Inside 'The Morgue' at The New York Times

What It Covers

Jeff Roth, sole keeper of The New York Times morgue, manages 10 million physical newspaper clippings dating to the 1870s in a 700,000-pound archive beneath Midtown Manhattan that reporters rarely use anymore.

Key Questions Answered

• •Archival organization system: The morgue uses an anachronistic filing structure where computers file under "US industry business, office machines, calculators, computers" and television under "radio, television" because categories reflect when technologies first emerged, not current usage patterns.
• •Pre-digital research value: The morgue contains stories killed after first editions that never made it online, like a 1950 telephone operator rescue story, meaning families searching digitally would never find these historical records without accessing physical clips.
• •Institutional memory preservation: The archive weighs 700,000 pounds across 600 filing cabinets, each weighing 400-600 pounds, with Jeff Roth as the only person who knows the location system after 30 years, creating a single point of failure for accessing Times history.
• •Serendipity in journalism: Former executive editor AM Rosenthal emphasized that morgue research before and after reporting consistently revealed unexpected information reporters didn't know existed, providing crucial context that shaped story angles and prevented missing key historical connections.