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Scanning Completion on Horizon for Fairfax Media

2 min read

So what’s going on with the Fairfax Media archive that became ensnared in the courtroom chaos surrounding would-be photo maven John Rogers?

Glad you asked.

Processing progress has been made in the wake of a June 15 settlement agreement between Fairfax and the court-appointed receiver for the Rogers assets, Michael McAfee.

We understand that more than 300,000 tagged Sydney Morning Herald photos have been delivered to Fairfax at year-end 2015. Scanning work is 85 percent complete, and all tagging and scanning is expected to be finished in four or five months.

Scanning of the New Zealand publications is complete, and 66,000 tagged photos have been returned.

Work on the New Zealand portion of the Fairfax Media archive is scheduled for completion by September or October.

In its December 2014 lawsuit, Fairfax Media Management claimed that many of its photographs listed for sale online had either not been digitized or the digitized versions were never made available to the company.

Three months later, McAfee discovered that Angelica Rogers was listing more than 1,000 Fairfax Media photos for sale before the digitization contract was completed, a legal no-no.

The receiver ended up recovering more than 97,000 photos from the ex-wife of John Rogers, photos that were scattered among three local eBay sellers moving merchandise on her behalf.

Rogers paid $244,000 for the Fairfax Media archive in a deal signed in March 2013.

You might recall the revelation that Fairfax had shipped the New Zealand collection to North Little Rock caused something of a historic, political stir back in Kiwiland.

Exporting the archive required an exemption from the Protected Objects Act by the New Zealand government. Why the exemption was granted was a sore point with more than a few.

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