City paper archives?

Submitted by cartoonybear t3_yd2x82 in baltimore

When City Paper was a going concern, before tribune ate it up, they had digitized every issue at least back to the nineties. Now, there’s no sign of these archives online. (A search for “Baltimore ‘city paper’ archives” leads to PPC ads for the Sun.)

i have ProQuest historical newspapers via the library, which is Sun since the 1850s or whatever, but the city paper stuff isn’t in there. Nor is there any link from sunpapers site to find anything related to city paper and a search there reveals nothing.

Does anyone know whether these archives still exist and if so where? And if not, why? I mean, they were literally just HTML pages that existed out there, why would Tribune go to the trouble of literally taking them down?

LOC appears to have some material but none online.

any associated bitching or tale telling you’d like to do about tribune and our once proud sunpapers is welcome too of course.

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Comments

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OneThree_FiveZero t1_itpotgj wrote

As far as I can tell the City Paper archive is gone. I was trying to find an old archive a few months ago, it was nowhere to be found.

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megalomike t1_its5qg0 wrote

Proquest has an alt weekly database i think, worth a check, if just to know definitively ots not there. Some stories can be found on baltimoresun.com.

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cartoonybear OP t1_itsefjm wrote

Thanks for the ideas, fellow baltimorons. I’ll post if I have success with any of them!

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margaritathewitch t1_itsfxzh wrote

I worked for a business that ran ads in city paper right before they were shut down. I could not find someone to take our damn payment for the last ads. Our landlord at the time worked for the new owner. I asked him for help and he was surprised but must have learned something because he avoided me after that. Months later the city paper is done. I would not be surprised to find out they purposely fucked the accounts to justify the decision to close them down.

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ashtree-lane t1_itsk34v wrote

The old site was on a server maintained by the previous owner. Tribune would have had to migrate the server, which would have been costly and they decided not to do so (a mistake imo). It is a real shame but I don’t believe they are available anywhere online. It is a major loss for the city, I totally agree.

Not to harp, but “they are just html pages” isn’t really accurate. Those html pages were dynamically generated by a server, on each request. That’s how many big websites work. There are thousands of stories on a news site and the static html version of a page you see really just exists in your browser.

At the very least, I wish there were pdf versions available in pro quest or newspaper.com. If you find them, please let us know.

I’ll hold my tongue about sun papers. I have stories but ultimately found the paper to be filled with hard working journalists who love this city. The parent companies were a different matter…

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