This June, the Internet Archive hosted the National Summit on Local News Preservation through their Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) bringing together journalists, librarians, archivists, and researchers to develop recommendations for newsrooms and cultural heritage organizations and for preserving local news.
The preface of their report laid out some dire circumstances.
“Local news in the United States is disappearing, and so is its digital record. The country has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers and more than 270,000 newspaper jobs, leaving over 200 counties with no local news source at all and another 1,524 with only one. Even when newsrooms survive, deleted webpages and broken links erode the
record of history’s first draft.”
Reminded me of publishing in the law. Legal professionals and law firms leave deleted digital publishing and broken links of their first draft of secondary law. 50% of the URLs cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justices generate 404’s.
Understand that by definition, secondary law is anything that explains, summarizes, or critiques primary law (statutes, case law, and regulations). When a legal professional writes a digital piece analyzing a court ruling or clarifying a complex regulation, that content serves the same purpose as a traditional legal treatise.
Where is the interpretation of primary law? Do we just let AI and LLM’s fill in the blanks of primary law – for lawyers, the judiciary and the public?
The report is a reminder that in the legal profession those who best appreciate this law being created are not the lawyers and legal marketing professionals involved in digital legal publishing.
“Archivists and librarians understand that access to local news is critical to their users. Local news documents the history of a particular place and its citizens, contains valuable information that may not be available elsewhere, and can support a wide range of research, learning, and knowledge. Likewise, journalists and editors understand the ongoing value of the content they produce. Often, local journalists are the only ones documenting the events and stories emerging from a community. Yet mounting economic pressures and technical challenges have kept local news from
being preserved and remaining accessible into the future.”
The summit found that the single most pervasive obstacle to archiving news was limited staff resources.
That need not be the case in the law. One, we don’t have as much to archive – yet. Two, technology and AI make things feasible. And three, I believe there are business models that can support the cost of archiving and structuring for citation our secondary law.
Not proven itself yet, but the Library at LexBlog, the only party making every attempt to preserve and structure for citation this secondary law has put together effective technology and what we believe is a sustainable business model.
Only scratching the surface in comparing the preservation of local journalism and the preservation of digital secondary law, but I hope you can see the issues that arise if we let this publishing and commentary go.