Sandusky Register deletes our history to save a few pennies
Ogden Newspapers remains silent after an IT 'efficiency' wipes out 20 years of local paper's YouTube archives
SANDUSKY — A part of local history was lost recently, and it could become irretrievable if the owners of the Sandusky Register don’t take action, according to sources.
The Sandusky Register’s YouTube channel is officially gone—it’s disappeared—and no steps are being taken to recover two decades of community news coverage provided by dozens of local journalists back when the newspaper was locally owned.
“They were switching up the email system to save money, changing email providers from Google,” the source said. “They eliminated all the Gmail accounts and lost the YouTube channel. I don’t think IT at Ogden meant to do it.”
The blunder is as technical as it is tragic: YouTube is Google. By deleting the legacy Gmail accounts to shave a few dollars off the monthly bill, Ogden’s IT department essentially threw away the keys to a 20-year digital vault.
The Register’s YouTube channel was rich with local history, featuring more than 100 recorded local political debates presented by the newspaper and sponsors from 2006 to 2025. One of those historic debates was the 9th District Democratic Primary forum between U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur and U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich at Firelands College—an event that attracted 500 attendees and a statewide audience online.
Also lost: a 2010 “Between the Lines” program featuring a conversation with seven “Miss Americas,” including Sandusky’s own Jackie Mayer. There was a segment with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that is now gone, along with a fiery 2020 interview with U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan at the height of the pandemic and the controversial 2020 presidential election campaign.
Hundreds of videos are lost, and the company will not say if it is trying to recover the files. Jeremy Speer, publisher of the Register and other Ogden Northwest Ohio newspapers, did not respond to inquiries.
Ogden Newspapers, based out of Wheeling, West Virginia, bought the Sandusky Register and the Norwalk Reflector from local owners in 2019. The Rau and White families had owned the newspapers since 1869. Since the purchase, Ogden has cut staff, moved press operations to Findlay, and sold the iconic building at Jackson and Market streets where the Register had been headquartered since 1929.
To be fair, Ogden has shown a genuine commitment to keeping newspapers alive in “news deserts” across the country, and the Nutting family deserves credit for fighting to keep local presses running. But critics say Bob Nutting—a man whose family controls a multi-billion dollar empire including a Major League Baseball team—is too fixated on “efficiencies” to allow for the kind of impactful reporting—and archiving—that shapes a community.
His reputation for frugality is well-known in the sports world. As Pittsburgh columnist Dejan Kovacevic once bitingly put it: “Nutting’s Pirates aren’t a baseball team; they’re a mathematical exercise in how little one can spend while still collecting a check from the league.”
That same “mathematical exercise” seems to be playing out in our local newsrooms. When you prioritize business margins over the “on-field success” of a community archive, you end up with a digital black hole where our history used to be.
This isn’t the first time electronic archives have gone “kaput.” About five years ago, the Register and Reflector lost a 12-year link-based archive of every page printed from 2008-2020. As newspapers continue to consolidate, the digital “morgues” of our community’s history are being treated as disposable line items.
Google typically allows a 30-day window to recover deleted accounts. The clock is ticking for Ogden to decide if Sandusky’s history is worth more than the price of a few email addresses.
