JOHN ROGERS PHOTO ARCHIVE KING
ous vintage photos — snaps of parks, schools and long-gone businesses. Sales of those photos have since turned the Rogers Archive into the biggest individual seller on eBay. Having recently opened a new, 15,000 square-foot facility in North Little Rock, Rogers struck the archive’s first international agreement in April — a deal to digitize the photos of Australia’s Fairfax Media. Fairfax, which owns more than 70 newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, recently shipped what Rogers called “the first wave” of their materials to North Little Rock. Rogers said technology is helping the archives bump up its efficiency and digitizing speed, which helps it turn around projects faster. With the McClatchy papers, Rogers said, he was able to fulfill an 18-month contract in just 11 months, a speed the archive recently repeated with the digitizing of the photos of the Minnesota Star Tribune. “[The Star Tribune was] 1.2 million photos, and we finished it in four months,” Rogers said. “It shows the speed with which we can do this process.” DK.
BRIAN CHILSON
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orth Little Rock’s John Rogers took a bit of luck and a good idea and — with plenty of 70-hour work weeks — made himself a multi-millionaire. While seeking out sports memorabilia for his trading card shop in the late 1990s, Rogers began purchasing the archives of old photographers, licensing the sports photos to trading card companies and the images of celebrities and politicians to books and magazines. Eventually, Rogers built up an archive of around 3 million images to which he owned the rights. It was when a friend suggested the untested idea of buying the photo morgues of newspapers and selling and licensing the images, however, that Rogers broke new ground. Since buying the photo archive of the Detroit News in 2009 for $1 million — a deal that required Rogers to return a digitized copy within one year — the Rogers Archive has since bought the photos of a host of great American newspapers, including the Chicago Daily News, the Boston Herald, and every paper in the McClatchy chain. In addition to selling photos of the famous, Rogers also pioneered the idea of online bulk sales of innocu-
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