Posted by Bud on December 23, 2009 at 12:04:15:
Sun-Times Media photo archive buyer John Rogers: 'The papers always wonder what's the catch'
The buyer of the Sun-Times Media photo archive, the sale of which was reported in Sunday’s column, has come forward: His name is John Rogers, and he’s an Arkansas entrepreneur who got into the photo acquisition and digitizing business by way of his baseball memorabilia collection.
Rogers, 36, made headlines last year for his $1.6 million purchase of a rare 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card at auction. He has been buying photo libraries individual photographers, including the estates of Arthur Rickerby, Don Wingfield and Barney Stein, as well as for publications, such as Sport magazine, the Denver Post and Detroit News.
Sun-Times Media on Monday confirmed he was the buyer of its library, which includes vintage Sun-Times and Daily News photographs.
Rogers said sportscaster George Michael, best known for the years he had a syndicated Sunday-night highlight show, “The George Michael Sports Machine,” is a consultant on his deals and, like Rogers, also a collector.
“My company purchased the Sun-Times archive, their photos and negatives,” Rogers said. “I won’t be able to give you the exact terms of the deal because of confidentiality (agreements), but essentially we gave them several million dollars in cash and services. … My staff takes their archive and gives them a full digital representation with keywords, captions, dates, all the pertinent information so they can be in 2010 as opposed to 1970.”
In the case of some archives he acquires, Rogers picks up the copyrights and can license the images himself.
Sun-Times Media, like other newspapers, retained the rights to the images and will be better able to organize and manage them after the digital conversion and cataloguing is completed over the next 18 months, Rogers said. His Rogers Photo Archives, meanwhile, gets the hard assets to keep or sell.
Said Rogers: “The papers always wonder what’s the catch: ‘You’re going to give us lots of money and you’re going to digitize it for free, which costs millions of dollars?’ What do you get?’ We get the photos. They don’t get why someone would care about old photos.”
Some of the Sun-Times Media photos already are showing up for sale online. Rogers said early offerings tend to be modern images of well-known figures of which there are duplicates, such as multiple versions of the same shot of Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan.
“I am a vintage collector first,” Rogers said. “The photos you saw on eBay were all duplicit in nature. We cull the duplicates first so we don’t have to digitize them multiple times.”
They don’t bring in much money – usually around $10 to $20 apiece, if they sell at all – and are sold, according to Rogers, only to make it possible to support his collection, which retains the bulk of the photos. His primary interest is in pre-1960 images and sportscaster Michael has an interest in vintage baseball shots, he said.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which recalled Rogers played football at Louisiana Tech, noted that his businesses also include a group of daycare centers. Arkansas Business named him to its "40 Under 40," although Rogers disputes the publications’ assertion his archives' "images are expected to generate about $4.5 million annually” from other media outlets that want to use them.
"We're at liberty to do whatever we want to with those (original photos and negatives)," Rogers said by phone. "When we hand (the newspapers) the digital product back and they start leasing these things to the public and making posters or whatever they're going to do, that's 100 percent them."
Those who object to media organizations selling a photo archive as part of their efforts to tap all possible assets often say they would prefer outlets make them images available to an institution that will treat the library as a historical resources. A private buyer is going to value the famous and already well-documented over ordinary images that document a city at a given time.
“That’s the biggest misconception, Rogers said. “Local interest does well for us. Let’s say it’s a (picture of a) downtown building in Chicago. Well, there are thousands of people whose parents and grandparents worked in that building. They have memories of being there as a child and they want that photo. Everybody assumes that Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and John Kennedy are what sell. We do just as well with mundane images.
“What we’ve found out over the last 15 years is that … you can find Babe Ruth always. What you can’t find are the mundane images. I scoured the Internet for images of North Little Rock, where I live, and if it’s an original photo from the ’40s and I want it for my archive, the truth is that rarely will you find it.”
Photos of relevance to particular institutions also are donated to them as they, Rogers said.
Rogers waxes eloquent as he talks about the pictures from the Rickerby archive of photos from Dallas on the day President John Kennedy was shot. Most were not published at the time, but they tell their own story, Rogers said. There are shots of Jackie Kennedy with a bouquet of roses earlier in the day and a photo of the flowers scattered in the back of the car after arriving at the hospital where her husband was pronounced dead.
So Rogers shrugs off those who would say he doesn’t respect what he has acquired.
“The people that get up in arms are the people that don’t have the money to buy it,” Rogers said.