This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The Salt Lake Tribune has won the return of part of its photographic archives, a trove of historic and vintage images that had been entangled in an Arkansas court case.
Nearly 200 plastic bins containing tens of thousands of photos, news clips and other memorabilia — accumulated from decades of daily publishing — arrived May 7 at the Utah paper's offices in downtown Salt Lake City, nearly two years after they left.
The Tribune and other newspapers sued North Little Rock businessman John Rogers last June over their photo materials, hoping to recover them after a deal fell through to convert the negatives and prints into searchable digital libraries.
According to Little Rock attorney John Jewell, the recovered Tribune photo collection was recently surrendered from a Rogers subcontractor and shipped to Utah after protracted negotiations.
Tribune Editor and Publisher Terry Orme said he was relieved to have the items back.
But Jewell, who is representing The Tribune and other newspapers in litigation against Rogers and his companies, said "a significant portion" of negatives remained in an Arkansas warehouse under control of a court-appointed receiver.
"We've still got to iron all those wrinkles out," Jewell said.
The Tribune and 19 other newspapers owned by New York-based Digital First Media provided Rogers with their photo prints and negatives in 2014 through an agreement to have them scanned, cataloged and converted into digital libraries.
In return, Rogers could sell the photos on websites he pledged to develop.
In April 2014, Tribune staffers estimate, the paper handed over 15,000 to 20,000 indexed folders stuffed with photo prints and clippings, along with some 200 boxes of negatives.
Rogers failed to fulfill his end of the pact, according to court records, and The Tribune and other Digital First papers sued in June 2015.
A year later, the former photo archivist and sports memorabilia collector, along with his photo-digitizing company, Rogers Photo Archive, continues to face legal and financial troubles involving scores of newspapers, banks, business partners and law enforcement.
Court documents and news coverage in Arkansas indicate Rogers also acquired archives from other papers, including The Seattle Times, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and publications in Australia and New Zealand.
The Digital First lawsuit, filed in Pulaski County Circuit Court in Arkansas, alleged Rogers and his ex-wife, Angelica, promised to digitize the photos as a ploy, intending instead to "personally plunder and deplete" the newspaper archives for their own gain. The suit asserted that photos from The Tribune and other papers may have been secretly given to third parties and auctioned on eBay and other online sites. In some instances, court documents say, prints were sold for which no negative survives, "making the photos one-of-a-kind items."
Tribune Director of Photography Jeremy Harmon said the paper's staff investigated nearly 300 separate eBay auctions involving Rogers and his companies and found no evidence that any nondigitized Tribune photos had been put on sale.
Orme said The Tribune had received digitized and indexed versions of about a third of all the images it provided to Rogers. He said Utah's largest daily would continue to explore its options for producing a fully indexed digital database.