Until a mere 15 years ago newspapers were the vehicle through which we learned about the world. Politics, sports, entertainment and of course the day to day happenings that we call news, were all in one easy to find place, the newspaper. The web gave us easy access, to not only our local, regional but to national and international information at the press of a button.
What was lacking? The past. In the last couple years Google has been working with The New York Times and Wall Street Journal to digitize their archives and make them available through Google news archives, but for every small town there is a newspaper with important information that most likely will not make as a national headline. What about these papers and their past?
Google is now working cooperatively with Proquest and Heritage to scan and digitize newspapers from all over the place. They are creating a news archive that will allow the public to read through the material in the original format. This service will be available through Google news but will be working in conjunction to make these archives available on the individual newspapers’ websites.
There is resistance from some publishers due to their current ability to create revenue by charging for archival services. There is a compromise Google is working out to help belay this issue, the results page for the articles will have a paid advertisements on the side, the profits from these will be shared between Google and the publishers.
The availability to research the past will be at everyone’s finger tips… this will increase the ability to look at trends in stock, find out from valid third party sources what the facts were, or at least the facts that were published were. So rather than hearing about how your dad won the game by catching the ball to score a touch down or your grandmother relating her walk through hills of snow to get to school, you can go online and check the newspaper from that time and see how much is exaggeration and how much is truth.
