Then and Now: How Today's Headlines Shape Tomorrow's Archive
In this panel, Helen Walker and Rory Carruthers from the Reuters Archive Team explore how the contemporary news cycle can serve as a guide for archive digitisation strategy. Rather than working through collections chronologically or by condition alone, they have found that both today's headlines and tomorrow's anniversaries offer a useful framework for prioritising what we digitise and when we make it available.
From re-digitised 16mm footage of the Iranian Revolution to images captured by the Reuters News Picture Service during the Tanker War, we'll explore how developments in Iran, and upcoming anniversaries, have shaped what is currently coming into focus in the archive.
Siri Abrahamson
Siri began her career in Paris as a journalist and producer, working on documentaries and television programmes for French and international audiences. Upon moving to London, she joined AP Archive, where she worked closely with production companies and broadcasters to connect them with the footage they needed. Now Director of Transactional Sales at Reuters, Siri brings editorial instinct, industry insight, and commercial expertise to the world of archive sales.
Helen Walker
As Reuters' Archive Manager, Helen is passionate about preserving and showcasing the news agency's rich audio-visual heritage. She leads initiatives to digitise tape archives of Reuters' news bureaux around the globe, ensuring both the preservation and discoverability of digital assets. Helen recently led the installation of the Reuters Media Ingest Hub, a dedicated digitisation facility at Reuters' London office, enabling media to be digitised entirely in-house.
Rory Carruthers
Rory is a qualified archivist at Reuters, focused on unlocking and preserving the organisation’s historic analogue collections. He has led major digitisation projects including 25 years of Reuters Newswire on microfilm and the Reuters News Pictures Service negative archive, which contains over 250,000 negatives, with more than 65,000 images digitised to date. Now digitising largely in‑house, Rory works with a more nimble, news‑calendar‑driven strategy with a focus on curation to improve customer discoverability and editorial reuse.
