| James Schuyler Linen Is this the moment? No, not yet. When is the moment? Perhaps there is none. Need I persist? This morning I changed bedding. At lunch I watched someone shake out the cloth, fold and stow it in a side- board. Then, the cigarette moment. Now, this moment flows out of me down the pen and writes. I’m glad I have fresh linen. |
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Global Platform Launches to Combat Authoritarian Censorship and Preserve Independent Journalism
“As authoritarian regimes worldwide escalate their assault on independent media, PEN America and Bard College today announcedthe launch of Kronika, a new digital platform designed to safeguard journalism globally and ensure that the historical record cannot be obliterated by censorship. The initiative is an expansion of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA), which PEN America and Bard College launched in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
After three years of focusing primarily on Russian-language media, the project is now providing its expertise and technical solutions for the preservation of media in any language. “What began as a response to escalating censorship in one country is evolving into a global institution to protect independent media everywhere,” said Ilia Venyavkin, Kronika’s director of programs. “With Kronika, we’re opening our tools and partnerships beyond Russia—to any newsroom or civic initiative confronting erasure—so facts remain verifiable, stories remain findable, and history remains public.
The project began when independent Russian outlets were shut down or forced into exile, leaving virtually no independent media operating inside the country. Since 2022, the RIMA project team has built an end-to-end digital preservation pipeline that ingests, processes, and makes materials searchable in both Russian and English, enabling rapid discovery and reuse by journalists, researchers, and the public.
It has preserved a total of 149 independent media archives to date. As RIMA began receiving requests from journalists eager to protect archives in other countries, the project expanded, and was renamed Kronika, meaning “chronicle” in Russian, honoring the ground-breaking periodical The Chronicle of Current Events, which documented Soviet human rights abuses from 1968 to 1983 despite immense risks..”
This photographer is documenting old newspaper newsrooms while they’re still around
Poynter: “Ann Hermes knew her work as a photojournalist would take her to exotic places. And it has — to discover the food markets of Jerusalem, to see hammocks in Honduras and to witness the Arab Spring in Egypt.
But the work that’s closer to home reveals something Hermes is skilled at seeking out. It might look like nostalgia, that’s there for sure, but Hermes is really capturing something else — people and places on the brink of change. She photographed the last Morse code station in the United States, a JCPenney Portrait Studio, and, for several years now, small local newspaper newsrooms.
The idea first started percolating around 2016, as we all got painfully familiar with the term “fake news” and claims that journalists were all elitists. “And for me, it was like, have you been in a local newsroom?” Hermes said. “At the local level, that couldn’t be further from the truth.” The photographer, who worked at Christian Science Monitor, started her career in local newsrooms at the Northwest Arkansas Times in Fayetteville and The Eagle-Tribune on the outskirts of Boston. Her idea for documenting local newspapers grew while visiting family in southern Illinois.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was too thin, her family complained. “And I walked into the newsroom for the first time, and I saw a sea of empty carpet with the outline of where the desks had been,” Hermes said. She thought:
“If I could show my family this scene, they would understand what they’re seeing in the newspaper.” Hermes has visited more than 50 local newspapers since starting her project, which was highlighted last week in The New Yorker.
She ruled out metro newspapers pretty quickly because of the response from corporate, and has mostly focused on family-owned papers, with a few online newsrooms in the project, too. She uses news desert reports from Medill and the University of North Carolina to find the spots she should visit. And the locally-owned places welcome her. “I did not have to explain what I was doing to them,” Hermes said. “They immediately opened up their doors.” In the newsrooms she’s photographed, Hermes often sees familiar echoes: a police scanner, maps, newspaper morgues that no one has had time to digitize yet, tucked away in corners or basements.
There’s often a stapler and the place where it belongs — editorial, photo desk, advertising — written and affixed on it in big bold letters. People who read The New Yorker, and for sure people who read Poynter, will not be surprised by what they see. But Hermes doesn’t just mean for her project to be one about nostalgia.
“The communities that really need to see this work are the communities that haven’t thought about their local paper in a long time and what it would mean to lose their local paper,” she said.
She’d like to work with local institutions, maybe libraries, to display her images in the places where they were made and spark discussions about the newspapers and what they’re facing. “This is for me a love letter to journalism,” Hermes said. “But I do want it to do more than that.”