Where in the world is public history news?

30 September 2013 – Cathy Stanton

Beginning tomorrow, the weekly Public History News Update (PHNU) emails from the National Council on Public History will be sent only to NCPH members.  So if you’re a non-member who has found these regular messages a handy source of public history information, now is a good time to think about joining NCPH.  And this also seems like a good moment to comment on our evolving efforts at gathering and disseminating news.

Once upon a time, we all relied on print and in-person sources to keep up with what was happening in the field.  The NCPH print newsletter, which is still sent to members quarterly, once contained conference announcements and job postings as well as organizational updates and informative short articles.  With the advent of the Internet, it made much more sense to move those kinds of timely items online.  Public historians were relatively quick to grasp the possibilities of electronic communication, and NCPH became involved in managing the PUBLHIST listserv back in 1995 (the list became H-Public when it joined with the H-Net network three years later).

Nearly 20 years later, the digital landscape has diffused to the point that there’s no longer any single, central source or node for news and information about public history.  People are accessing data and resources in myriad ways, as Rob Townsend’s summary of the findings from our 2012 Readers Survey showed.  Most of us tend to assemble our own repertoire of sources from places all along the print/digital continuum, tailored to our interests and reading preferences.  For instance, I pick up a lot of my public history news on Facebook and email but have never really warmed up to Twitter or reading magazines on tablets, and I do still enjoy sitting down with the print copy of the NCPH newsletter when it arrives in my mailbox.

Except for that newsletter, just about everything NCPH produces in the realm of news is accessible to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection (and even the back copies of the newsletter are available here).  There’s some overlap, and you may be receiving the same information from us via multiple venues.  For example, items from the main News Feed here in the Commons are included in the Public History News Update and also sent out via H-Public. In the not-too-distant future, we hope that a renovation of the NCPH Website will let us create a clearer interface for accessing these various types of continually updated information.  In general, we’re trying to streamline things as much as possible, which has challenged us to keep rethinking and tinkering with things in response to changing technologies and feedback from our various audiences.

So that’s one reason for this post:  we invite you to tell us what’s working well for you, what’s confusing or frustrating, or what would be useful that we’re not providing.

And the other reason for the post is to explain why the Public History News Update —which has now largely taken over the one-stop shopping kind of role that H-Public played for many years—will now be sent only to NCPH members.

The material we send out through our News Feed, newsletter, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and listserv requires a surprising amount of time to gather and format.  A big chunk of that time is spent simply coordinating all the various pieces and working to integrate them into other processes (for example, conference planning and organizational initiatives like our various guides and directories).  This work of news-gathering and dissemination is done by NCPH’s very small staff and a team of volunteers as a service to the field at large.  But we also want to make sure that we’re offering particular benefits to those who are supporting the organization through their membership.

So beginning this week, anyone can still read the News Feed, subscribe to H-Public, “Like” our Facebook page, or follow us on Twitter.  But only members will receive the one-stop “push” PHNU message (meaning it comes to you rather than you having to seek it out somewhere online) that pulls together the various strands of information about public history that we’ve seen flowing around during the week:  links and headlines that we think may be of interest to public historians, conference announcements and calls, organizational news, funding opportunities, headlines of recent History@Work blog posts, and a link to the NCPH job board.

If you’ve been thinking of joining NCPH anyway, maybe this can be the nudge you’ve been waiting for!  And whether you’re a member or not, we’re interested in hearing your feedback on our current news formats, which is helpful as we continue working to streamline and improve them.

~ Cathy Stanton is the Digital Media Editor for the National Council on Public History.