Syracuse.com has a good interview with Pete Hamill with lots of stuff about newspapers and their demise.
Pete talks about the "old" days in newspaper journalism and offers some opinions about the future. He makes a really good point about the eventual destruction of newspaper libraries and what that will mean to historians.
When I first started at the Journal it had a Class A newspaper library. While many of those files remain, I'm not sure what attention is being paid to its maintenance.
Here's a couple snippets I liked from the fairly long Q&A.
"The Huffingtonpost.com does not pay its writers. Tina Browns’ thedailybeast.com does pay its writers. You have to be paid because this is not a hobby. You have to keep that standard. You can’t ask grandpa to loan you money because you have to go to Afghanistan. I walked the picket line for that to continue. "
"I’m so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers. I know from writing historical novels, one of the great sources is bound volumes (of newspapers). They tell you all the detail that historians don’t. How much was a pair of shoes. What did a guy pay to go to the ballpark in 1934 during the Depression. How many people where there? The detail, you could find in the morgues, the bound volumes that have the advertising. At the very least there ought to be grant money somewhere to scan every page of it."
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4 comments:
I hear the Bay City Times threw out its photo archives.
Into a dumpster.
Including pics of a presidential visit to the city.
It's a freaking crime, Jim.
Say it ain't so. Newspaper libraries are critical enough to future historians that were I a history professor at a local university or college I would beg for permission to take them over and save them.
Newspapers are instant history. Certainly it is not complete, or even correct history, but the details are important to historians.
This is serious collateral damage.
You are absolutely right. One good thing about the closing of the Ann Arbor News is that the Ann Arbor Library agreed to take all of their archives. I really appreciate that! (Although the director of the library recently pointed out that the cost of dealing with all that material--while a huge bonus--also has some costs attached.)
"I hear the Bay City Times threw out its photo archives.
Into a dumpster.
Including pics of a presidential visit to the city.
It's a freaking crime, Jim."
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That is is, anon, that it is.
If this is indeed the case, what's going on up in Bay City? They got a space problem in that building of theirs?
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