Tales From the Newsroom: The morgue
A reporter’s best friend was the in-house archive
It was called the morgue — but it was really a very specialized archive.
Every mid-size or larger newspaper had one — an entire room dedicated to the paper’s own back issues. Even most weekly and small dailies had one, as well.
Each morgue was slightly different, mind you, but all of them had a way of making their coverage history accessible to reporters in the age before digitized data storage.
When I was stringing for the old San Diego Evening Tribune in the late 1980s, if I was assigned to do an interview with a local or even touring musician, my editor would send a request over to the “Research Desk” (as they preferred to be called) and a day or so later I’d have photocopies of every article we’d ever run on that person. A decade later, when I was working full-time at the merged San Diego Union-Tribune as a reporter for their website, I could go down to the morgue myself, fill out a chit, and get everything either paper had ever written on the subject I was working on.
And if we needed a photo, we could request that, too. Even photos that hadn’t been published but were taken at an event or of a local personality could be requested from the photo editor.
It was an incredible resource.
Except for maybe the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, I don’t think too many papers have a physical morgue any longer.
The Digital Age was going to save us, make all those old clippings and microfiche and bound copies obsolete.
As recently as the late 1990s, nearly every paper in the country had one or more folks dedicated to going through the latest edition (or editions, if the paper zoned its coverage for different communities). Every local article would be cut out, the date hand-written or stamped on the top, and then sorted into the appropriate folder in a bank of four-drawer file cabinets.
Since many articles would be filed into two or more folders (a story about a city council meeting might cover 2-3 different topics; a sports story might interview a coach and several players by name), the staffer doing this important archiving would typically start with a stack of 5-8 papers. And, of course, the story on the page you were currently cutting up meant the articles on the back of that sheet were lost, so you needed 2 copies minimum.
Newly hired archivists, or those at fancy papers, might use scissors to cut out stories; most, though, found it quicker to use the edge of a metal ruler (generally one made for typesetting and thus using picas as a measurement unit, giving them the name “pica pole”) to pull up against. Since advertisers were sent a whole page thus separated from its other half, articles that were cut using a ruler edge became known as “tearsheets.”
This may have seemed like overkill, to create a folder for every high school football player who was interviewed — but we had no idea that, say, Junior Seau would go on to an NFL career down the road and those earlier stories of him in high school would become an invaluable resource in covering him in the years to come.
Ron Packard started off as a school board member in Carlsbad, Calif. Went on to the City Council, then ran for Congress, and became chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee. Those old articles offered information about his career that might otherwise have been lost.
By the 1970s, most papers were sending a copy of each day’s edition to a company that would take a photo of every page and assemble these into a roll of film known a microfilm — which could be viewed on a specialized back-lit projector. Later, smaller sheets of film could hold a miniaturized image of each page that could be viewed on its own projector- technology known as microfiche. Many more issues of a paper could be stored in the same space on microfiche as compared to microfilm.
In the paper’s archive (morgue), you would find cabinets holding every back issue on microfilm or microfiche, organized by year, month and date. Alongside these would be the clip files, organized by subject matter. So reporters could either pull specific articles by subject matter or, if they knew roughly when an event had occurred in the past, do a deep dive on microfilm or microfiche and review the paper’s ongoing coverage of that event.
And each paper also usually had bound editions — every day’s paper stitched together into book form with a hard cover, usually containing a month’s worth of papers — maybe less at an outfit like the New York Times, where the papers were thicker than in a small town like Des Moines or Albuquerque.
As newspapers began moving to digital design and layout, rather than putting the paper together with razors and hot wax, it was soon possible to save each page of a paper as a PDF file — far cheaper than sending it off to have a microfilm or microfiche copy made, and in many ways more reliable as it could be automated — ensuring no pages or issues were accidentally lost.
At the same time, since the papers were being assembled in page-design software like Quark “Xpress” and Adobe “InDesign,” those articles already existed in digital format — often written in Microsoft Word or another similar word processor. Storing them in a sortable database allowed reporters working on a story to quickly see what other stories had been written on that topic without having to ask a staff librarian to sort through file cabinets of clippings, or microfilm or microfiche.
By the early 2000s, many papers had stopped having microfilm and microfiche made, along with bound copies. Once the economy tanked and newspaper circulation began shrinking, research librarians were among the first positions to be cut.
About 15 years ago, while still on staff at an 85,000 circulation daily, I stopped clipping my own articles.
Like most reporters, I’d saved every article I’d ever written — the best ones were good to have on file to show prospective employers as you tried to move up to a bigger paper that paid better, but ego also played a part in it.
Each day, I’d mirror the efforts of our staff archivist, going through the day’s paper cutting out my own articles to sort into a file cabinet at home.
But with our newspaper’s archive having moved online, and thinking I’d have access to it forever, I stopped clipping my articles.
When our paper was bought out by the larger competition 12 years ago, they acquired all our history, too.
But once they merged our website into theirs, I began noticing that some of my articles were no longer showing up in searches. (I had linked most of my arts coverage off of my personal web site, which was getting a lot of broken links.)
Through two more corporate purchases, even more articles have disappeared from the online archive.
A lot of those interviews with musicians would be good to have as I still actively cover jazz and blues. And I might want to write a memoir someday, even just privately for my kids to let them know what their old man did for a living.
Fortunately, our paper did still send out for microfilm and microfiche and bound editions, and the local historical society acquired all the hard copies when we were sold.
As I still have that list of links, I know which dates I’m looking for. It will just be a matter of investing some time to visit the local history museum, to fill out a request form, and then wait for a researcher to pull that copy for me, for a small fee.
Kind of like when I first started off in this business.
-30-
Jim,
Thank you for another fine column.
Well done sir.
Keep up the good work.
Tilt
The more things change; the more they stay the same...