Newspaper & Mailroom

Rogers Photo Archive to Digitize Fairfax Media Photo Archives

Monday 24. June 2013 - The Rogers Photo Archive, an industry leader in the preservation and digitization of historic photography, has finalized a partnership with Fairfax Media to digitize and catalog all of the company's news photo archives.

Fairfax Media is one of the largest media companies in Australia and New Zealand. Its photographic collections span more than 100 years of history, as covered by publications past and present, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun-Herald, The Age, Sunday Star-Times, Auckland Star, and Dominion Post.
The agreement with Fairfax Media includes the award winning publications The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Australian Financial Review in Australia and 70 national, daily, and community publications in New Zealand.
“This partnership means the preservation and digitization of one of the world’s great photographic collections,” said John Rogers, owner of the Rogers Photo Archive. “Digitization will unlock this vast visual resource and allow the public to share it through Fairfax’s news projects.”
The Rogers Photo Archive has already partnered with more than 20 newspapers and magazines in the United States, including The Miami Herald, (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Sacramento Bee, and Boston Herald. The company is currently digitizing the newspaper archives of the McClatchy Company, the third-largest newspaper company in the U.S.
“For us, this process feels more like a mission than a business,” said John Rogers. “We know we’re in race against time, because historic photographs and negatives grow more fragile as years pass. Storms, flood or fire can completely wipe out a collection in an instant, taking with it the history of a community.”
Because of their age, a number of the Fairfax photo collections had already begun to deteriorate.
Garry Linnell, Fairfax’s Director of News Media, Australian Publishing Media, said: “By digitally archiving the images, we are not only preserving them for future generations, but we’re ensuring the images can be readily accessed by any of our publications, as well as those in the community that are interested.”