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Victoria McCargar, MA '77

In Victoria McCargar's home in Los Angeles, she proudly displays a framed first-day cover bearing a Missouri School of Journalism 50th anniversary commemorative stamp. Such an item doesn't mean much to anyone besides stamp collectors; a first-day cover is nothing more than a special envelope with a newly released stamp.

Not a collector, McCargar, MA '77, instead keeps the memento as a fond reminder of her time at the Missouri School of Journalism and of the late JoAnn Dickerson, the outstanding professor who gave it to her. Like thousands of other students, McCargar has since gone on to do great things. She spent more than 25 years as a reporter and editor with the prestigious Los Angeles Times, and now she's starting her own "crusade" to alert people about preservation of news archives in digital form. But she, like so many others, still carries a piece of the Missouri School of Journalism with her - and it's more than just a stamp.

McCargar returned to Columbia in the summer of 2006 in her new role as a digital preservation consultant. She is a historical archivist of sorts, but her work doesn't take place among the stacks of books and papers in a library. Instead, she is tackling an issue that will become more prevalent with increasing advances in technology: What happens to digital data in the future? Digital information - photos, stories, illustrations -- are incredibly vulnerable to obsolescence, corruption and accidents, becoming irretrievable with software updates or simply disappearing in a hard-disk crash. And it's not a hypothetical problem: Part of McCargar's charge as a consultant for the university is to try to determine whether the Columbia Missourian's own lost archives (1986-2002) can be salvaged. McCargar sees threats to news archives as a cultural and historical crisis, and she's set out to solve the problem. The following interview highlights her journey from journalism to archives and the turns in between.

You started with an undergraduate degree in English at the University of California-San Diego, and you finished with a master's in journalism. How did you get there?
I was doing my undergraduate work during the Vietnam era, when Ronald Reagan (then California's governor) was shutting down communications programs in California. I had thought about writing, but I was also interested in library science. I sort of fell into journalism almost by accident. I didn't set out to be a journalist. For several different reasons, I found myself living in Columbia, Mo., and fell in with J-School grads and thought "this is a lot of fun."

What kinds of hands-on journalism experience did you get when you moved here?
I got a clerk job at the Columbia Daily Tribune cleaning up computer code in wire stories. I decided that as long as I was here, I should get a journalism degree. I surfed in on the Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate tide, when the School of Journalism had the biggest classes since World War II. I started on my master's degree, and I also was promoted to general assignment reporter at the Tribune. It wasn't long before Brian Brooks recruited me for a graduate assistantship working in the slot at the copy desk of the Missourian. I was working for both papers at the same time, but I was a copy editor at one and a reporter at the other. I worked very hard to keep those two things separate, and I needed to eat, so I had to have the Tribune job to put myself through school. Those six-day weeks were good preparation for working at the Los Angeles Times.

Your master's degree from Missouri was in science and medical reporting. What did you take from the program that you still use today?
I am so glad that one of my professors, Joye Patterson, taught me how to listen to scientific jargon. In science reporting, you have to take all this jargon from engineers and scientists and turn it into English. Very few people outside of journalism can do that. For my master's project, I was in charge of putting together a weekly science page for the Tribune. It was a tremendous experience. I did most of the writing myself and used wire services for others, many of which came from the L.A. Times. The Times is known for some great science writers, people I idolized at the time.

You spent more than 25 years at the Los Angeles Times. What took you there?
I had always dreamed of working at the Times, but it seemed such an unattainable goal. It was, and still is, one of the best papers in the country. I moved back to my native Los Angeles after graduation and sort of bounced around some of the papers in the area. And then all of a sudden, because I was a Missouri grad, I got a foot in the door at the Times. They were expanding the business section and hired me. I didn't know anything about business journalism, but I had been to Missouri and had been a copy editor, and that was enough.

Did the status of women in journalism during that period have any effect on your belief that working for the Times was an "unattainable goal?"
There were plenty of women in editorial at the Times, but practically none in news. Most were in features. JoAnn Dickerson, who had been a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, took a job at the L.A. Times in the mid-1970s and became the first woman news editor outside of features. I started working for the business section in 1979. I was the first woman on that desk. It seems hard to believe, because most newsrooms now have more women than men, but it certainly wasn't the case then. I think it's a real privilege to have been on the forefront like that.

You experienced two major cultural shifts in journalism in the 1980s - the growing prevalence of both women and computers in the newsroom. How did you become involved in the industry's electronic boom?
I have always had this technology-geek thing going, so I was given the responsibility at the Times for developing all charts and graphics in the business and financial section. In the pre-desktop publishing days, it would take about two hours with an artist to create a visual. With a little Macintosh computer that Apple gave to the paper, I was able to create a graphic in 20 minutes. I actually created the first computer-generated graphic in the L.A. Times. It completely bypassed the art department infrastructure. One Friday afternoon, one of the senior editors commented on how long I was spending down in the production room with the Mac. I told him, 'Well, if I had my own [computer], I wouldn't have to leave my desk.' The following Monday, there was a Mac and a LaserWriter sitting on my desk. At the time, it cost $7,000 for the LaserWriter and $3,000 for the Mac. Nobody even blinked an eye at spending that kind of money. That one computer morphed into a whole desk of graphics people. There was a whole explosion in graphics in the late 1980s, mainly produced by the Mac. It was another thing I got into on the ground floor.

You were eventually promoted to manager of the art department at the L.A. Times, which was almost entirely computer-based by that time. What was one of your major obstacles?
I began to perceive the problem of not being able to find computer files. We would build a map or drawing and then couldn't find it later. So, in the mid-1990s, I worked on building a database for Times graphics. Everybody loved it, and it was - and still is - state-of-the-art. It was a really fun project, and I'm still really proud of it because it's still being used.

Creating the graphics database was a step in the right direction, but you said you started noticing some problems.
For some time, I had noticed that the software used for the graphics in the database was quickly outdated. You could go to retrieve a file, but it would be a mess, or you couldn't open it, because the software used to create it was obsolete. We had versions of maps and things that weren't compatible with updated hardware and software. I began asking around the industry about how to solve this problem, and nobody had a satisfactory answer. All of the newspaper geeks kept telling me that "you just need to upgrade." But that actually made the problem worse.

With electronic data gradually disappearing and no solutions, what did you decide to do?
This problem was literally waking me up at night. I decided I had better go to library school because that's where they're figuring it out. So at the age of 45, I enrolled in the Master of Library and Information Science program at UCLA, thinking I would be the oldest student there, but I wasn't. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to hit the department when the faculty was really beginning to study this issue of electronic archiving. They had ties to the National Archives and were working with researchers around the world to look at the issue.

Academics were starting to look at this issue of digital preservation, but the journalism industry was not. How did you start to bridge this gap?
This issue was unknown to the newspaper industry. To a major extent, it still is. We really need to find another word for "archives," because it makes people's eyes glaze over. When editors and publishers are writing checks, they don't want to write checks for archives. The research I did at UCLA, if at all possible, was anchored in newspapers and journalism and what preserving electronic communication means to that industry and to history. I felt like I had to get the word out. If we're not smart about this, we won't have a legacy to leave for future generations.

You have since committed your career to this issue, leaving the L.A. Times in 2005 to become a consultant. How have you adjusted to the career change?
I had really been a gadfly in digital archiving. It was just something I did. Now I'm totally a "free radical," to put it in the physics sense. I don't answer to anybody except myself. I started out by just trying to understand what people were saying at conferences and in writing. But now it's gratifying because more and more people are coming to me for advice.

Who are some of your clients and colleagues joining you in the discussions of electronic preservation?
I've attended conferences and spoken to people all over the country. My clients include the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times and its parent, Tribune Co., a major philanthropic foundation, and others are in the works. I've met a lot of really interesting people along the way. I've met with archivists from Disney and Universal Studios, the Getty Center, the Library of Congress, the National Archives and others. There is a whole body of people interested in this issue, but I'm often the only person in the conversation with experience in a for-profit environment.

Why should the regular person be concerned about digital preservation?
I talk to a lot of people who buy a 50-year guaranteed CD, thinking it's going to last forever. They think they can put priceless baby pictures and family pictures on those CDs and be able to open them up to show their grandchildren someday. The CD will be there, but the data might not be. You won't have a machine that will run it.

From a historic perspective, why is this issue important?
The technical implications of this issue are so interesting. Look at photojournalism coming out of stories like the African AIDS epidemic. If people in the future don't know about that kind of thing, it would be devastating for mankind on a profound level, wouldn't it? This is like a religious crusade for me. It isn't just something I do; it's a really serious passion. Somebody has to do it, and I guess it's me.

You left a long and successful career in journalism to follow this passion. What convinced you that you were making the right decision?
I had shared in three staff Pulitzers at the L.A. Times and had done a lot of rewarding work. I felt like I didn't have anything left to prove professionally, and I thought, "What an interesting time to do something else." I put my career into free fall. I still believe that if you get too comfortable at your job, and it's not challenging you anymore, take a risk and see what happens.

What advice do you have for the students as they try to manage the uncertain digital future of communications?
Make friends with your librarians or someone trained in library and information science. I think it's really important for journalists, in this Gutenberg-like revolutionary era with technology, to understand what you're looking at in terms of information. Who's it from? What is it? Is it authentic? What's not on the Web? You have to understand the matrix of information. Thinking from a journalism standpoint, there's something rather sinister about Google. The Google algorithms popularize what's already popular. It rewards conventional wisdom. The journalists who only bother to look at the top of search results are only seeing the most conventional belief, which might be popular but biased or even wrong. I think every journalism student should have a course in search engines. Talk about eyes glazing over! But it's important.

We talked about history. What about journalists' legacy?
Ask the question, who gets to write history? The feds, believe it or not, are on the forefront in digital preservation. That means that what is likely to be available in the future, in terms of documents, is the government's version. Journalists have traditionally been the balance to that, if you will, but if their story isn't part of record, what will the public end up with? They need to be asking their editors, "Where is this story, this picture, going to be in 50 years?"

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