Voice of OC offers a free archive of Orange County civic history through its website.
The archives are a collection of news stories, photo essays, columns and other reporting published online since the newsroom’s first day of publication – March 31, 2010.
The newsroom’s founding work published that day can also be found in the archives.
The newsroom archives are organized by categories including recent work, coverage areas, author and year.
The archive acts as a resource for student reporters publishing under collegiate partnerships with the newsroom.
[Read: Student Reporting Partnerships Fueling an Informed OC]
[Read: Shaping Tomorrow’s Visual Storytellers]
“Student reporters can use the archive to look back at past stories discussing the same issue across different cities and create bigger, more regional pieces or stories for wider audiences,” said Hosam Elattar, reporter at Voice of OC and lecturer at Chapman University.
Under the program’s model, students are assigned a city to report on throughout a semester – following and reporting on the actions of government officials.
“A lot of the students are learning about these cities that they’re assigned to for the first time. So when they’re researching stories, or when they’re looking into an issue, reading of some of those older stories to help inform future coverage, but to also help them, learn about the city that they’re covering for the semester.” said Angelina Hicks, collegiate news service editor with Voice of OC and professor at Chapman University.
News archives can also act as an accountability tool for the public.
“Accountability would be impossible without an archive,” said David Young, president of the Orange County Press Club, noting how archives can show the changing position of a government official and document their promises to taxpayers.
“More than ever today, it is very challenging to keep elected officials accountable,” Young said. “Local archives can help journalists keep local officials accountable, which is what I think that journalism absolutely needs to do.”
Archives — especially of photographs — are disappearing in the US as news deserts have expanded amidst legacy publications closing.
“And they might seem like a detail, and great to get rid of in order to save money. But the fact of the matter is, people use archives to inform our understanding of who we are as a people,” said Katherine Jacobsen, the U.S., Canada and Caribbean program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“Understanding where we came from and how different social and political movements evolve helps us, hopefully, to prevent those types of things from happening again. That’s money well spent.”
Nonprofit newsrooms extend news archives further, offering free access to their stories.
“News is the first draft of history, and for a community to know its history, it needs to know its news,” said aid Jonathan Kealing, chief network officer for the Institute for Nonprofit News.
“With more and more news organizations experimenting with paywalls, free-to-all nonprofit news organizations are one way of making sure everyone in a community knows how we got here.”