Newspaper Archives

It's an unfortunate coincidence that just days after I'd first used The Times' archive for a little project that I'm working on, that they announce to registered users that it'll have a paywall from the end of this week (confusingly, they list the date as Friday 18 September when there isn't such a day).

Still I did at least find what I was looking for on this occassion.

Sadly it mirrors what Guardian newspapers have done with their archive. The Times is a little cheaper with access charged at £4.95 for a day, then £14.95 a month and £74.95 a year. The Guardian is £7.95 for a day, £14.95 for three days and £49.95 for a month - so significantly more.

I fully understand the value of these archives, and the work that must have gone into digitising all those papers. But it's a shame that the prices are where they are. Plenty of people will still be visiting their local reference libraries for access.

This comes a week after Google announced that it was digitising a number of US papers. The Google effort seems to be ad-funded, although I can't see a clear promise that these will be available free in future. And Google doesn't seem to offer an easy way of downloading the articles, something you certainly can do with The Times' archive.

Still, I did enjoy this side-story from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's coverage of the Apollo 11 landings in 1969: