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The Smokehouse Creek Fire swept through the Texas Panhandle in 2024, eventually reaching the charming little town of Canadian. At one point, the entire city was surrounded by flames. Laurie Ezzell Brown, seventy-three years old, editor and publisher of the Canadian recordthe local newspaper, spent most of its days reporting on the fire, which ultimately burned about 70 percent of the county. As it consumed the hills around Canada, Brown, whose family has owned the newspaper since the 1940s, was overcome by a different fear: that the fire would destroy the RecordThe file of. “I would have been devastated,” she said. “It’s not just the history of this community. It’s the history of my family. It’s who we are. It’s what we’ve done.”
Newspaper archives are at risk across the United States. Sometimes the threat is a natural disaster, as happened in Canada, but files are more commonly lost when newspapers close, move to smaller offices or are purchased. Photographs, which take more time to digitize than text, are particularly vulnerable, and copyright issues can make their reuse complex, archivists say. Some newspapers partner with universities to preserve their archives; others turn to libraries and historical societies. Many have no plan. When an archive is destroyed, “we’re losing that individual community identity, that voice of this group of people right now,” says Ana Krahmer, an archivist at the University of North Texas.
Frank LoMonte, a law professor at the University of Georgia who has studied the loss of local newspaper photo archives, estimates that only a small minority of newspapers have the financial resources and foresight to proactively safeguard their archives. LoMonte is especially concerned with unpublished photographs because they provide an unfiltered perspective on what life was like and offer a window into how editors of the time chose to portray major news events and what they chose not to include. “The loss to history from the purge of photographic morgues is unquantifiable,” he said.
In the 2000s, Marianne Mather worked as a photojournalist in Aurora, Illinois, Beacon-News and the elgin Courier-Newsboth property of Chicago Sun-Times. Years later, she was working at the Chicago Grandstand when its parent company bought part of Sun-Times’ papers and was curious to know what was left of his photographic archives. “There was barely anything,” he said. Mather had worked at those newspapers for more than a decade, but discovered that only two of his photographs remained in the archive. She and two other former employees said many of the photographs had been lost during layoffs and consolidations between the brands; some were even thrown into a dumpster, according to Jim Svehla, who was the Naperville SunThe photo editor when they were discarded.
Mather knows the value of preserving published and unpublished photographs. In 2016, he spent two days searching the Grandstand’s before finding what he had been looking for: a previously unseen photograph of then-presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders being arrested at a 1963 civil rights protest in Chicago. The photo cleared up doubts about Sanders’ involvement in the movement. “I held it up to the light, the acetate negative, and said, ‘I think we’ve got it,’” Mather recalled. “It was amazing.”
The University of Louisville spent years trying to acquire Louisville’s photographic archive. Courier diarybut the newspaper’s owner, Gannett, held out in hopes of finding someone willing to pay, said Cassidy Meurer, a university archivist. In 2022, when the Courier diary The process of moving to a smaller office began, with Gannett eventually agreeing to donate the archive to the school. The collection includes approximately 10 million photographs, Meurer said, which are in the process of being digitized. “It’s not just a window to great historical moments,” he said. “It’s also a window into everyday life and how things felt in a very different time.”
Back in the Texas Panhandle, the fire saved the Canadian recordBut the near miss prompted Brown to begin donating his newspaper’s archives to the University of North Texas Digital Newspaper Program, which preserves newspapers from around the state. He Record It stopped publishing a print edition in 2023, but Brown maintained a digital edition with his personal savings. Whatever happens, he knows the archives won’t be lost: He turned in the last batch of back issues to the university in June and plans to donate the photo archive as well. “They’re out of here,” he said. “And they are in a safe place.”