BoSacks Speaks Out: The Vanishing Memory of America’s Newspapers

Let me be blunt. We’re torching our history. Not metaphorically. Literally. The archives of America’s local newspapers, the photographs, the negatives, the visual heartbeat of our communities, are disappearing. Fast.

The Wake-Up Call in Texas

The Canadian Record nearly went up in flames during the 2024 wildfires. One spark away from losing decades of community memory. Weddings, funerals, football games, and floods are all nearly gone. Thankfully, the editor acted. The archive now lives at the University of North Texas. That’s what I call editorial foresight. But how many others didn’t act in time?

Dumpster Fires of Forgetfulness

In Illinois, a photojournalist found her life’s work, published and unpublished, dumped during a corporate consolidation. A decade of visual storytelling was trashed. That’s not just a loss of images. That’s cultural amnesia. A community lobotomy. You can rebuild a website. You can’t reprint the soul of a town.

Ten Million Reasons to Pay Attention

Contrast that with Louisville. The University of Louisville stepped in and saved the Courier-Journal’s photo archive, containing 10 million images. That’s institutional wisdom. That’s understanding that journalism isn’t just about today’s headlines, it’s about tomorrow’s historians.

The Gold Nobody Sees

Here’s the kicker: the most valuable photos are the ones that never made it to print. The outtakes. The contact sheets. The raw, unfiltered truth. They show what editors chose, and what they didn’t. That’s the real story. Digitizing them is messy, slow, and expensive. But it’s the kind of mess worth making.

When a newspaper loses its archive, it loses its DNA. We talk about journalism preserving democracy. But what good is democracy without memory? Every lost photo is a page ripped from our collective story.

Universities and libraries are doing heroic work. But they can’t save what they never receive. So, here’s my call to action: Publishers, editors, historians, get off your butts. Find the boxes. The negatives. The forgotten hard drives. Partner with a library. Apply for grants. Start a GoFundMe. Because once history hits the dumpster, it doesn’t climb back out.

Perspective Check

Life Magazine partnered with Google to digitize millions of images. World wars. County fairs. All online. That’s the model. Now imagine if The Des Moines Register, The Asheville Citizen-Times, or The Santa Fe New Mexican did the same. Imagine if every local paper gave its archive a digital afterlife.

The difference between memory and oblivion isn’t money. It’s willpower.

BoSacks Final Thought

Newspapers tell us what happened today. Archives remind us who we are. Save them both.