Librarians and Journalists: Complementary Competencies?

On Friday, I had the opportunity to co-teach a course on Building a Better Website for the British Columbia Library Association. At one point in the class, we were talking about social media and social networking technologies and how librarians can use these technologies to enhance library services. I mentioned Apture, a service I’m quite fond of, and while I was discussing Apture I ended up talking about how many news agencies and journalists have adopted Apture as a means of adding value and rich contextual information to their news stories.

I also mentioned how librarians and journalists are finding themselves in the same boat these days. What I meant by that was that newspaper budgets are shrinking, cutbacks are rampant, and how some journalists who were steeped in traditional methods of gathering and distribution are showing some resistance to using “Web 2.0″ tools. Librarians are faced with similar challenges: many of us are not particularly technical, and we work in fundamentally conservative organizations. Change is difficult to implement and when it comes at all it is often at a glacial pace. Librarians who don’t have technical skills or who don’t see the value of using social media to support library services are quick to dismiss these changes as “trendy”, and are very vocal when it comes to expressing their displeasure at being “forced” to learn to use these new tools.

Luckily, none of the librarians in my session were averse to using these tools, which made for a fantastic day, but I digress.

A little while ago, a journalist friend of mine passed along an article from Poynter Online. Amy Gaharan writes about news organizations who are abandoning the Associated Press and creating new models for press distribution and systems. What caught my eye was the following passage:

What if a coalition of news orgs within a state teamed up with talented technologists, database architects, librarians, search optimization experts, ad networks, and maybe even print-on-demand pros to create a new type of news where packaged stories are but one resulting product?

What if this kind of team built a replicable, open-source, customizable infrastructure that would make it easy for people to track any issue in the state — regardless of the sources of information (such as public utility commissions, local governments, transit organizations, sports leagues, school boards, citizen groups, or even those notoriously tortuous legislative information systems), and regardless of whether their topics of interest would traditionally make it into the paper?

What if the core of a news org wasn’t only a staff of trained journalists and editors gathering information primarily to produce packaged stories based on just a small fraction of available info? What if librarians and technologists also were on the job, getting as much info as possible into useful, modular, searchable formats that could be easily searched and mixed according to relevance to particular communities, interest groups, or even individuals?

What if, indeed? Never mind your best practices, these are next practices.

Tagged as: journalists, librarians, libraries, newspapers