Talk:List of newspapers in North Carolina

message: I finished reformatting this table.  It now has a column for references, title, more abbreviated city location, and highlighted row headers.   There are a lot more dates of establishment that are known from the linked articles that need to be inserted to make the table more complete.
 16:31, 5 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The "List of newspapers" section heading is basically redundant to the title of the article "List of newspapers in North Carolina" and probably shouldn't be named as such; moreover, it might be better to break this long list up in to further subsections. Not only will this make it easier to edit and expand the article, it will also make it easier for readers to find certain newspapers faster without having to scroll through the entire list. The easist way to do this would be alphabetically such as by individual letters or by a range of letters, but it also could be done by type of paper such as "Daily", "Weekly", "University", "Free", etc. or even by geographic location. Right now, every time some tries to edit the list, they're going to open one big long editing window full of code; so, if two people try to edit the list at the same time, there will be a good chance of an edit conflict which might make make editing a bit more difficult and also might increase the chances of accidental formatting or syntax errors being introduced when editing. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:46, 11 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Reformat

message: I am using this process to update this list of North Carolina newspapers:
* Check the Library of Congress database for North Carolina newspapers and insert missing ones in alphabetical order in this article.  Done 15:27, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Checklist and TTD

message: This list currently seems to rely to a considerable extent on the data provided by the Library of Congress Chronicling America project for whether a newspaper is "current" or not.  I think there are some problems with this solution.
A general problem with evaluating the information in Chronicling America is that both the pages and the underlying MARC records typically fail to identify the creator or the last modification date. (The last modification should be recorded in MARC field 005, but most (all?) Chronicling America MARC records lack this field). Many Chronicling America records were originally created in the 1970s or 1980s. So even presuming the entries were 100% accurate at the time of creation, it's very hard to gauge whether they have any bearing on the paper's status today.  In other states, I've come across Quite A Few newspapers that are still marked as "current" in Chronicling America but verifiably folded decades ago.  Here are a couple of less dramatic, but troubling, North Carolina examples:
* The Challenger (Wilmington): "current" in MARC record, marked as "permanently closed" on Yelp, no indication of recent activity I can find.
* Black Ink (UNC): "current" in MARC record, marked as shut down in "200?" elsewhere, no indication of recent activity I can find.
Most actually-current newspapers have a website or social media feed that provides ongoing evidence of their currentness; for them, this is a largely academic issue. (But even that evidence, of course, is not entirely reliable; abandoned websites get taken over, and social media feeds for smaller newspapers in particular often live on in a zombie existence simply reposting links from elsewhere, years after the actual newspaper has shut down.)  For those that don't have an online presence, I'd want to see some kind of recent secondary mention that indicates the newspaper is out there in the physical world doing stuff; the fact that the LOC hosts a record that indicates the newspaper was "current" at the unknown date when the record was last updated doesn't really tell us anything.
So overall, I'd suggest that while Chronicling America is often reliable for other bibliographic information (with various caveats), it is basically useless for evaluating whether a newspaper is current.
IMO this issue highlights a broader problem with using current/defunct for the top-level split in these lists: there will always be a nontrivial set of lower-profile newspapers for which currentness is difficult or impossible to verify.  (I don't think this could be addressed by changing the list criteria, because these newspapers may be articleworthy as well as listworthy, since their low profile today isn't necessarily representative of how much attention they garnered in the past.)  
In any event, it's GREAT to see the work being done here!  -- Visviva (talk) 08:09, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  The problem of currentness