Bill Densmore asked for 2-3 keys points we took away from BiblioNews. Here are mine: (Hope I’m posting these in the right place!)

1. Librarians and journalists have many common interests, values and experiences. But how do we get beyond the obvious beneficial results of collaborating? What more can we all gain than:
* Libraries provide information and facts for news stories.
* Libraries curate information (so best/most useful/most relevant stories rise to the top).
* Newsrooms tell stories of libraries and their roles in communities, which can lead to increased funding and library use).
* Newsrooms provide reading material for libraries.

Our challenge is to come up with new ways to collaborate, and to perhaps to focus on how we, together, can provide information that helps people make informed decisions for themselves, their families, their community, this country, and our world.

2. Is it my responsibility to get everyone involved in the news process? I’ve always thought it was. Public Insight journalism is built on the belief that everyone has knowledge that the rest of us can learn from. So the more people who are talking to journalists, and the more diverse those people’s backgrounds are, the better we can report on what’s going on around us.

A big part of my job has been to make sure we’re hearing from people whose perspectives, stories and voices are not often in the news, or people whom we talk about on the news (e.g., people who are homeless) way more than we talk with.

But at BiblioNews, that idea of ”underserved” communities came up, and one person made an excellent point — one that’s really stuck with me — that people I think of as underserved may be very well served media-wise (and maybe library-wise, too). They’re likely getting their news and information from other sources that I’m not tuned into.

So do I continue laboring to get those people into our news process? All those people who are difficult to recruit into being news sources for American Public Media, Minnesota Public Radio and our news partners — teens, recent immigrants, Asian Americans, people with little money, the politically conservative, people without college degrees, the theologically conservative, American Indians, Wyomingites, etc.?

A big part of why we have been wanting for years to work with libraries is because libraries have built strong relationships with people of all sorts of backgrounds. People who don’t trust us, or don’t feel comfortable talking with us, trust and rely on libraries. The people who have participated in LibrariUS thus far are much more diverse in age and race (and ethnicity) than the makeup of the Public Insight Network. I suspect they are more diverse in education and income as well, but we don’t ask for this information.

Anyhow, I don’t have an answer for whom I should be getting to participate in the news. Maybe the answer is to work with ethnic and other media so people who gravitate to them will have more opportunities to participate in their news coverage.

3. One concrete idea for librarian-journalist collaboration that came out of a breakout session was for libraries to train people in how to use the digital recorders that some libraries have to lend out. Journalists could also participate in the trainings to teach interviewing skills. Then newly-equipped community members can go out to collect stories from their neighborhoods, schools, families and places of worship. Journalists could do some training on how to edit audio pieces. Stories would get archived at the library, and also posted to the web — for example, on a map of the neighborhood.

4. A second concrete idea that would be easy to implement is to add links to online news stories that let readers access relevant library databases and other resources. A librarian could recommend useful links.