The British Library Newspaper Collection in Colindale is currently digitising 40 million newspaper pages from its vast 750 million collection, eventually anyone around the world will be able to search and access centuries of newspaper stories. Ed King, the head of the collection, describes the library as a “national memory”.
The decisions of editors should be a clear demonstration of what is important to their readership and their wider community. Newspapers give a unique insight into our values and beliefs at any given moment in time and record a level of daily life that is captured nowhere else. Want to know what happened yesterday, last week, last year or fifty years ago? Nine time out of ten an old newspaper is the best place to go.
And if newspapers are a record of how we live then television and radio are no different. How well would we remember Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech if no one had filmed it? And I can’t thank the nameless TV news editor enough who realised how important it was to send a cameraman down to Tilbury docks to film the first set of West Indian immigrants coming off the SS Empire Windrush in 1948.
The importance of newspapers, and news in general, is obvious in the context of national memory. As a news and current affairs editor I am acutely aware of the importance of what a national broadcaster like the BBC decides to record and what we think is not worthy of recording.
However after reading Carlton Dixon’s article on The Real McCoy at 20 on The TVCollective website last week I realised that it is not just news and newspapers that are our national memory but all different genres. What makes us laugh and what makes us cry, and what we like to watch on a Saturday night are just as important in documenting our history as any newspaper article. If future generations want to understand the origins of the current recession we are in it might be more insightful to watch a few of the property programmes that proliferated in the last ten years rather than a few news programmes. If historians want to understand black people’s place in society few newspapers will have recorded it as well as The Real McCoy did (and the same goes for Goodness Gracious Me with regards to Asians). I have no doubt that programmes like the Cosby Show will be just as important to understanding the history of African Americans in the 80’s as 60 Minutes on CBS.
So if newspapers, and the media generally, are our “national memory” then not documenting an event is the same as forgetting. History finds it hard to recall things it can’t see, read, touch or hear. As people from diverse backgrounds we have a responsibility to document today’s stories for the historians of tomorrow.
The first and biggest problem of course is how many of us from BME backgrounds are actually “writing” tomorrow’s history. It is essential that there is more diversity in the media both in front of and behind the camera. This is the only way that we can ensure that not only our history is recorded but also its interpretation is not solely left up to people from white middle-class backgrounds.
The second problem however is while the British Library Newspaper Collection is storing the UK’s “national memory” who is storing ours? Right now in Brixton a purpose built museum is being built to do just that (The Black Cultural Archive) and is due to open in 2012. It will be the first purpose built museum of its kind to document the presence of black people in Europe. I hope it will serve to be the “national memory of black British people”. (You can follow their progress on twitter @bcaheritage)
If we do not solve the first problem then we won’t even have a need to solve the second problem.
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