How newspapers in Alabama, Florida are making use of their photo archives to inform readers and engage communities

“Newspapers may provide the proverbial ‘first rough draft of history,’” Susannah Nesmith writes, “but when history moves on, are there still ways to mine value from all that accumulated material, much of it sitting in dusty file cabinets?” The Miami Herald and Alabama Media Group, which includes The Birmingham News and The Huntsville Times, are doing just that by harnessing photo archives as a way to engage readers while also informing them. One project The Miami Herald has started called Flashback Miami features curated collections of photos from the paper’s archives and is designed to “give you a feel for what’s been here before.”