More than 40 million newspaper photographs and negatives from New Zealand and Australia will soon be loaded onto cargo ships and dispatched to North Little Rock, where they will be digitally copied.
After the first shipment of photographs arrive in June, another shipment of the same size will arrive in December, and more photographs from other countries will follow as Rogers Photo Archive starts to establish an international footprint.
After a brief roadblock, the company received word last week that the New Zealand government would allow it to transport the photographs out of the country - finalizing the company’s first international partnership, which owner John Rogers said is key to his business’ growth.
“This was such a monumental deal for our company,” he said.
The partnership between Rogers Photo Archive and Fairfax Media will allow Rogers to digitally archive photographs and negatives from 71 of the New Zealand media company’s newspapers and to keep the original prints.
As with his other partnerships with newspapers, the digitized photographs will be returned to Fairfax Media.
Rogers said the deal is a partnership with the media company because he will own the original prints and negatives and share licensing rights with Fairfax Media.
The deal was briefly stalled earlier this month when the legality of the transaction was questioned.
Under New Zealand’s Protected Objects Act, formerly known as the Antiquities Act, anyone planning to export treasured items, including photographs more than 50 years old, must get a license from a government agency, The New Zealand Herald reported.
David Butts, manager of heritage operations for New Zealand’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage, told The New Zealand Herald that he would “be drawing the provisions of the act to Fairfax’s attention.”
Rogers said it took some negotiating, but his attorneys and the government were able to come to an agreement: The company can take the photographs, but it has to return any that are deemed unique and historic to the country.
“They wanted to protect themselves in the event that we have the only known image of an event, person or place,” Rogers said. “It delayed everything for several days, but in the end everything worked out perfectly.”
He said he expects the company will end up returning a few thousand images when it is done sorting them.
Rogers Photo Archive will receive about 100 million photographs in the deal.
Rogers said the new partnership with Fairfax Media has taught him lessons that can be used as the company begins to expand its operations internationally.
“I’m glad it happened as a business owner because last thing we want to do is ruffle any feathers,” he said. “It set a good precedent that we can come into a country and work with the government.”
The company already has employees in Hong Kong, and it is in talks with a company about a large archive, which Rogers would not name.
He said he plans to go to Europe this summer to start recruiting newspapers on the continent.
Rogers expanded the business in January by adding to his North Little Rock facility and hiring 40 people. The company has 90 employees in North Little Rock, 40 in Memphis and 200 in Calcutta and Banglaore, India.
The company’s workers in the U.S. organize and clean the negatives and prints before they are scanned, and the workers in India label and tag the photographs.
Rogers said the company, which is currently digitizing photographs from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, will also continue to pursue newspaper archives in the U.S.
The company has worked with 30 newspapers so far, including the Detroit News, Chicago Sun Times, Denver Post, Boston Herald and Seattle Times.
Rogers, who got his start as a collector of sports memorabilia, said working with newspapers is a “profitable business” because many news organizations have the photographs and negatives but not the resources to make digital copies.
“It’s a partnership that has worked out with the papers,” he said. “Because it allows them to take a nonperforming asset and make it a revenue producer.”
Digitizing photographs also makes it easier to look up photos for research, and it can have a potential financial benefit for newspapers, said Stephen Buckley, the dean of faculty at The Poynter Institute.
“For a lot of newspapers, there are financial implications because users can do searches and find things via digitization and newspapers can charge for that,” he said. “Financial gain is a potential.”
Business, Pages 29 on 05/25/2013