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Finding archives on the webBy Julian Sher
In the news business, journalists are always rushing to break tomorrow's stories today. But most good journalists understand that most good stories also lie in the past. You have to know what a politician promised two years ago to hold him accountable at this afternoon's news conference. You have to know what a company did three decades ago at the other end of the country before writing a story about its announced plans for your community this week. The web is great for finding today's news. Finding archived news pages is a lot harder. NEWSPAPER WEB SITES You have to start, obviously, at the home pages of the newspapers you are interested in. (To find a newspaper in a city or country when you don't know the name of the paper, see JNet's best tools at www.jourmalismnet.com/papers) In the past, many sites offered free access to much of their material. That has now changed as more and more websites charge for their archive material. Many of the leading British and American papers offer a free search of their database and then for a minimal fee, you can retrieve the single article you want. (Often just the search result alone maybe enough to give you enough clues or keywords to try a Google search, and hope similar facts or backgrounds are available somewhere else on the web.) The New York Times, for example, offers access to every article published in The Times since 1851 for people who sign up for TimesSelect: it's free for newspaper subscribers and is not very expensive to join. The Washington Post has an excellent free archive dating back to 1887 and a single retrieval costs only $3.95 The most comprehensive list of web archives is maintained by the Special Libraries Association News Division, an international organization for print, Web, and broadcast news librarians and news researchers. Their US listings can be found at http://www.ibiblio.org/slanews/index.html but unfortunately it was last updated two years ago. For Canadian and other international archives - updated more recently in 2006 -- see http://www.ibiblio.org/slanews/internet/intarchives.htm. GOOGLE AND THE WAYBACK MACHINE Often, if you click on a result the page displayed will inform you that the newspaper no longer offers that article. But a good trick is to copy a few sentences from the listing found in Google News. Then go the main Google web page and search the entire web for that snippet: inevitably, some newsgroup or web enthusiast has copied that article somewhere. But Google News has also recently launched a new service called News Archive Search at news.google.com/archivesearch. Punch in a few keywords and Google News gives you a listing by year of the results from news sources --- and how much each article will cost. The Wayback Machine at Archive.org is an ambitious attempt to archive the entire web -to date, it offers through 55 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. You can put in any web address, including a newspaper site. The results are random and incomplete: they may only have a few dates of the year or month you need. But it's worth a try. There are, of course, several commercial services that have extensive archive databases. The News Library at nl.newsbank.com has listings for 1,164 newspapers and other news sources and gives the most complete archive available for each publication is included. Both pay-as-you-go and subscription pricing options are available. Detailed maps help you locate a region, state, or even a specific newspaper. By far, the best archive service on the web is Lexis-Nexis. Most major media corporations subscribe to it, as do many public libraries. (Library websites are an excellent - and usually free way - to access commercial services, usually all you need is a membership card.) The Nexis web site gives you access to more than through 5 billion documents and records, and 32,000 sources; 35 million company dossiers; 2,300 global newspapers and the full text of the top 99 U.S. newspapers. Pricing plans include monthly flat rate subscription plans and per-transaction plans. If you're not ready to go all the way, Lexis-Nexis also offers an excellent A la Carte service at /alacarte.lexisnexis.com. It's free to search the database and view titles and headlines- you only pay for the documents you retrieve. There are no subscription requirements or registration fees-and the average cost per document is only $3. And here's a real deal: Short-term archives on hot story topics are completely free at a Lexis News site at www.lexisnexis.com/news. HISTORICAL ARCHIVES This web site offers 28.9 million newspaper pages from 584 cities going back 238 years - for a price. There are also several free archive collections, such as the September11Archive at www.september11archive.com which contains more than 15,000 full-image newspaper pages on the World Trade Center attacks. Other free archives include Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, the global AIDS epidemic, the Nazi persecution and annihilation of the Jews in World War II and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. You will find these and other arc hive tools at JournalismNet's News Archive page, available at www.journalismnbet.com/archives __________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ Julian Sher, the creator and webmaster of Journalism Net (www.journalismnet.com), does Internet training in newsrooms around the world. He can be reached by email at jsher@journalismnet.com. This article and many other columns from “Media” magazine are available online with hot links on the JournalismNet Tips page at www.journalismnet.com/tips
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