A Treasure Trove from the British Library

The British Library has launched a major new digitization project, the British Newspaper Archive, which currently offers around 4,000,000 searchable pages from over 200 different newspapers. The papers were published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and date mainly from the nineteenth century, although some newspapers' runs extend back to the mid-eighteenth century. Searching the Archive is free, but viewing the content, either through the pay-per-view option or by subscription, is fee based unless you access the Archive in person at one of three British Library Reading Rooms. The project is a collaboration between the British Library and brightsolid, a British digital publishing firm. Digitization continues at the rate of 8,000 new pages a day, with the goals of scanning 40,000,000 newspaper pages over the next ten years.

Newspapers have been called the "raw material of history" by no less an expert than historian Henry Steele Commager. In the British Newspaper Archive, researchers will discover

Exhaustive coverage of crime and punishment ... Eyewitness accounts of social transformation ... Illustrations and advertisements ... first-hand accounts of [newsworthy] events ... and countless vivid details of how our ancestors lived and died.

At the moment, only newspapers that are out of coyright are included in the project, but the collaborators have secured "permission from one publisher to digitise newspaper runs up to the mid 20th century."

The Times Paywall Finally Goes Up

The New York Times announced today that its new paywall has gone up for readers in Canada, and that the paywall for the United States and the rest of the world will go up on March 28. According to the email I got, the rollout in Canada will allow the company "to fine-tune the customer experience before [the] global launch." Does this mean that if our experience is bad, we can blame Canada?

Readers will be able to view twenty articles per month, and after that level is reached, will not be able to view anything more unless they are digital subscribers. I was happy to see that "Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit." That seems like a reasonable approach to me, and one that should help to keep Times stories in wide circulation. Here's New York magazine's take on the paywall. The Times is gambling that regular visitors to the website will be willing to pay to access it. The question really boils down to whether the Times and other newspapers can "reverse 15 years of consumer behavior and build a business around online subscriptions?" It's safe to say that newspapers, both in the United States and around the world, will be watching.

The New York Times: Too Little, Too Late?

Like many other people, I have been waiting for The New York Times to announce when it would begin charging for access to its website. The silence has been deafening since the initial announcement fourteen months ago. Every so often, I would see news (sometimes no more than informed speculation) about the Times's plans on other news organizations' websites, but there was nothing from the Times itself. On Sunday, the silence was finally broken, but in a mea culpa op-ed piece that acknowledged the paper's failures in implementing the new plan, but neglected to provide any details whatsoever about the plan itself. I understand that the management of the company wants to have everything in place before making the announcement and cutting over to the new website, but they have had months to figure out the details. Shouldn't a plan have been in the works before the Times announced such a significant change in its business model? While the Times has been dithering, its readers have grown more accustomed to getting their news for free, and may well see paying to read the Times as a luxury they can do without if they can get their news for free from other sites.

A New Approach to Newspaper Websites

The survival of newspapers in the digital age is a concern for anyone who values the analysis and critical commentary that a good newspaper offers. Raw, unfiltered news is widely and freely available on the Internet, and newspapers and other print publications are struggling to survive in a world where people are hostile to the idea of paying for news. How can newspaper websites generate revenue so that they can continue to employ the journalists who create the content? Rupert Murdoch has put many of his newspapers behind a paywall; it appears that The Wall Street Journal is thriving in the online environment (unique content?), while The Times of London has been less successful in attracting paying customers. For earlier OOTJ coverage of the Murdoch newspapers and their paywalls, click here. The New York Times is erecting a paywall that will go live in January 2011, and it's reasonable to assume that this experiment will be watched closely, especially since an earlier attempt at charging for the online newspaper was a failure that was abandoned rather quickly. No details about the Times paywall have been announced.

Today's Boston Globe is reporting that the Globe is going to try a different approach that will debut in the second half of 2011. Instead of having one site for all content, the paper is going to host two sites. Boston.com will remain a free site with "limited access to journalism" but with "breaking news, sports, and weather ... as well as classified advertising, social networking, and information about travel, restaurants and entertainment." The Boston Globe Lite? The new site, BostonGlobe.com, will be "designed to closely approximate the experience of reading the paper's print version [and] will contain all the stories and other content from the day's paper as well as exclusive reports, in-depth news, analysis, commentary, photos and graphics, plus video and interactive features." Subscribers to the print paper will have access to BostonGlobe.com for free, a model I wish other publishers would emulate. No price has been set yet for the digital-only subscription. To read the press release about the two websites, click here. It will be interesting to see how this new approach develops, and if it will generate enough revenue to pay for the Globe's newsgathering operation.

The Times to Erect a Pay Wall

In 2007, The New York Times dropped a pay wall after failing to realize expected revenues. Many online readers breathed a sigh of relief, and continued to enjoy the free online content. Now, however, The Times is planning to "announce the introduction of a so-called 'pay wall' before the much-rumoured launch of Apple's new tablet computer, which is thought to be specially designed for easy newspaper reading, on January 27." This report comes from an article in the Telegraph, a British newspaper. The Telegraph reports that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times Company chairman, favors "a metered use policy similar to The Financial Times, which allows readers to access some articles for free before they are forced to subscribe." The Financial Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, as is The Wall Street Journal, which also charges for content. In fact, News Corporation is planning to "introduce charging for all the company's newspaper websites, including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World. My colleague Vicky Gannon, who sent me the link to the Telegraph article, says it's one thing to charge for The Times, but quite another to charge for The Sun and News of the World, which do not exactly qualify as high-quality content. It looks as if paid access to online newspapers is the wave of the future, and in fact newspapers have to make money from their content if they are survive. Advertising revenues are not enough to sustain a major news-gathering operation. "More than 1,200 news organisations worldwide have signed up with Journalism Online, a new media payment firm whose clients are expected to start rolling out fees soon." It's hard to imagine that most people are going to pay for subscriptions to more than one or two newspapers, making it inevitable that some newspapers will simply not be competitive in the online environment.

New Google Service

The New York Times has an article in the Technology section describing Google's new Living Stories project. This "new approach to presenting news online by topic [was] developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post," and will be offered to all newspaper publishers if it proves to be a success. According to the Times article, "Living stories is a much-enhanced version of what some newspaper Web sites already do, grouping articles and other material by subject matter." At present, only eight broad topics are offered; for each, a summary is provided, and then a "timeline of major events and some pictures, followed by the opening sections of a series of articles, in reverse chronological order." I don't know whether Living Stories will bring more traffic to newspapers' websites, which is one of the goals of the project, but I think it has great potential as a research tool. The organization is logical and intuitive, and should be appealing to students.

Rupert Murdoch Takes a Stand

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation, owner of the Wall Street Journal and The Times, among other newspapers, is a vocal critic of Google. He accuses Google of stealing content from newspapers and making it available through its search engine without any payment to the publisher. The Telegraph is reporting that in response to complaints from Murdoch and other publishers, Google has launched a new initiative--the First Click Free program--"that lets ... [Google] index website content but prevents Web surfers from having unrestricted access once they reach the online locales." Google now offers publishers the ability to "'limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.'" What this means is that "Google users may start seeing registration pages pop up when they click for a sixth time on any given day at websites of publishers using First Click Free ... ."

I understand that newspaper publishers have got to find a way to finance their expensive news operations. Our local newspaper for Westchester County has recently laid off forty staff members, and the story is the same at newspapers around the country. However, I think that charging for content is going to be a struggle. Users have become used to accessing information for free, and frankly don't care how it gets paid for. Murdoch has stated that newspapers "'need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high quality news and information does not come free.'" He is currently negotiating with Microsoft about making its Bing search engine the exclusive online source for content from Murdoch's newspapers. Will this content be enough to give Bing a competitive advantage over Google?