Nieman Lab predictions don’t always come true, but Terry Parris Jr. is doing his best to make his a reality.
As journalism reached breakneck speed to produce mountains of content for insatiable digital platforms, it “drifted away from where people actually live their lives,” Parris Jr. wrote last year. He predicted 2026 would “push us back toward the physical and tangible in the spaces we work, the ways we engage, and the products we create.” And he pointed to one civic space well positioned to serve as a starting point for that work: libraries.
After several years leading engagement journalism initiatives at ProPublica, The New York Times, and The City (now The City Reporter), and securing an MLIS from library school along the way, Parris Jr. has spent the past year as a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford refining his vision for the Library Newsroom Project. Through the project’s first pilot, a partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library’s Sunset Park branch, a group of community members has published more than a dozen editions of a free, print monthly bulletin called the Sunset Park Sun.
In August, Parris Jr. outlined his vision for “propagating” the Library Newsroom Project’s Brooklyn pilot in other communities around the country. “I once described the larger ambition as opening 16,000 community-led newsrooms, one in every public library in the country,” he wrote. Now, he thinks about the work in more expansive terms. He believes the goal should be “creating 16,000 places where neighbors can look more closely at where they live and make something public from what they find.”
I was curious about many aspects of the Library Newsroom Project (LNP), including other pilots in the works, its origin story, and its possibilities and limits as a form of local news. I sent Parris Jr. a bunch of questions; our email conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
In one paragraph within a nearly 3,000-word memo, I said that we should work with public libraries because they could act as natural partners for local newsrooms. I described them as de facto town squares and information centers. People already went there to use the internet. To get information. To ask for help. Or simply to spend time. Libraries are known, physical, trusted spaces and they are already part of community life.
I got the job, and one of the first things I did was launch a partnership with Brooklyn Public Library that we called the Open Newsroom.
My pitch to the newsroom was simple: For a new nonprofit that no one beyond journalism nerds knew about, libraries offered a way to meet, listen to and potentially work with people who would probably never find us.
At first, that was how I understood a library newsroom project. We began testing it in Brooklyn in the summer of 2019. The Albany project you linked got underway in early 2022 and came from a similar place.
In collaboration with BPL, we chose three Brooklyn branches in Red Hook, Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York and held four public gatherings at each over the course of a year.
Our first gathering, in the early summer of 2019, was in a tiny back room at the Red Hook Library. The neighborhood is home to Red Hook Houses, the largest public housing development in Brooklyn, and most of the roughly 35 people packed into the room were from Red Hook. Maybe six were journalists from outside the neighborhood who had come to observe. Instead, I sent them off to talk amongst themselves about what community meant to them. Basically, I put the journalists in time-out.
The turnout alone felt significant. But what stayed with me was watching neighbors, some of whom knew each other and some who had never met, talk about where they lived and what made their community special.
We asked them a few simple questions: What is good about this place? What is bad about this place? And when you hear about something here, who do you tell? In newsroom-library collaborations, the public is still often treated as the subject or the source or the audience. That evening, the convening was the medium. They were neighbors talking with one another in small groups about what they knew, what they cared about and what they wanted to understand.
More than seven years later, I still remember leaving that first public gathering and thinking: This is it. This is what I want to do. I was floored by how the library had created the conditions for this to just happen.
The disconnect was not a shock. Newsrooms are built to organize around a story, a deadline, and a finished editorial product. The process is relatively controlled, and the destination is recognizable. Community work, civic media or engagement journalism do not always offer that certainty. You may not know the outcome when you begin. The newsroom may have to share control with the community. And the work may lead somewhere other than an article. That can be hard for a newsroom to understand and embrace, especially when it means sharing the work, not controlling every part of it and allowing the process to take time.
Newsrooms have become much more receptive to this kind of work since I started. But even now, the newsroom usually sets the terms. It decides the format, the timeline and what counts as a useful outcome. I became interested in what might happen if residents helped decide those things, too.
Whatever statistic you choose, there is less local news than there used to be, and there will probably continue to be less of it in many places. But even if we could rebuild every newsroom that has disappeared, we would still have another problem: a community can have professional journalism and still remain disconnected from its own historical, community-centric knowledge base.
People may not know one another or know whom to ask. Useful information may be sitting in a WhatsApp group, on a flyer, with a librarian, inside a government database or in the head of someone who has lived on the block for 40 years. This knowledge exists, but it may not travel. It may never become shared, public, useful or durable.
We saw this a lot in Brooklyn. Five people could sit down at the same table and each one would know about a different event, program or resource that the other four wanted to know more about. That is not necessarily a failure of reporting. Most of those things would never become conventional news stories. But it is an information failure. The knowledge is there, and the people who need it are there, but there is no structure connecting them.
That is where the Library Newsroom Project comes in.
Journalism is a tool, and a valuable one, because it offers a structured way to ask questions, evaluate evidence, check claims and make information understandable. The difference is that those practices do not have to remain exclusively inside a newsroom or serve only the production of professional journalism.
Journalism can live inside the public library and allow people to take part in it together.
And I would go one step further and say this is also an evolution libraries can undertake. Libraries have always helped people find, access and understand information. They can also help communities create information for and about themselves. They already provide public space, information exchange, continuity and established community relationships.
I see this as an evolution of local journalism, but perhaps not in the most obvious way. The evolution is not that every newsroom becomes a Library Newsroom. It is that the tools and processes of journalism do not belong only to professional journalists. Communities can use them, too, to understand where they live and share useful information with one another.
The real distinction is what the reporting requires and whether the group can currently do it responsibly. Breaking news, investigations involving confidential sources, serious allegations, physical danger or reporting likely to trigger legal threats require professional editors, lawyers, security practices and an institution prepared to stand behind the work.
In school, we do not teach calculus in the same class where we teach long division. People do not begin with the most advanced subject. That does not mean they can never learn it. If a group cannot pursue a question responsibly, the answer may be to bring in a professional partner, not abandon the question. Resident-led does not have to mean resident-alone.
Plymouth District Library offers one version of that relationship. Its community-led newspaper pairs residents with retired professional journalists who serve as paid mentors. Residents determine and help create the work, while the mentors help them take on reporting subjects that they might not yet be prepared to handle alone.
Construction on the rec center was supposed to be completed in March 2025. It was April. Judith wanted to know: What was actually happening, and when would people be able to use the building again?
With a little help, she started calling and emailing.
No one answered at the recreation center, and the voicemail boxes for operations and maintenance were all full. She submitted a question through the Parks Department’s website. No response. She filed a 311 service request. No response. Then she called the neighborhood’s community board. Someone there answered, confirmed that the center would not reopen that summer, but that it didn’t have a set date, and helped connect her with the Parks Department.
The first response she received from Parks still did not answer her questions. Judith kept going. She contacted the press office, explained everything she had already tried and asked again. Eventually, Parks provided an explanation and a revised timeline: additional work had been discovered during construction and needed to be completed before the building could safely reopen. The agency later gave us a new projected completion date of October 2025.
I’m proud of that story precisely because the original question was so ordinary. Judith wanted her recreation center back. She wanted to play pickleball. But that building is also where neighbors exercise, take classes and spend time together. The fact that its reopening date kept slipping was a legitimate public question, whether or not a professional newsroom would have decided to assign a reporter to it.
The answer mattered, but I was even more interested in publishing how Judith found it. Alongside the update, we included a section called “Resources Used to Find the Answer.” Judith explained the Capital Project Tracker, 311, Community Board 7 and the Parks Department, and what each could help a resident do.
That story contains the entire project in miniature form: a neighbor notices something, asks a question, persists, makes the answer public and leaves behind a path that another neighbor can follow.
That was great. But my favorite part came later, when she described what she did to get that answer to about 25 folks at a public session. It was incredibly funny, informative and empowering for everyone in the room. You could feel them thinking, “We can do this too.”
The Assignment Board, as we call it, began as questions written on paper cards and taped to a whiteboard at the library. It now holds nearly 90 questions, ideas and curiosities generated by residents. People can browse them and pick one. Often the hardest part is knowing where to start. We are building a database that tracks each question from unclaimed to answered. The plan is for it to become a public “front page” where neighbors can browse what the community wants to know, claim a reporting assignment, follow a story as it develops or share information that might help answer a question.
We are also developing another story discovery tool with the not terribly imaginative working title Story Board. The Assignment Board begins with residents’ questions. The Story Board begins with public records. Using a Python script and a custom Claude skill, it turns open data, land-use filings, eviction records, community board minutes and other sources into possible reporting assignments. Each assignment explains what the records appear to show, what remains uncertain, what questions to ask and whom to contact. The point is to turn public data most people would never open into an invitation to start reporting.
The partnership work is also where we are testing governance and funding: who makes which decisions, who does which work and how the money follows that responsibility.
We are beginning to work through that with Voces Ciudadanas, a grassroots Sunset Park organization that builds immigrant leadership through organizing and popular education. We wrote a grant proposal together for a project with neighborhood street vendors. It would include storytelling workshops with vendors, a special issue of the Sunset Park Sun, a printed map and a public walking tour, all beginning with what vendors want their neighbors to understand about their lives and work.
Voces Ciudadanas would lead much of the relationship-building and organizing because it already works with vendors. LNP would support the writing, publishing, and production. The library would provide a public programming space.
The larger experiment is whether working around a specific subject can create another way into LNP, with the people who know that subject best shaping the storytelling from the beginning.
Miami also lets us test what happens when it begins with teenagers rather than with an open, all-ages neighborhood group. It gives us a different rhythm. Sunset Park generally meets monthly; these teenagers will meet weekly. And WLRN gives us a chance to build a newsroom partnership from the beginning while making sure the young people still shape the questions and decide what deserves their attention.
In New Jersey, we have a $68,000 budget for a one-year project with three libraries, in partnership with the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. We are now looking at prospective libraries and learning about the communities they serve. Rather than create three isolated projects, we want to see whether they can form a regional cluster, with shared training, tools, printing and other costs while still building something distinct in each community.
We also need to learn whether that structure works for the branches and communities themselves. A shared organizer could begin as a stranger in all three places. What can be shared across a region, and what depends on someone who already knows the library and its community?
Boston is at an earlier stage. Boston Public Library has identified money in an existing media-literacy budget for a possible year-long project in East Boston. We are discussing how to support a local organizer, journalist, or storyteller to lead the work and looking for a local news partner. That partner might help with training or production, but we are open to building around what it already does well and wants to contribute.
The library itself is a physical place. People can walk into it without subscribing to anything, creating an account or even knowing what to search for. I want the information produced there to have some of those same qualities. It should be something people can encounter, hold, use or gather around.
That is part of what print does for the Sunset Park Sun. It is a bulletin, definitely not a newspaper, that sits inside the library and moves outward into stores, restaurants and community organizations.
But I do not want to mistake the format that worked in Sunset Park for the model itself. Another project might produce a zine, a printed neighborhood map paired with a walking tour, an oral-history collection with a listening station, an exhibition, or a resource guide introduced through public workshops. A podcast might be accompanied by a printed guide and a listening party at the library. The physical and digital can support each other.
Cadence can vary too. Every project really has two rhythms: how often people gather and how often they make something public. Those do not have to match. Sunset Park generally meets and publishes monthly. In Miami, the teenagers will meet weekly but produce two larger public projects, one each semester. Another group might meet monthly and produce a quarterly zine.
I care less about whether something appears every month than whether the rhythm is predictable, useful, and possible to maintain. People should know when they can return, how they can participate, and when the work will come back to them. A beautiful one-time product can be valuable, but by itself it does not create an ongoing community information practice.
The big answer is the idea I started with: There are more than 16,000 public library branches across the country, and each one could become a place where people regularly come together, learn about where they live and make something useful and public.
But success has to be visible long before we reach anything close to that scale. The smaller, and arguably more important, answer begins with one person.
In the playbook [we’re developing], I describe one possible library newsroom progression this way. Strangers become neighbors, neighbors become storytellers, storytellers become collaborators and collaborators become leaders. That is not a ladder everyone is expected to climb. Someone might participate once and learn something useful. Someone else might return, make friends, report a story and eventually help lead the group. Both can matter.
For the group itself, success looks like consistency. I would rather see 10 people return regularly for a year and build something together than have 100 people attend an exciting launch and never come back. Large attendance numbers can be useful, but recurrence tells me whether a practice is actually taking root.
At some point, it also has to stop being a program I bring into a library and become something the library and community know how to hold. The library should know how to support the work. There needs to be a local lead with time to coordinate it, a regular place to meet, and money to support it.
As more projects develop, success means they learn from one another without becoming copies of one another. Knowledge should move sideways among communities, not only downward from LNP. Our role should become less central in more mature pilots as local confidence, relationships, and leadership grow.
And there are plenty of things we can quantify. We can track who returns, how many questions residents generate, what they make public, which languages they use, how the work circulates, and whether people take on new responsibilities. Those measures can tell us a lot.
But the simplest sign of success may be a pronoun. It is when people stop calling it Terry’s project or the Library Newsroom Project and start saying our meeting, our publication, our newsroom, our library. That is when I know the work has begun to belong where it lives.
