The raging tornado that clawed its way up the banks of the muddy Mississippi river on May 7, 1840, couldn’t have hit at a worse possible time. River traffic was high on a Friday afternoon and the massive storm was wide enough to deal death on both sides of the water. The “official” death toll is listed at 137 to this day, but it’s extremely doubtful that even one African American death was noted in the tally for the day’s newspapers.

Even 50 to 80 years later, in many parts of the country, white newspaper owners did not record the deaths of African Americans.

So-called “black newspapers” have since grown up over the years to become powerful record keepers of a segment of society sometimes relegated to the sidelines by the mainstream media.

Many of these are small community newspapers, with few advanced IT resources, and very little emphasis placed on the value of their store of historical data.

That’s about to change. A partnership between leading black media placement firm Amalgamated Publishers Inc. and Ninestars Information Technology Ltd. has been created to embark on the process of digitizing reams of back-issues from more than 200 black newspapers throughout the United States.

Single portal

The final, fully Internet-searchable information database will be made available to each individual paper. The hope is eventually to create a master, Internet-enabled portal database. Anyone from the merely curious to historical scholars will be able to take a tour through history from the perspective of the black newspaper.  

Mark Channing, chief financial officer at New York-based Amalgamated Publishers, said the project’s goal is to make black newspapers’ information resources available to a wide audience, something that might not occur on an individual or paper-by-paper basis.

“Many of the newspapers that we represent go back well over 100 years,” Channing said. “Most, if not all of them, were founded not for business reasons, but for social and political reasons. Because of that, for the most part, they are undercapitalized. Many of them have no means of preserving their archives. Some of them have put [the back issues] on microfilm, but unfortunately some of them are just rotting away in back rooms because the paper can’t afford to do anything to preserve them.”

Channing said that the combination of all these papers represents an enormous historical pool of information that is not available anywhere else. Throughout history, the papers have covered events and issues from the viewpoint of the African American community in a way that mainstream papers haven’t.

Chicago test bed

In 2004, Amalgamated began digitizing the archives of two black papers earmarked to serve as a test bed for the project. Stories from the Chicago Crusader and the Gary (Ind.) Crusader have already been converted to digital form and the content is now at Ninestars’ Chennai, India, facility where it’s being processed and evaluated.  

From there, Channing envisions making a program available to Amalgamated’s other newspaper clients.

Each paper would have a copy of that archive available to use as they see fit. The goal: the creation of a fully searchable Internet database covering each member newspaper’s entire archives.

Research could be conducted for free, but users would pay a fee to access an entire article or print a copy, a business model already employed by major media heavyweights such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Recoup investment

Channing said this approach would let Amalgamated recoup some of the original capital spent to digitize papers’ content. A small percentage of the fee would also go to the newspaper providing the content, he said.

In addition to providing a different perspective on the news, another advantage of the digital archive would be to support genealogical research in the African American community.

That benefit was illustrated during a demonstration conducted last year by Ninestars technicians in Chicago, Channing said.

 “One of the executives at the demo happened to be from Chicago and the newspaper (being searched) was from Chicago,” Channing recalled. “He spotted a name that was the same name as his grandmother, who came from that area.

“Currently there are a very limited amount of resources to go to, to trace back African American families. One of the best ways is going to be these newspapers, because the focus of these papers has always been on community: the births, the deaths, the marriages and whatnot were heavily covered and that’s one of the reasons that they have developed such a loyal following.”

Ready to move

Bangalore, India-based Ninestars, meantime, is ready to move on the project. The company has already processed several million pages of historical newspapers for a large aggregator, so it’s familiar with bulk conversions, said Michael Hart, Ninestars’ U.S.-based president, Pan America.

“This project is reflective of what our core competency is,” Hart said. “It’s really right up our alley.”

Hart expects the majority of the content to come from microfiche, but Ninestars can convert old print copies as well.

“Often in the case of print archives, we hire an on-site or near-site vendor to do the initial scanning,” he said. “Basically they are tasked with creating a TIFF (tagged image file format, a non-compressed or very lightly compressed type of image file), and then the TIFF gets pumped to our facility in India for processing.”

Ninestars contracted with Graphic Sciences Inc., a Royal Oak, Mich.-based document management firm, to handle the first conversions.

Aside from the sheer technological challenge reflected in the project, Hart said the partnership would yield even broader rewards.

“Quite frankly, we’re very proud to be a part of this project,” he said.  “In the traditional history books, African American history often gets short shrift. As this project is no doubt going to show, there is a very rich trove of content that is still pretty difficult to (access) because it’s analog... paper or film.

“What we’re doing is creating that ‘connective tissue’ between all that stuff that’s tucked away and what we believe is a rather large group in American culture that really wants to have access to this.

“It’s a way for African Americans to take control of how their history has been told and represented.”