If you’ve actually made it this far, you deserve a snack. Hit me up and I’ll mail you something from Stanford (truly, I will). But if you’re just dropping in, the first two parts covered the idea of building newsrooms in librariesand the history that shaped it. This one is about what I’ve learned along the way, the deeper lessons that sit underneath the day-to-day work.
Over years of building, testing and teaching in libraries and newsrooms, a few lessons have settled in. They came slowly, through practice and conversation, and they continue to shape how I think about what comes next.
Shared values
Libraries and journalism share the same foundations. Both help people make sense of the world and are grounded, at least theoretically, in information, access, service and trust. Libraries are stretched, serving more people with fewer resources. Newsrooms are shrinking, trying to stay relevant and rebuild credibility. Both are being asked to carry more than they were built for, and both are tested by the same political pressures. I won’t go full drama and say their survival depends on each other, but working together certainly wouldn’t hurt.
Connection as foundation
The Library Newsroom Project works because it brings librarians, journalists and the community into the same space. Blend these together and it builds the kind of connection I’ve been talking about, the kind that leads to friendship, confidence, stronger libraries, better journalism and more connected communities. Here’s what that connection makes possible:
It strengthens libraries. It builds on what libraries already do best by helping people navigate information. It turns the library into a center for curiosity and questions, and neighbors into storytellers. It gives staff new ways to connect with residents and strengthens the library’s civic role without adding too much to their workload. The project shares the work with neighbors and volunteers instead of relying only on already-stretched staff. It creates continuity that carries over weeks, months and, in the case of Sunset Park, more than a year.
It changes journalism. Working through libraries means starting from connection instead of chasing it. Rather than parachuting in, we work alongside people who already hold that trust. Instead of asking only for quotes, we listen first. We share our power and what we know as journalists, including how to verify, how to ask questions and how to follow threads, and we help neighbors do it too. When people see how stories are made, hear from those making them and do it themselves, they understand journalism differently. Curiosity grows, and empathy for the process follows. It can also bring journalism closer to the ground and open the door to stories that feel more responsive and relevant, while taking on engagement work newsrooms rarely have the time or depth to do.
It creates community. It turns a public space into a place where people make sense of things together, realizing they aren’t alone and that someone else often has that experience, that question or even the answer they need. Residents bring their knowledge, their questions and their everyday experiences, and together they build a shared record of what matters. This leads to connection.
This shared work sparks something else, too. It gives people the chance to understand media by doing it. Media literacy doesn’t land when it’s taught like a class. It lands when people get to make something together. When neighbors see how facts are gathered, produce stories and sit in on the edit, they learn how journalism works by living it, not studying it from afar. That kind of learning deepens connection to each other, to the library and to the flow of local news around them.
Belonging builds capacity
After years of experimentation through the Open Newsroom, library school and now the Library Newsroom Project, I’ve learned that capacity building only works when it begins with belonging. Libraries and newsrooms both want to strengthen their relationship to the public, and working together can do that. Communities want this too, but they need an invitation, a little interest and at least a few snacks. The Library Newsroom Project creates space for those relationships to form first. That is what makes the rest possible.
Many projects that promise to build capacity start on the wrong end. They ask people to do homework or produce too quickly, before they feel any ownership. The Library Newsroom Project reverses that order. We begin by giving people room to get to know one another and to find their place, their voice, their comfort and their curiosity. We build community and confidence, and from there we build outward together. The newsroom and the work follow naturally.
Relationship as defense against attacks on the freedom to think
Book bans are spreading. Budgets are being cut. Some staff are harassed, and worse, for doing their jobs. Censorship, disinformation and attacks on the First Amendment are also testing the press. Libraries and journalism are facing versions of the same threats, often from the same forces.
What is missing is not courage. There are countless librarians and journalists already fighting to preserve our freedom to think, create and imagine. What may be missing is connection. A fellow traveler in the library world told me recently, “We keep talking to legislators, but maybe we need to start talking to the public.” That line stayed with me.
Just as communities begin to trust journalism when they understand how it works, the public will defend libraries more readily when they understand what they are protecting, and it is more than books. That understanding begins with connection to libraries, to one another and to the people doing the work.
Courage grows through connection, and connection begins with relationships.
Coda: We’re Working Too Far Down Stream
Across nearly 20 years in journalism, two books have shaped how I think about reaching people, talking to them and building connections. One is Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone. The other is Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People.
Putnam shows how, for decades, communities have been slowly coming apart. It didn’t start with the pandemic, though that sped it up. It didn’t start with social media, though that accelerated it too. It didn’t start with the internet, though that didn’t help either. We’ve been coming apart for more than 50 years. As we’ve spent more time at home and at work, surrounded by passive entertainment and struggling to make ends meet, our community connections have shrunk.
Klinenberg builds on that idea, showing how the places where communities connect are also shrinking. Public squares are fewer, and many that remain are heavily policed or inaccessible. Our social infrastructure, and thus our social capital, has grown thin. We are isolated socially, as Putnam writes, and physically as Klinenberg shows. It is a paradox that the great innovation of total, global, always-on connection seems, in many ways, to have the opposite effect on our physical lives.
Reading these books, and others like them, made me realize that the problems they describe — disconnection, mistrust, isolation, polarization and the loss of shared space — often show up in journalism as things we think we can fix with a series of stories, an event, a cleverly written newsletter or a better newsroom strategy. But they run much deeper. They are societal. No amount of reporting, data, delivery systems, analytics or even relentless fact checking can fix them on their own.
Understanding this helped me step outside my journalism brain and think about society through a wider lens. I began to see that much of what I’d been doing was focused too late in the process.
It helped me see that bringing people together, facilitating, listening, teaching and empowering was its own form of journalism. Journalists shape stories to help make sense of something complicated, new or unseen. My work simply moved that process earlier. Instead of producing a single story, my output became a collective act of journalism made up of hundreds of small, shared efforts to inform, connect and build understanding. Starting the work earlier, in spaces where people already gather, made the problems we try to fix later a little easier to see and sometimes to solve.
Fixing journalism, however you interpret that, has to begin closer to the source. And for me, that source is at the library.
I don’t know where all of this leads yet. But if what we’ve built so far is any sign, the answers will come from the same place they always have, around a table in the community room at the library, where neighbors sit down together and start talking.
I’ll keep sharing what we learn as this project grows and as I explore ways to scale and sustain it in my year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. And if you see a way it could take root where you are, I’d love to hear from you. Connect with me here.
