By Jossif Ezekilov
I came across this article first in the Washington Post (in the paper edition) and then found it online. It talks about how Google is undertaking a project to digitize pre-internet newspaper articles. They are working with more than 100 newspapers (including the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which claims it is “North America’s Oldest Newspaper” and has editions from 1764) and will undertake the cost of scanning and uploading the articles on its website as well as sharing the revenue with the participating newspapers.
Kevin Kelly (“Scan this Book!”) is probably rejoicing at this news. This project brings the 2.0 academic network once step closer to being fully digital. If more and more newspapers join this project, it will bring a legion of great, credible academic sources to the Internet world. Imagine being able to look up newspaper articles from the 1800s from the comfort of your own home!
Understandably, however, some newspaper companies are concerned that the digitization of newspapers will hurt their businesses. After all, newspapers already have their own news sites and free news is a regular commodity on the Internet
Google’s new project certainly does beg several questions: What will happen to newspapers in the Digital Age? Is Google’s digital archives project the first step to making news completely digital? Will I still be able to read a newspaper on the bus 5 years from now?
9 Comments
September 16, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I definitely agree with the fact that this project will bring more credible information to the internet. The journalist in the article quotes Marissa Mayer (VP for search products at Google): “’This is really good for newspapers because we are going to be bringing online an old generation of contributions from journalists, as well as widening the reader base of news archives.’” With the transition to the Internet 2.0, I think there will be a lot of changes to get used to, and one of those may very well be reading the news on the internet instead of in print. I’m not sure if we can say that these changes will happen in the next 5 years or even 10; though I do believe that this is likely to happen. With the current popularity of environmental concerns, I think that this may be a step to take to reduce paper product usage, etc.
September 16, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Pretty much all newspapers have a website with an online edition (if not the same edition) posted everyday. Some newspapers are creating an entirely separate edition of the day’s paper (such as the wall street journal) for their public website. To further expand and use The Wall Street Journal as an example, current subscribers can log in on the WSJ’s main website and read their paper that way. Another options is to become a subscriber to the print edition that is posted online, for a monthy fee. Or, a viewer can read the online edition of the daily newspaper, online for free. The online edition typically has less articles and no editorials or opinon columns, and sometimes reposts articles taken from other sources.
Either way, this is one example of how newspapers, like books are evolving with the influence of the internet, which may, one day, completely eliminate the paper version of the newspaper.
September 16, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I agree with this concept of bringing newspapers online. Think about how it benefits us–it still is aimed at the same type of audience (educated and with computers), and it’s free–all we have to do is type in a URL and we can find any archive or any article printed in the last week’s paper that we missed. It more accessible and, as Taylor states above, it helps to resolve our omnipresent environmental issues, which is an element society is becoming more focused on nowadays.
According to Jenkins’ point that “the new media would displace the old media”, this is a growth of technology that’s continuously modernizing today. Jenkins uses the paradigm that as new technology is created, the old technology is not entirely erased–it is just put to another use. For an example, when the television came around, the radio stopped focusing entirely on news and entertainment show broadcasting, and they made a gradual change to music stations. This new tecnology didn’t deplete the radio–it simply helped to converge our technology into other uses, a theme that is reoccurring now with the newspaper going on the internet. Sure, it might change the stereotypical routine we’re used to, involving waking up in the morning and going out to get the paper. Yet, it helps to carry us along to a new age in technology that by now, we should be used to embracing.
September 16, 2008 at 3:54 pm
We may be missing the point of the article: as the commenters have been pointing out, most newspapers are already online in their current editions.
But what Google is doing is digitizing the archives of no-longer-in-print editions of these newspapers. This is a big deal for researchers like me who, all the way through grad school, had to sit in a dark library basement feeding microfilm through a mechanical reader and print out — in negative — the pages that we wanted to take with us, using the pocketful of dimes we’d brought along.
For the bigger papers, these archives are already on line — if you want a New York Times article from 1937, you can pay $3.95 to get it (or $15.95 for a “10-pack”). Or, if you’re a GW student, you can get it for free if you’re logged in through the Gelman Library’s databases. What Google is doing might, however, be particularly useful in the case of smaller papers that may not have the resources to digitize their own back archive.
September 17, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I have definitely been told that I can only use old newspapers and primary sources for certain papers, and if this will all be posted online, it will make life a lot easier. I don’t think it will hurt the business of newspapers because they have already been online since the internet has been up and running. There will always be people who prefer hard-copy to the internet and the business will be just fine. However, making the old no-longer-in-print editions online is very beneficial to people like us. Students and researchers who are trying to do the best job they can with as many resources as possible. I’m sure it will be overwhelming with all the information at hand, but still, very effective and useful in the near future.
September 18, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Digitalizing newspaper articles will not only make them more accessible for researchers to locate these “forgotten papers”, but it will introduce a new type of community where people can comment on articles, share ideas, disagree with the author, and so on. This new media won’t hurt businesses because this is a chance to get more people interested in an article and help spread the word at an exponentially faster rate, as opposed to having the old article hiding in a library. Also, major corporations can, and some already do require that to get the full version of a text you must pay a fee, or belong to an institution (like GW), where you pay to access the articles, and assumingly the institution will in turn pay the company.
September 18, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Having these old newspapers and magazine articles online in one database (Google) would make researching for papers a million times easier. Not only would you be able to save time, it would be more effective. Last year I remember being at the Boston Public Library researching for a project about an event in United States History. I was interested how it effected the current population at the time, so I spent hours in the library searching for newspapers and legal documents to use in my paper. I was able to find excellent sources, but a month or so later, I came across multiple more sources that would have been useful for my paper. They were in the library while I was researching, but I wasn’t able to find them because it just wasn’t that easy to search and find everything I needed. Honestly, I was probably a little bit lazy and overwhelmed by the library. Having everything online in one database would not only make searching for documents easier, but also more efficient. I believe that I would come out of time spent on the database with a lot more sources than if I am at the library roaming around aimlessly.
September 22, 2008 at 5:05 pm
The idea of a digital newspaper, especially small ones saved from years ago, is exciting. As some others have mentioned, sources such as newspapers are very credible and extremely useful in research essays. Accessibility to newspaper articles on historic incidents creates a better understanding of the lifestyle and thoughts of people during that time. One could get a sense of other occurrences during that time frame by looking into other surrounding articles. This would sharpen the researcher’s idea of the life the people of that time led and help them better understand the impact certain incidents had on their lives. On the contrary, although this new way of looking up newspaper articles may be useful to people who may want to easily access this information, it could also be very dangerous. With the vast amounts of people that use the web and the many ways of possibly configuring information through web decoding, is it possible that these articles may become less credible? Or worse, wind up in the wrong hands?
December 12, 2008 at 4:55 pm
It does not come as a surprise to me that even newspapers are becoming digitized. Without a doubt all newspapers will be, if not already are available in full online. However, I do not think it will be as soon as five years that we will no longer see newspapers themselves. Newspapers are relatively inexpensive to make, for they are made and printed on recycled paper. If newspapers really do end up stop being printed and are read solely on the Internet, I do not think it will be anytime soon, or at least I hope not. Newspapers hold a special significance to many, because of special events that have happened. Foe example, when Barack Obama won I purchased a copy of the Washington Post. If the newspaper was only online, then it would not be my newspapers, it would be everyone’s newspaper, and that just does not hold the same value as if it were a paper that I owned myself.