Preserving news (newspapers, news broadcast and wire service content) in the 20th century posed significant challenges for libraries and archives. Issues of frequency, size, longevity, and accessibility (through interlibrary loan) hampered the collective ability of libraries to collect newspapers and related news resources comprehensively. Collaborative programs such as the Foreign Newspaper Microfilm Project, United States Newspaper Program, and the International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) were formed to confront these challenges. Focusing on long-term accessibility, these programs promote cataloging and preservation on microfilm of newspapers and other primary sources.

In the past two decades, the production and consumption of news changed dramatically. The “lifecycle” of news production (from its sourcing to distribution) is no longer a linear process culminating in the “final edition” for collection. It is now a continuous loop of gathering, processing, versioning, output, response, and update. Printed newspapers are fast becoming secondary to Web distribution of news content. Therefore preserving news in the electronic environment require a different set of strategies.

National libraries, research institutions, and historical societies still grapple with issues such as digital ingest and legal deposit of electronic news. Several pilot programs have emerged to test models of collecting the electronic equivalent of the “paper of record.” However, these efforts only scratch the surface of the entire news production of established organizations (and almost none of the output created by “citizen journalists,” bloggers, and the like).

Meanwhile, generational habits continue to influence the industry in transition. The “news experience” has become atomized as companies, search engines, digital readers, and advertisers track user habits and deliver personalized content.

Legacy content is not immune to change either, as digitization efforts bring increasing accessibility to historic news collections. Mirroring the collection of print news of the 20th century, however, there is an extreme diversity of approaches from a wide range of commercial and other players. Inconsistent metadata applications, “silos” of content that prevent cross-searchability, and a lack of transparency in digital efforts all conspire to hinder rational and comprehensive action by research libraries. Restrictive licensing also affects how users can approach large corpora of data in their evolving research.

For libraries, the challenges for future collecting will require cooperative solutions. Libraries will need to bring their collective leverage to bear on this complex issue through concerted action on several fronts:

• Collectivize the library market for news back files, databases, and tools. Their newspaper holdings and collective purchasing power provide libraries potential leverage in persuading aggregators and publishers to make digital collections (such as America's Historical Newspapers, Factiva, LexisNexis Academic) and tools (such as Factiva Insight) available to libraries on affordable terms. This will require the cooperation of independent and academic research libraries whose collections serve as sources of content for the aggregators.
• Work with publishers, aggregators, and other repositories to ensure adequate archiving of digitized legacy content. Establish realistic requirements for print and digital archiving of newspapers digitized by publishers and aggregators, and achieve compliance with those requirements. Such requirements will include the creation and disclosure of standardized, page-level metadata.
• Increase the amount and granularity of available information on newspapers held and digitized by libraries, aggregators, and publishers. CRL is expanding the ICON website and database to provide comprehensive information on the scope and completeness of world newspaper titles held by libraries in print and microform; and on newspapers digitized by libraries, publishers, and aggregators. Gather and aggregate metadata from such resources as Google’s News Archive Search, the National Digital Newspaper Project (NDNP), and the World Newspaper Archive.
• Urge the major national libraries to implement uniform, electronic copyright deposit to acquire and archive current newspapers in digital format. This will require community agreement on a standard document type definition (DTD) for electronic copyright deposit.
• Push for uniform, persistent archiving by the producers of electronic news. Work with the Associated Press and other news reporting organizations to ensure that their systems for archiving digital news content serves not only their own immediate needs but the needs of future scholars and researchers as well.