They can do the same thing, except at much less cost. Fill high capacity flash/SD cards with digital images, archive them together with the story slug to a tape drive. Digital tape is a very stable medium for data storage unlike HDD, flash, CD-R/DVD-R, etc.
Our archive system in 2003 was based on a jukebox cdrom machine. It would take up to a minute to access some images. The system was called Merlin and the only images stored on the system were those that had been used plus a couple of back up images of the same event. And of course it required active involvement of the photographer(s) to archive the pictures. With negs it was just a matter of throwing them all into an envelope and dropping that into a box from which the lab rat would be expected to file everything that night.