The Lively Morgue

Sorting News Pictures (undated)

This eye-catching new project from the New York Times covers a more recent time period than the newspapers we’re digitizing for Chronicling America, but is well worth a look for anyone interested in newspaper history; particularly photography.

The paper plans to publish several photographs online each week from its vast archive (“morgue”). To give you an idea of just how vast the archive is, the website states, “If we posted 10 new archival pictures every weekday on Tumblr, just from our print collection, we wouldn’t have the whole thing online until the year 3935.”

Perhaps even more intriguing than the photographs themselves, is the information written and printed on the reverse of each print. This information provides an invaluable insight into the editing and publishing process.