How newsrooms are bringing their archives to life

Chris Moran, editorial lead on generative AI at The Guardian, recently spoke about how his team used AI tools to build an internal chatbot that lets journalists query the archive, as well as an initial experiment with tag pages that pulls from the paper’s archives to create AI-generated summaries of past events. Similarly, L’Eco di Bergamo, a local newspaper in Italy, has used AI to repurpose more than 70 years of obituaries from its archives to create a database for readers to explore their local and family history.

“The first thing newsrooms can start by doing is making it ridiculously easy for their own journalists to discover their internal archives,” Lawal said. “It’s important for the archives not to feel far off and locked away.”

Once a user-friendly internal database is in place in a newsroom, he says, journalists can be encouraged to develop new products and stories from the material.

Archives for institutional memory

Beyond editorial products, some newsrooms are also using their archives to tell the story of the newspaper itself.

Le Roch points me to an example from the French Catholic newspaper La Croix, which a few years ago published a dossier in which they used their archives to address the paper’s antisemetic past.

“I find that very interesting — a newspaper acknowledging and explaining its own history via its archives,” Le Roch said. “Not every newspaper is comfortable doing that. But a paper’s history inevitably shapes the editorial line today. When you write as a journalist, it’s your own voice, but you are also writing under the name of a newspaper with a long history.”

She suggested I speak with the team at Charlie Hebdo about this, and how they use their archives to help onboard new journalists in particular — which seemed like a good idea, because if there is any newspaper that has consequential, complicated history in French media and society, it’s Charlie Hebdo. The satirical weekly paper has long been associated with a combative, irreverent strain of French republicanism, and many people will remember it was the target of a terrorist attack in 2015 that killed 12 people.

Each of the journalists I spoke to there had a lot to say about the role of their archives in shaping their journalism.

Jean-Loup Adénor, the magazine’s deputy editor-in-chief, told me about how new team members are encouraged to spend time in the archive room, reading past issues and books about the paper’s history.

“This allows them to do two things,” says Adénor. “First, to better understand the ideological positioning of the paper and the causes Charlie has defended; and second, to draw inspiration from the tone and the freedom we have in writing here.”

“I’ve worked in more traditional media like France Info and Ouest-France, and there, it’s easy to imagine yourself in a rigid framework,” he explained. “But it’s much harder to project yourself into a free one. That’s what’s both reassuring and intimidating about the freedom here.”

“When I started at Charlie, I wanted to understand exactly what the paper was, so I spent a lot of time in the archives reading old issues,” said Yovan Simovic, a journalist who started at the paper in September 2023. “The editor-in-chief often tells us: You are completely free in your writing here. But that freedom is a bit frightening, and you don’t immediately understand what it means. So going to read the old issues, understanding how they spoke, how they described the world, how they wrote — all of that helped me to understand what he meant. Of course, we don’t want to copy [previous journalists], but it helps to see how free we are by seeing what they were able to write.”

Each of them had a favorite piece from the archive they could point to — for Simovic, it’s a piece of embedded reporting done in Afghanistan by journalist Agathe André, for Adénor it’s the survivors issue published the week after the 2015 attacks — and told me how they’d pinned articles or cartoons from past editions to the walls of the newsroom for inspiration.

Adénor suspects that understanding your newspaper’s history is particularly important at Charlie Hebdo.

“Maybe the emotional attachment to the paper is different at Charlie than at other newsrooms. I’m trying not to be too grandiloquent in what I say, but the fact is, for secular, left-wing, republican-left journalists, working at Charlie Hebdo is not trivial,” Adénor says, referring to the price many of journalists have paid (and continue to pay) to work there.

“I feel a responsibility to do my job as well as possible, and that requires knowing the paper’s history. I’m not a historian, and I don’t aim to become an expert, but I do need to understand the major milestones.”

He feels he owes it to the audience as well.

“Many of our readers have followed the paper for decades. They often know the paper better than we do. So when we receive criticism, it helps to understand where it’s coming from, historically.”

“You feel a kind of responsibility to respect that memory by understanding it,” agreed Etienne Le Page, an intern who started last autumn. “You can’t just write without context. You need to know what happened at the paper in the past, and how the paper functions and continues. That’s something you learn to do by reading past editions of the paper.”