Selling Newspapers’ History, One Print at a Time

Interesting read over on Chicago Reader about what happened to the Chicago Sun-Times’ photo library – and why parts of it are showing up on eBay.

One of the most horrific stories I ever heard was about an editor at a paper who was tired of all the space the photo library was taking up so she ordered the staff to throw everything older than a decade into the dumpster. Untold thousands of prints and negatives, dating back a hundred years, were tossed. Thankfully, one of the staffers worked with the county historical society and they supposedly went dumpster diving to retrieve as much as they could. Which is why I often ended up at the historical society looking for our own photos …

Mark E. Johnson

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