who we are
The Local Television Legacy Initiative (LTLI) is a national movement dedicated to preserving American local television news — past, present, and future — and to ensuring the public’s right to access it as historical record. Driven by archivists, media makers, and journalists, we argue that local news is vital civic infrastructure. Like a city bridge or school building, media artifacts must be actively maintained or they deteriorate and disappear.
LOSING OUR CULTURAL RECORD
Threats to remaining local television includes intentional destruction, continued deterioration and neglect, and the threat from increasingly hard-to-find obsolete playback equipment. Local TV news captures the texture of daily community life, and the people it covers deserve enduring access to how their stories are, and have been, told — because understanding the past is essential for meeting the future.
initiative goals
- Engage funders, policymakers, and institutional leaders
- Build a national network to rescue at-risk local news collections
- Partner with media corporations to unlock their archival holdings
- Ensure born-digital local television news preserved and accessible in perpetuity
- Connect educators, the public, and researchers to local TV news repositories