (♥️ Contra Costa County Library). He is committed to advancing democratic, non-commercial avenues for producing and sharing knowledge. He organizes with the Los Angeles Tenants Union and enjoys tennis, improvised music, birdwatching, and singing in his car.
