Here's the thing itself, an advertising-supported search engine for whatever newspaper archives Google can find online or contract to scan, digitize and index: http://news.google.com/archivesearch
You can already search the historical archives of many magazines and newspapers through their Web sites, some at no charge and others on a pay-per-view basis. What Google offers is one-stop searching across those databases.
For example, a search for "Titanic sinks" -- filtered to just 1912 to avoid references to the Titanic as movie or metaphor -- found me almost 500 items, starting with the Christian Science Monitor, Atlanta Constitution, Hartford Courant, Chicago Daily Tribune and Boston Daily Globe -- but all of those are in the pay-per-view ProQuest Archiver.
As might be expected, the search also found numerous stories in the free New York Times archive. The surprise was a Google News Archive copy of The Daily Advocate of Victoria, Texas, for Friday afternoon, April 19, 1912, headlined "Band Plays as Titanic Sinks." It will serve as an example of Google's own archival newspaper viewer. Will word-associated Google text ads work with this kind of search? So far, I'm not tempted by the ad for a "1918 farmouse sink."
"News archive search provides an easy way to search and
explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people or
ideas and see how they have been described over time. In addition to
searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can
also see a historical overview of the results by browsing an
automatically generated timeline."
"News archive search searches across a large collection
of historical archives including major newspapers/magazines, news
archives and legal archives. Search results include both content that
accessible to all users (such as BBC News, Time Magazine and Guardian)
and content that requires a fee (such as Washington Post Archives,
Newspaper Archive, and New York Times Archives). In addition to
crawling content online, we've also worked with newspapers to digitize
materials via our News Archive Partner Program.
Through partnerships with newspapers around the world, the News Archive
Partner Program makes unique and previously-unavailable newspaper
content searchable and browsable online."
Of course Google's not the only outfit that thinks old news can be good news. Here's a piece I did a few years ago about the National Digital Newspaper Program, an article I should update... but not today.
More than 200 years of previously microfilmed and scanned newspapers are available through Proquest Historical Newspapers, if you are lucky enough to be at an institution with the right pay-as-you-go subscriptions. The relationship between Proquest and Google isn't entirely clear in the early announcements, but perhaps Google will find headlines and offer a preview of stories behind Proquest's pay-service firewalls.
(My own university library apparently has turned down my request to add the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper to its Proquest subscription. Perhaps it was because of the annual subscription cost. I'll have to get a few campus historians to join in the request, which also should quash any suggestion that I just want to ego-surf my own old clippings to prepare my memoirs.)
Proquest offers these titles (links are to PDF advertising brochures from Proquest):
Note: I posted an early blurb about this at http://boblog.blogspot.com, where I'm posting more often, but less verbosely.
Connecting with students today
A school-is-about-to-start technology in learning session showed one of anthropology professor Michael Wesch's collaborative class video productions today, which has me thinking about how to use this blog and my original Blogger blog http://boblog.blogspot.com in class...
The print
edition of the Wall
Street Journal, which actually is home delivered in Radford,
unlike The New York
TimesWashington
Post. (To be eyewitnesses to the Murdoch transformation,
online and in print.)
Collaborative
features of Google docs... which gets back to the video above, which started with that huge class collaborating on a script. My biggest class, "Media History," is still smaller than 50, so we should give it a try.
Sorting a year of notes on media innovation and journalism
As I shuffle through archived clips and bookmarks, I'm going to post a bunch of quotes here while figuring out which to use in my fall classes... Somehow a bunch of February and summer items wound up jumbled together in a folder... Intriguing juxtapositions...
Mark Bowden, in The Atlantic for July/August, chronicling Rupert Murdoch's arrival at the Wall Street Journal:
"A great frigate of high-minded journalism had just struck its colors to the Tabloid Pirate. The once-mighty, staid, studiously gray, independent Wall Street Journal was now a first cousin to Fox ('Fair and Balanced') News, Bart Simpson, the London daily Sun's Page Three titty displays, and the deliberately outrageous New York Post."
Louis Hau in Forbes. "Down on the Wire" in February:
"Do newspapers still need The Associated Press? And does The Associated Press still need newspapers? Until
recently, these would have been ridiculous questions. But print
circulation is tumbling. So is advertising revenue. Editors are
slashing budgets and making do with less. Readers are moving online,
where they get all the national and international news, sports scores
and celebrity gossip they can read--for free, updated constantly, and
often by AP."
"Newspapers have about a year to get rid of all the people who can't
pull their own weight and to redeploy all the smart energetic
journalists who can find the great stories and push them out to print,
web and video. Some papers still have lots of talent, but they must
push it to the front so readers can find it and find that they like it..."
Mark Glaser of PBS, interviewing experts on copyright and fair use last week:
"Many people complain that the U.S. air
use rules are vague, and that copyright law hasn't really been updated
for the digital age. How do you think the laws should be changed to
help protect copyright holders while also respecting video remixes and
fair use? Or do you think the laws are fine as is?"
Philip Meyer of UNC Chapel Hill, in a USA Today February oped:
"News media love conflict, and when religion and science clash in political arguments, they like to stoke the flame..."
Bob Giles of the Nieman Foundation, announcing two investigative reporting awards in the spring Nieman Reports:
"The press remains an essential national
institution in its job of independently probing for facts about
wrongdoing or information the government wants to shield from its
citizens. Its watchdog role is never more vital than during a national
crisis..."
Alan Mutter, in a February blog entry, "Can newspapers afford editors?"
"All things being equal, everyone would vote for giving newspapers
sufficient resources for both gathering news and checking their work
closely. But things aren't equal. Newspapers are operating at an
increasingly unequal disadvantage against their online competitors. While
there is no doubt about the value of the industry's traditional values,
the question is whether the industry can continue to afford them."
