This has long been a pet peeve of mine, and it somewhat collides with the other lamentable practice of microfilming old newsprint, and then throwing away the original. If the original microfilm deteriorates and is not digitized, you could be left with nothing. Or worse yet, if there never was any microfilm to begin with, it cannot be digitized. If it does exist, it is often behind a paywall, and not in any public archive. There are exceptions, and various countries do things differently. I recently discovered that a local printshop will scan original newspapers for me at high resolution, and the results are astounding. This is with large format CCD scanners (not a drum or flatbed scanner) that are usually used for blueprints and such, so the scans are quick and excellent quality. I’ve scanned a few dozen pages of rare extra edition headlines that also didn’t get microfilmed, and thus did not get preserved anywhere, apart from any surviving hardcopies. This was completely a private initiative of mine, but I wish we saw more initiatives like it. The Internet Archive is leading the charge here, but only with a fraction of the world’s knowledge.
News archives are one of the most commonly used sources of knowledge, when it comes to writing history or genealogical research. Without them, gaps begin to appear that may never be recovered.
