Who’s Going to Save Local Newspaper Archives?

The Smokehouse Creek Fire burned through the Texas Panhandle in 2024, eventually making its way to the small, charming town of Canadian. At one point, the entire town was penned in by flames. Laurie Ezzell Brown, the seventy-three-year-old editor and publisher of the Canadian Record, the local newspaper, spent most of her days reporting on the fire, which ultimately burned about 70 percent of the county. As it consumed the rolling hills around Canadian, Brown, whose family has owned the paper since the 1940s, was overcome by a different fear: that the fire would destroy the Record’s archive. “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 around the United States. Sometimes the threat is a natural disaster, as it was in Canadian, but archives are more commonly lost when newspapers shutter, move to smaller offices, or are purchased. Photographs, more time-consuming to digitize than text, are particularly vulnerable, and copyright issues can make repurposing them complex, archivists say. Some newspapers partner with universities to preserve their archives; others turn to libraries and historical societies. Many have no plan at all. When an archive is destroyed, “we’re losing that individual community identity, that voice from this group of people at this point in time,” says Ana Krahmer, an archivist at the University of North Texas.