Libraries are a locus for civic change

This piece is part of our Civic Media Series. Read the Civic Media Magazine and explore pieces from the series here.

With the rise of each new form of media, communities have figured out a way to make it their own, unique, local form of expression, from broadsides to the broadcast to Bluesky. Utilizing the tools at hand, humans will always localize their own media environments to shape their perception of the world around them. And personal media creation can be powerful — research shows the more people get involved with the news process at a local level, the more likely they are to trust civic information more broadly.

Yet the concentration of media ownership and power has decisively swung in the direction of private equity ownership and walled garden platformization. In less than 20 years, 3,200 print newspapers have vanished. Integration of quality information is built on trust and connection, and as we work toward another, better world, we must invest in public information spaces, both physical and digital. We must collaborate to build meaningful local media landscapes outside of the status quo, to emphasize the connection and trust that should be at the core of information-seeking behaviors.

Though I work primarily with libraries, I’ve been interested in local media my entire life. As a teen, I was a reporter in training for a weekly paper in suburban Massachusetts, where I reported on the local historical society, graduations and community theater. I kept plugging as an arts editor and columnist at the Columbia University Daily Spectator, which helped me discover my voice as a critic and editor, learning about daily news production as we pulled all-nighters for a finished product. When I graduated college during the 2008 recession, I couldn’t find a newspaper job, so instead, I went to library school, where I became interested in open source development and digital information access. Through that work, I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of media projects of all types: fostering better communication on the internet; collecting oral histories; building community; and writing, always writing.

I’ve found that local media and storytelling fosters a curiosity about the world, about history, and perhaps most importantly, about other people. In the 1970s, the scholar and activist Ivan Illich coined the term “convivial technologies,” or technologies that serve “politically interrelated individuals rather than managers.” At its best, local media-making builds trust in other people, invites creativity and supports individuals working toward a common goal of publication. It is democratic, generative, and it creates community.

But instantiating a more diverse democratic vision and building new spaces for local media means balancing what historian Fred Turner describes as “the need to produce spontaneous, creative individuals with the political imperative of taking concerted national action against fascism.” One way to do that, he writes, is to organize the whole system so it is “firmly oriented toward discovering, encouraging and servicing local initiative.” In this context, leaders need to act like educators, supporting democratic initiatives and institutions so that citizens can see themselves as agents of social change.

A particularly generative way to rebuild this focus on and service to local initiative is through libraries: There are an estimated 124,903 libraries in the United States, of which about 14% are public. We need to invest in underexplored partnerships between civic media makers and libraries as a clear place of change. While not all libraries are of equal size (many have barely one staff member), they all exist to provide vetted, quality information to their communities. 

Top-down, corporate media is always going to be part of a broader information landscape. Social media has become an accepted fact of life. But democratic media — the kind that builds interpersonal trust — is a sticky and difficult, yet rich, locus of power that requires interpersonal connection beyond the digital realm in order to exist.

Shamichael Hallman’s 2024 book Meet Me at the Library explores how libraries are “bridge builders” to civic trust. He writes, “Libraries are becoming community anchors with a focus on bringing together diverse groups of citizens… They have become critically important agents in the civic and social health of the communities they serve.” In the book, he explores several different ways in which libraries provide access, encourage conversation between diverse stakeholders and create a sense of belonging for community members.

This was borne out in Library Futures’ research in Albany, N.Y., where we found that facilitating conversations between local news providers and librarians opened up the possibility for positive outcomes for the community, including increased patron access to local news sources, use of local historical resources, using the library as a site for in-person reporting, increased branch events and reporters becoming familiar with library resources. 

“I never realized that community engagement of marginalized communities was a goal for us both,” said Deanna DiCarlo of Albany Public Library. By rooting collaboration in the shared mandate of libraries and civic media to provide for the news and information needs of the public, everyone has the potential to benefit.

As we face increasing challenges, we need new definitions for a new era of mass media. We need to empower and incentivize communities to create their own media. We need to create structures where people can see themselves and their communities in media. We need to understand the news process as a fundamentally human approach to understanding the world.  

Further, we must define an overarching political framework that encourages democratic modes of expression and fights the tendency for mass media to move toward propaganda, non-convivial technologies and commercial advertising. Much of the billionaire class lining up behind the current administration has made their fortunes by capturing the attention of the global electorate through attention, surveillance capitalism and information exploitation. It is possible to build powerful values-aligned media that are non-profit, democratic and collaborative, but it is going to take broad cooperation between communities in civil society. We must commit to the public’s right to know, to read, and to listen. “Free people read freely” is a common refrain in the daily work of libraries. Will local journalists and new sources get on board with us?

In a recent library-media partnerships, Sarah Asch quotes Jo Guidice, a long-time champion of library-media partnerships.  “[Journalists] are information seeking and we’re information specialists. So it seems like a perfect marriage … Our goals are the same — really elevating facts, and teaching people how to tell fact from fiction.” 

Further, Dallas Morning News managing editor Tom Huang says that “newsrooms can’t afford to be the traditional ones where we’re closed off from the community … But that’s a lot of hard work. And, since libraries have largely figured that out, why not partner with the libraries to do that?”

Libraries are facing unprecedented attacks on intellectual freedom and the ability to make both digital and physical materials available to the public. As we grapple with the change afoot, creative partnerships between local newsmakers and civic institutions have the opportunity to be truly transformative, but only if we build together.

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Jennie Rose Halperin is the executive director of Library Futures at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, and has held a variety of jobs supporting media and open information for the public good at places like Creative Commons, Mozilla, and Harvard Law School; she got her start as a teen reporter at the now-defunct Easton Journal, where she covered both the historical society and graduation ceremonies in her hometown of Easton, Mass.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Bettina Chang. Fact-checking by Bashirah Mack.