A reading of the summit report against the Community Media Archive
The National Summit on Local News Preservation asked for national preservation of local television, a “just save it” habit, and the record of what communities decided. For local civic video, those already exist, running, on the same archive that convened the summit.
of city and town meeting video already preserved, the record of what local governments “did, and decided.”
local news programs in the archive, from community newscasts to student and municipal news, in 947 collections.
institutions in the room was a community access TV organization. The field that produces most local civic video was nearly absent.
Nearly 50 organizations, newsrooms and memory institutions, met for one day alongside the IRE conference. The report is written about newspapers and news websites, and it is candid that the obstacles named a decade earlier at the Dodging the Memory Hole forums still stand.
Nearly 3,500 newspapers and 270,000 newspaper jobs lost; over 200 counties with no local news source and 1,524 with one (Medill, 2025). A quarter of webpages from 2013–2023 are gone (Pew, 2024).
Internet Archive, Poynter and IRE will work with up to 300 newsrooms in six cohorts, build a central access portal, and pair newsrooms with local libraries.
A panel on images and video warned that they are “often left out,” that corporatization has cut off access to local TV news, and that newsrooms delete born-digital content on short cycles.
Thin capacity; no born-digital standards; rights versus revenue; discovery in an AI-shaped web; and consolidation that puts lawyers and managers between archives and decisions.
Local news is civic memory. It is the running record of what a community was, did, and decided.Report, conclusion, p. 13
Each row pairs a recommendation from the report with what the Community Media Archive already does, and the limit on that claim.
Searching every item title in the archive, not a sample, finds 78,408 news programs outside of government meetings: 14,550 hours across 947 collections. Hours run low because news comes in short segments.
A hand-read random 50 were all news programming, in roughly equal thirds: student newscasts, municipal and county news updates, and community or independent local newscasts such as CCX Media 12 News, Norwood News and Prince George’s CTV News.
Items by program date, 2009–2026. 2026 is a partial year. 95 items dated before 2009 and 2,611 undated items are not shown.
National Harbor, where the summit met, is in Prince George’s County. That county’s public access station has been putting CTV News into the archive since 2014.
The panel’s warning about short-cycle deletion, observed in local video.
An access organization deleted its back catalog. Twenty videos remain on its channel; the archive holds 1,333. For the rest, the archive is now the only copy.
Pittsburgh Community Television went out of business. Its archived programs are the record of a closed organization, and no automated check could tell it apart from a live one.
Removed by the platform outright. What was collected before removal survives in the archive.
Three more channels look deleted but are not called closed: a missing channel is evidence, not a verdict, until someone who knows the station confirms it.
The report asks for metadata “on the principle that the last step of the creator’s process is the first step of the archivist’s.” These three rules, from the archive’s style guide, each trace to a failure that was measured.
The archive’s identifier is built from the title, so a repeated title makes an upload silently fail, permanently. In a 75-collection sample this caused 380 of 598 missing videos.
Lead with boilerplate and hundreds of programs become indistinguishable to search.
Otherwise a backlog of old tape lands in the wrong year, all at once.
Places and institutions the report names, matched by name to archive collections. Treat each row as a lead to confirm, not a confirmed link.
| Named in the report | Why | Archive collections |
|---|---|---|
| CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, Burlington VT | Lightning talk on local access news and a digital archive | Channel 17/Town Meeting TV8,998 items · 11,104 h, 80% meetings, 2015–2026; mostly Burlington-area councils and boards. Also Vermont CAM1,297 (2008–2020) |
| Porter County, Indiana | Its 141-year-old newspaper closed in 2025 | Porter County IN755 items · 828 h, 76% meetings, 2014–2026 |
| National Harbor, Maryland | The venue | Prince George’s Community Television9,765 items, including 3,120 news programs |
| Ann Arbor District Library | Panel speaker | Community Television Network, Ann Arbor count unconfirmed |
| Brooklyn Public Library | Lightning talk | No Brooklyn collection found. Nearby: BronxNet20,880 · Manhattan Neighborhood Network9,677 |
| Queens Public Library | Attendee | Queens Public Television351 |
| Grand Rapids Public Library | Attendee | Grand Rapids Information Network2,002 · Grand Rapids Television1,710 · GRTVAccess927 |
| Alexandria Library | Attendee | City of Alexandria VA383 |
| Chicago Public Media, Chicago Tribune, Columbia College Chicago | Lightning talk; attendees | Chicago Access Network Television4,554, 1997–2023 |
| University of Louisville | Courier Journal photo morgue | Louisville Metro TV6,973 items · 2,040 h |
| State Library of Washington | Lightning talk | A statewide partner; for example King County TV2,469 · Thurston Community Television1,840 · City of Olympia364 |
| Minnesota Historical Society | Attendee | City of Minneapolis6,304 items · 5,775 h · Minneapolis Television Network686 |
| GBH Archives; American Archive of Public Broadcasting | Attendees | Boston City TV10,163 · Boston Neighborhood Network738. Public broadcasting and community access complement each other. |
| University of Maryland | Attendee | UMTV591 |
| University of Illinois | Attendee | Urbana Public TV count unconfirmed |
| Waltham Public Library | Attendee | None found |
| Lincoln Library, Springfield IL | Attendee | None found |
| Rhode Island News Media Archive | Panel speaker | No Rhode Island collection found |
Item counts are active items. “Count unconfirmed” means two sources disagree about the collection’s size; it does not mean the collection is empty. “None found” means no name match, not a verified absence.
Labeled with the report’s own timeframes. None has been started, and no one named here has been contacted.
Local civic video and news programs for a cohort newsroom’s town appear alongside that newsroom’s archived web pages in the Today’s News for Tomorrow portal, on the same archive.
First stepA conversation with the program team about surfacing archive items for cohort places.
Watch forThe program is about newsrooms: offer links, not a merger.
A short fact sheet on what national local-video preservation looks like when it actually runs: collections, hours, growth, storage per hour, coverage by place.
First stepTwo pages, every figure dated and sourced.
Watch forSaying plainly that commercial local TV news is not what the archive holds.
“In counties with zero or one local news source, the public record of local decisions still exists: this many hours of meetings.” Porter County, with 828 hours since 2014, is the worked example.
First stepJoin Medill’s county data to the archive’s place map.
Watch forUse only confirmed place links, and state the counties counted.
Quiet collections, back catalogs gone “unavailable” and removed channels become a list for a person to follow up with the station, feeding the clearinghouse the report proposes.
First stepA review sheet of current candidates.
Watch forNo automatic verdicts. A quiet seasonal town and a closed station look identical.
A one-page newsroom edition of the style guide: unique titles, the first 180 characters, the real date in the title, a stable channel address.
First stepDraft the page and offer it to Poynter and IRE trainings.
Watch forPresent it as learned from practice, not as a validated standard.
One town, three partners: a cohort newsroom, its community access station and its public library, with a volunteer cohort working across all three.
First stepPick a town where all three exist. Grand Rapids and Queens both had libraries in the room.
Watch forStart from what the town wants from its tape, not from what the archive needs.
An article reporting a council vote links to the moment in the meeting video where it happened.
First stepOne newsroom, ten articles, in a city with a deep meeting collection.
Watch forTranscription errors quoted as fact; always link the video itself.
“Finding local government on video in the Internet Archive,” for IRE’s training series, which already ran an archives webinar with GBH in August 2026.
First stepA session proposal built on the 30-day search challenge.
The report calls for “storytelling about collections” and for treating local news as civic memory. Existing writing about the archive already makes that case for civic video.
First stepSequence it with the pending Internet Archive blog pitch.
The report’s first next step is to reconvene regularly. Four specialized moving-image archives were in the room, but only one community access organization.
First stepAsk the conveners for a community media track, with CCTV Burlington’s archive work as a natural co-presenter.