Help us save the digital archives of local newsrooms

A clear tub of five years of newspaper clippings are basically all I have to show for my first journalism job. All that work was published online, too. But with several changes in the content management system in the 26 years since I started at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, only four of those stories still live on that newsroom’s site.

I’ve reported on the work journalists have to do to save their own digital archives for years. And I’ve always thought of it more as an individual issue. But of course it’s way bigger than that. When I reported my book on old Florida hotels, newspaper archives through newspapers.com were a huge and vital part of my research. Often, the hotels claimed they’d opened in different years than reporting at the time showed. The polished stories those places told about their own history were sometimes different than the actual reported record of what happened.