Written on June 13, 2008 – 4:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
British quality newspaper The Times have opened up their dusty but valuable archives of the past 200 years by officially launching The Times Archive today. Every newspaper published between 1785 and 1985 has been scanned and made fully searchable through an OCR program.
Nineteen months ago, Times Media’s digital publisher Zach Leonard told Journalism.co.uk that the company was looking at the possibility of building an archive of all its content. Turns out that Leonard wasn’t just trying to gain some goodwill but actually planned on digitalizing the archive. The beta version was launched only last month, so apparently the company has different guidelines than most web start-ups - who often seem to stay in beta mode forever.
For a limited period of time, the whole archive will be free. So enjoy it while you can. Read about the original Live Aid for example, or the Titanic or the assassination of Lincoln.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on May 13, 2008 – 4:21 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During Web 2.0 Expo, Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs called upon all media companies to look at the bright side of the digital revolution: “Media business are focusing on the destruction of their business and therefore lose sight.” I couldn’t agree more with this man. So I was happily surprised when David Petherick mailed me an example of a newspaper that seems to get what’s going on in their industry. The Liverpool Daily Post, a regional newspaper, is using CoveritLive to live blog the production of tomorrow’s paper:
Over the next 17 hours, members of our team will be logging on to this blog to talk about what they doing, and how the Liverpool Daily Post is put together.
Editor Mark Thomas, deputy editor Alison Gow, news editor Andy Kelly, sports editor Richard Williamson, business editor Bill Gleeson and features editor Emma Johnson are involved with this unique experiment and will write a story for the paper about their experiences as well. So why are they doing this?
It’s an attempt to get our online readers more involved in what we do on a daily basis.
Sounds good and daring. And I must say, I’m impressed by the amount of messages they have been posting. The number of comments is also pretty high, yet the news editors might need some more time to answer them. As one of the most important parts of the digital revolution is the growing need of people to interact with media professionals.
All in all, this initiative of the Liverpool Daily Post is a good example of the attitude media companies should have. Some optimism in this business doesn’t hurt anybody, in fact, it’s exactly what it needs. Especially now The Guardian Journalist Nick Davies has pointed out with his book Flat Earth News that British newspapers basically just copy/paste from the newswire of the Press Association. A bit of transparency is the least that newspapers can do to win back their audience’s trust.
[WebTipr: David Petherick]
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