OJR on Online News Archives
Mark Glaser of the Online Journalism Review goes deeper into the discussion about whether news archives should charge money for their content.
New York Times Digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz observes that putting archives online for free might jeopardize contracts and revenues gained through the sale of archives to vendors like LexisNexis and Factiva.
Free archives can attract readers and new subscribers, counters Guardian digital publishing director Simon Waldman.
Glaser examines what different newspapers are doing regarding charging for archives and how well they’re working. He mentions several price-per-article increases have had little effect on demand for materials from the archives. Glaser also realizes that many of us pay for news archives indirectly because many libraries buy news databases for their customers.
Addendum: Quite a few people on Newslib have chimed into this discussion, including a few comments about whether free archives on the Web really endanger revenue from commercial databases. One of the differences is that the general public is more likely to go to a news source’s Web site then to search for a specific source in a commercial news database. For aggregated search results, commercial news databases may still dominate. If a few sources provide free archives on the Web, it doesn’t change that strength. I suppose, then, that if enough news sources offer free archives and someone can build a cross-site search, the commercial database vendors might start to worry.
