Editor’s note: This story was reported as part of a project for the University of Texas at Austin School of Information
Our media landscape has changed dramatically in the last few decades. With the ubiquity of the internet and social media, where and how people get their information has shifted – and news outlets spend a lot of time thinking about how to connect with users effectively.
It can be a tricky goal to achieve, and some news organizations are turning to a new solution: partnerships with public libraries.
During election season this year, The Dallas Morning News took advantage of just such a partnership. Reporters held tabling sessions to talk to people in the community, setting up in public parks, on university campuses and in public libraries.
As news outlets across the country grapple with how to reach their audience, partnerships with libraries have gotten increasingly popular. And Dallas has long been a hub for such collaborative work.
For some in library or newsroom leadership roles, these partnerships just make sense. Jo Giudice, who last month retired as director of the Dallas Public Library, said she sees librarians and journalists as two sides of the same coin.
“Our goals are the same: really elevating facts, and teaching people how to tell fact from fiction,” she said. “Media literacy is big for both of us. And I think that’s probably the core of our partnership.”
Ling Hwey Jeng, a professor of information studies at Texas Woman’s University, said there’s another reason journalists have been so keen to partner with libraries.
“Trust is what makes the libraries and the librarians the best,” she said. “There is no other agency that has this kind of trust.”
Studies back this up. A 2017 Pew Research poll found that about 8 in 10 adults feel that libraries help them find information that is trustworthy and reliable. Another Pew study from that same year found more adults trust libraries than news outlets.
While these numbers have not been updated since a rise in book challenges have placed libraries at the center of a polarized public discourse, it is worth noting that the majority of Americans do not support banning books from public libraries, according to a 2022 survey by the Every Library Institute.
This level of trust makes libraries a good place for journalists to engage with the public. Tom Huang, the assistant managing editor at The Dallas Morning News, spearheaded outreach to the local library system. He said libraries offer an avenue for journalists to keep their work relevant in a changing world.
“I’ve always said newsrooms can’t afford to be the traditional ones where we’re closed off from the community,” he said. “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?”
What has this looked like in practice?
In Dallas, the Morning News and the Public library partnered up as far back as 2016, when they received grant funding to run a teen journalism program, an idea that originally came from journalist Alma Guillermoprieto.
“She presented an idea of what if a local newsroom partnered with the public library system to train and teach young people how to be storytellers?” Huang said.
From that seed, Storytellers Without Borders was born. The program ran from 2016 to 2018 and the teens met with journalist mentors at the library and learned reporting, fact checking, researching and interviewing skills.
But library media partnerships in Dallas have gone beyond training potential budding journalists. In April, the Dallas public library partnered with the Arts Access program, which is itself a collaboration between The Dallas Morning News and local NPR affiliate KERA News.
Arts Access was set up to cover the North Texas arts scene from an equity lens, and the program teamed up with the library to host a funding fair.
“The idea was to connect artists and creatives to information that would help them secure funding for their work,” said Sam Guzman, the coordinating editor of Arts Access. “The library partnered with us because they have this whole repository of grants, and grants are a major funding for artists. And so they hosted a room at our fair where they were taking people through their database and explaining to them how they could apply for grants.”
Other partnerships in Texas
Dallas isn’t the only place in Texas where news organizations have partnered with libraries to better reach the public. In San Antonio, a grassroots nonprofit news site called NowCastSA made its home in the downtown library branch for years before the COVID pandemic hit.
Charlotte-Anne Lucas, the founder of NowCastSA, launched the organization in 2009 with the goal of making government more accessible – and accountable – to the public. With video equipment, her team live streamed local government meetings and candidate forums before the streaming of such meetings was widely available.
Lucas said it always made sense to her to run her news organization, which shut down last year, out of a library.
“Credible news organizations and libraries are in the exact same business of empowering people with information,” she said. “That’s absolutely what we do. We don’t say, “here’s who you vote for.” We empower you with the information so you can look at videos of the candidate.”
And while Texas has several long-standing examples of library media partnerships, in other parts of the country, these collaborations are growing in popularity.
Laurie Putnam, a library and communications consultant and adjunct professor at the San Jose State School of Information, said she expects to see even more collaborations crop up in the future.
“Everybody’s been through a lot with the pandemic and in many places with the weakening or even the disappearance of local news outlets. And that means people have been pushed to think differently and to work differently,” Putnam said. “When these partnerships do work, they can just be amazing and they can really benefit everybody involved that can benefit the library, the newsroom and the community. So it’s really a three-way win.”
