Spearheading the conservation effort is Brian Geiger, CBSR director. His largest project, the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC), is a repository of historical California newspapers published from 1846 to the present. Publications, such as the Californian, the state’s first newspaper, and the Daily Alta California, its first daily newspaper, call the CDNC home – archived alongside current California newspapers in PDF format to preserve the Golden State’s history.

Brian Geiger, director of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, handles an old newspaper in his office at UC Riverside. For the first time, eight Southern California community newspapers will be archived, digitized, and available for the world. The project is led by UC Riverside’s Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research. (UCR/Stan Lim)

“The big hole from my perspective in preservation is the fact that contemporary papers aren’t generally preserved in any way,” says Geiger. “Historians and family researchers, decades from now, looking back at the 2000s and 2010s are gonna see this big gap in coverage.”

To try and close that gap, the project is collecting newspaper PDFs from publishers, and “dozens and dozens” of news media publishers have signed on, he says, including two well-known Inland Empire publications, the Press Enterprise in Riverside and the Desert Sun in Palm Springs.

If they [publishers] wanna participate, then we can put those in the CDNC, or if they don’t want them accessible,” Geiger says, “we can embargo them for a certain amount of time and just preserve the PDF so that they’re around for future researchers.”

As a public service and at no cost to the publishers, Geiger and his team can preserve old editions as well.

Geiger sees this work as a public service. He and his team have created a portal where publishers just log into the portal and upload the PDFs. And then every six months the team processes all the PDFs that they’ve collected over the previous six months.

“If you were going to the CDNC and just limit your browsing from 2020 to the present, pretty much everything you see there is born digital. All the recent papers,” Geiger says.

Copyright issues are always a concern when it comes to digitization, says Geiger, especially as ownership in the industry is changing so quickly, it can be a challenge to find who owns copyright.

“We can digitize up through 1963 without infringing on copyright, and then after 1963 it becomes a little bit more complicated,” says Geiger. 

Regardless of copyright status, Geiger’s team tries to work with publishers.

“If we digitize beyond ’63, you know, at least reach out to them, and say ‘We’re interested in digitizing your title. Would you be okay with this?’ I don’t wanna step on people’s toes if I can avoid it.”

 The CDNC is free to browse by making an online account.

“If there’s a specific topic, you can search by keyword and limit by title, date, whatever you wanna do,” says Geiger. “We have a map of California. You can find titles in a particular county or region of the state.”

 A team of four full-time staff and students work meticulously to ensure the pages are properly preserved, he says.

Geiger says they usually work with microfilm but they also work with original newsprint. He says they scan the film to create high resolution TIF images which they then save to become the preservation copies. 

“Then you run those TIF images through specialized software that both OCR’s it, so you have texts there that people can search and read, and it also basically zones the page, so you know that this is a paragraph, this is a article, a column, and so forth. It goes through the software and then creates the deliverables that we then ingest into the CDNC and host.”

Boxes of newspapers converted to film sit on a shelf in the office of Brian Geiger, director of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research at UC Riverside. (UCR/Stan Lim)

 UCR’s first foray into preserving California newspapers began in the early 1990s with federal project funding to identify all surviving California newspapers, says Geiger.

“That lasted from the early 90s to the early 2000s – before I came on board,” says Geiger, citing the archive’s origin story:

“In the early 2000s, we got wind of the fact that a number of microfilm companies were either going out of business or looking to get rid of their stock of film,” he says.

So, more than 10 years ago, Geiger says, the archive acquired newspaper microfilm from about half a dozen different vendors, he says, citing BMI and Sunnyvale as the biggest. They still exist and eventually became what is called the California Newspaper Microfilm Archive.

 It was no small task preserving all the master negatives housed within the Microfilm Archive, but access to all that microfilm paid off a few years later when the CBSR received another federal Library of Congress grant to digitize California newspapers. It’s called Chronicling America.

“It’s still ongoing,” the director says. “We have a grant from them right now.”

Geiger and his team were digitizing about 50 thousand pages a year. Now they are doing probably 5 million pages annually.

“So, the project it’s continued, and it’s grown over the years,” he says. “I’m guessing there’s about 150 million pages of California newspapers that we could do.”

 Beyond the CDNC providing access to researchers, academics,and documentarians, Geiger believes preserving papers ensures they’ll be around for generations to come:

 “The CDNC is kind of the access side of what we do, but we very much continue to be in the work of preservation and trying to preserve both historic and contemporary papers as best we can. It’s a very big state. There’s a lot to do.”

The  CDNC is currently accepting new uploads. Geiger says they even have several high school and college papers that have uploaded or are still regularly uploading. In order to upload, users will need to create a free online account before they can start uploading files to the collection.

Stylebot, a copy editing plug-in compatible with Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chrome, offers a way, they say, to adhere to style guides in the digital age.

At the forefront of this innovation is Laura Davis, a seasoned journalist and educator at her alma mater, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her mission, she says, is to address the challenges in newsroom workflows and editing processes.

Davis’s early career took her through various digital and tech roles at renowned media outlets, such as the Associated Press, Yahoo News, the Los Angeles Times and Buzzfeed. However, she always carried with her a deep appreciation for the intricate world of style guides and says she was often the “resident style nerd” among her colleagues.

As newsroom workflows evolved, Davis says she found herself facing new challenges, particularly in the realm of copy editing.

“I was taught in journalism school [that] copy editors write your headline. You [reporters] don’t write your headline,” says Davis. “Then I went into the world, and I was sharing things on social media before it even went through the copy desk. The workflow just wasn’t set up.”

Davis transitioned from the newsroom to the classroom about a decade ago.

At Buzzfeed, she was approached about teaching full-time at Annenberg: USC needed someone to oversee digital for a new student newsroom, putting the website, TV and radio under one roof as a converged newsroom.

“I was recruited for that role and, ultimately, decided to take it,” says Davis.

Her commitment to equipping young journalists with the necessary copy editing skills became even more pronounced, she says, when she took charge of the digital arm of the new student newsroom.

“When you’re publishing on multiple platforms instantaneously as a journalist, you need to be responsible,” Davis says. “You cannot rely on somebody else with expertise in copy editing to look at every single piece of content before it goes out.”

While at the LA Times, Davis had bonded over copyediting with the late Henry Fuhrmann, who served in many roles, including as Calendar section copy editor and eventually assistant managing editor. When Fuhrmann retired in 2015, Davis recruited him as an adjunct to help run the student newsroom.

“I kept seeing the same copy mistakes showing up again and again,” says Davis. “I was feeling frustrated about it, so at first I just took stylebooks and put them on students’ desks. I’m like, ‘Okay, they’ll see this and they’ll remember and they’ll do it.’ Then I saw that wasn’t working.”

Driven by a desire to address recurring copy mistakes, Davis and Fuhrmann enlisted the help of faculty colleagues, Jenn de la Fuente and Edward Lifson and started building out a newsroom style guide.

“We decided to try putting a bot on Slack that could answer those [style] questions, and it really just kind of took off in our newsroom. The students loved it,” Davis says. “At first, I saw it as just a project for our newsroom.”

It became something more than that after they graduated, she says.

“A couple students emailed me and they were like, ‘Can I use Stylebot in my newsroom?'”

In 2020, Stylebot evolved into an independent company and has since helped various nonprofit newsrooms and startups, such as CalMatters, NowThis News, and Deseret News, in streamlining their editing processes, she says. Stylebot has other journalism schools among its clientele, including Syracuse and The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Davis says.

“We now offer customization for newsrooms because once we started talking to more newsrooms and people about their editing problems, we found that all their style resources are not always in one place,” says Davis. “We thought that was a need we could meet.”

Stylebot builds on what style rules are already established, Davis says.

“What we’re doing is adding to their resources, because we have things that they might not address in their style guide,” says Davis. “We basically combine the resources so it will answer with their style. But if they don’t address a question and we do, they’ll get our answer, as long as our answer also doesn’t violate any of the other style rules.”

Stylebot is not generative AI. According to Davis, the answers users see are all human written to ensure a balance between technology and journalistic values.

“I say that our tool is AI enabled, because it uses machine learning and natural language processing,” says Davis. “Journalists are excited about the future and wanna embrace the technology, but also are aware of the limitations at this point.”

Her platform bridges that gap, she says, noting: “We still use a lot of human judgment and curation with Stylebot.”

Having a consistent and clear style is crucial for a newsroom’s credibility, Davis says, and this principle is at the heart of Stylebot’s mission.

“Style guides are the soul of a newsroom,” says Davis. “It’s part of what makes – especially when we’re thinking about today’s media landscape – a style guide is part of what makes a newsroom or journalism stand out from other kinds of media because the standards and the practices of journalists are what distinguishes them from somebody just posting content on social media.”

Stylebot is updated every other week, with more guidance on AI added recently.

“On a lot of these broader issues with journalism, we do try to be a first line of defense in terms of if somebody does have a question around those ethics and whatnot. And then when news organizations have their own more specific policies, we’ll do that in their custom version,” says Davis. 

The Stylebot team is fairly small, consisting of Davis, co-founder and CTO Vishal Saberwal, and Customer Editor Katherine Wiles. Initially, Davis received grant funding from USC to develop the Annenberg style guide that powers Stylebot. 

“We hire research associates who help us work on the Annenberg style guide as well, and those are grant funded. We’ve also raised a small what I call ‘pre-seed’ of outside funding, and it’s also been bootstrapped.” 

Davis says Stylebot was created “by journalists for journalists,” to “make the editing process easier, faster and more fun.” Ultimately, she hopes, Stylebot can be a way of getting editing and style practices and values to more people producing content for a variety of audiences.

“In my work as a journalism professor, I’m teaching a general education seminar right now about the changing media landscape and how young consumers are gonna have to contend with figuring out finding factual information online,” says Davis. “Newsrooms aren’t going anywhere, but the reality is that there are other types of creators who people get information from, and if we can be a part of making that process more in line with the fundamental principles of journalism, if Stylebot can be part of that, that is a huge win for me.”

The team acknowledges the changing media landscape, while making information that’s important to the Fourth Estate of democracy, easily accessible and implementable, Davis says.

“There’s research showing that the words journalists use have real world impact in a variety of ways. Everything from making people trust the news organization more, to just a moral issue of treating people fairly, to when it comes to things like suicide and mass shootings, the way media cover it can literally save lives,” Davis says.

But insecure funding isn’t limited to student journalism—the industry as a whole has experienced massive dislocation and upheaval in the past decade. Newspapers have disappeared from the news ecosystem, leaving some areas without a news outlet to report on crucial local news. These “news deserts” have especially sprung up in smaller, more isolated, and more economically limited regions and towns.

In the places where local journalism has suffered, oftentimes college and university news outlets are the ones filling in the gaps. To address the lack of education coverage and, hopefully, prevent more news deserts, 21 high school students in the Sacramento region are in training  to report on education in their schools and districts.

The Student Education Reporter Program, also known as Sacramento School Beat, was founded in early 2020 by Steve O’Donoghue and Louis Freedberg. The program aims to fill news deserts in the region and assure students get the proper training to go on to have successful careers.

“What we need [for high school students] in California is a pipeline that feeds to college programs, [and into] the industry,” said O’Donoghue.

Student reporters in the program produce one story per month that are accepted for publication throughout the academic year. They are paid a $1,200 stipend each academic year they work. Grants from the Dow Jones News Fund, the California Black Media, the Sacramento County Office of Education and the James B. McClatchy Foundation help sustain the program.  

“The number one predictor of academic success is family income,” said O’Donoghue, whose program works to address the income gap in schools, often working with students from low-income schools with not many resources. All stories produced by students are provided to local professional media outlets, in addition to publication on the Sacramento School Beat website, said O’Donoghue.

Last month, I spoke to the 2022-23 staff during their week-long intensive hosted at the Cal Matters Headquarters, in the capital city. I talked about how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the industry, the work I am doing with Jour•Ed and the California Press Foundation and industry specific jobs based on unique interests. 

SacSchool Beat Students hear from Danielle McKinney, Outreach Coordinator at Jour•Ed and Tim Crews Fellow at Cal Press, during their summer intensive hosted at the Cal Matters headquarters.

When asked in an anonymous poll about the state of the journalism industry, one student said, “I feel as though, as an ever changing and evolving industry, choosing a career revolved in journalism may be fun but I worry of financial stability.”

The future sustainability of journalism relies on financial stability and non-traditional revenue models. Programs like SacSchool Beat are necessary to help students secure invaluable hands-on experience that will help them transition successfully into the industry.

“I love being part of the Student Education Reporter Program as it has given me an outlet to communicate issues that directly relate to youths,” said student reporter Kayli Huang in her bio on the Sacramento School Beat website.   

The goal for O’Donoghue and his program’s supporters is to increase media coverage of local Sacramento County schools and districts and to provide student journalists with knowledge and resources to take them to the next level of reporting. Each academic year, the program accepts applications and brings on new students.

Plans to create similar programs are in the works, including in Contra Costa County, where O’Donoghue is working with the Contra Costa County Office of Education, the Journalism Department at Diablo Valley College, Ed TV and Local News Matters.

It was inspiring to hear from young people and see firsthand how programs like O’Donoghue’s can play a vital role in filling gaps in the industry. As the media landscape continues to change, I am hopeful students will continue to tell the stories that might otherwise go untold and find new ways to embrace the digital age and engage audiences through storytelling.

“Although paper journalism has less of an audience now with the modern technological age, I think digital journalism will become increasingly more important in the years to come,” one student said in the poll.

If you’ve heard that the journalism industry is “dying,” that is simply not true. The industry is changing, and students are the future.