MyHeritage debuts OldNews.com, offering access to myriad historical newspapers

MyHeritage debuts OldNews.com, offering access to myriad historical newspapers(techcrunch.com)

109 points by MISTERJerk2U 2 years ago | 33 comments

They seem to be competing with https://www.newspapers.com/, which has been providing access to historical newspapers for about 10 years now.

I did a few searches on OldNews.com to compare with Newspapers.com, and it seems that OldNews has a smaller database, with far fewer newspapers. It didn't contain results from a sampling of local newspapers that I tried, nor from major newspapers like the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, or Chicago Tribune.

At $99/year, OldNews is also slightly more expensive than the basic Newspapers.com subscription.

Their UX is also lacking, with poor filtering options that make it difficult to select a specific publication, city, or range of dates.

It's not clear to me how they hope to compete with the incumbent in the market.

geor9e 2 years ago | |

They're probably just banking on the fact that MyHeritage has a lot more customers than either one of those, who probably haven't heard of either one, and are already proven to shell out money to research their family history. Whatever you show them first, they'll use. Of course the smart customers like you are going to stick with the better alternative but I think you're in a small minority of elites.

jaysonelliot 2 years ago | | |

Newspapers.com is an Ancestry.com property. I'm not sure who's the larger company in terms of user base, do you know their respective sizes?

greggsy 2 years ago | |

In Australia at least, the state and national library sites offer free, searchable access to newspapers going back since the early 1800’s. Even obscure community papers are available. Is a similar thing not offered by the equivalent US institutions? What is the threshold of ‘worthiness’ for a publication to ge archived and served by Library of Congress?

ghostly_s 2 years ago | | |

The same is available here, but through local libraries, so not necessarily available to everyone, because most everything is at the whim of local government in the US.

WarOnPrivacy 2 years ago | |

> OldNews is also slightly more expensive than the basic Newspapers.com subscription.

newpapers.com is $150/yr or $20/mo for unlocked content - and $90/yr or $8/mo for partially unlocked content.

Or you can pay $360/yr for Ancestry and get newspapers.com for $150/yr for unlocked - $90/yr for partially unlocked.

Or you can pay $600/yr for Ancestry and get newspapers.com at no extra charge.

dima55 2 years ago |

The #1 thing anybody should be asking for here is a list of newspapers they archive. I cannot see it. The obvious competitor to these people is https://www.newspapers.com and they at least have a crude one: https://www.newspapers.com/papers. Note that the Seattle Times (and newspapers from the NW in general) are missing. Does oldnews do better here?

WarOnPrivacy 2 years ago | |

> Note that the Seattle Times (and newspapers from the NW in general) are missing. Does oldnews do better here?

A LOC search for WA state showed some content on but not ST. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/?state=Washing...

jaysonelliot 2 years ago | |

It seems like OldNews has a very limited set of papers, I couldn't find results from any of the major newspapers (NY Times, WaPo, Chicago Trib, etc) or from a sampling of local papers that I tried.

dash2 2 years ago |

It's such a shame that recent historical newspapers are closed source in this way. We could learn so much from quantitative analysis of culture if there were downloadable data or at least an API.

echase3 2 years ago | |

You can easily find historical newspapers on archive.org. For example:

https://archive.org/details/sim_los-angeles-times_the-los-an...

dash2 2 years ago | | |

But automated text analysis needs OCR. There's https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov but I'm not sure how good its OCR has been.

dash2 2 years ago | |

Just to add an example: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/119646/13/WRAP-historical-analysi...

calvinmorrison 2 years ago | |

Well you can, go to your local library and look at microfiche. It's how we used to do it. Primary research. If you're lucky they may have OCR or a tagging system. If not, reels of microfiche

jvan 2 years ago | | |

Microfiche is a small flat sheet, microfilm is on reels. "Fiche" being French for card.

The More You Know...

dash2 2 years ago | | |

That's not gonna work at million-scale, though.

brewdad 2 years ago | |

I'm old enough to have visited a library and pulled old rolls of microfiche off the shelf to hunt for an archived news article. Being able to pull most of those same records while sitting in my backyard is pretty amazing.

I do fear that too much of the modern era will end up locked behind paywalls and ultimately lost once private equity has no use for it anymore.

ajxs 2 years ago |

In case this is useful to anyone, there's lots of digitised newspapers freely available in the Library of Congress: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

everybodyknows 2 years ago | |

Interesting that the newest available is from 1963.

riordan 2 years ago | | |

Chronicling America is great, but as you’ve noticed it’s limited to issues that are in the public domain. It’s not just LC, the National Digital Newspaper Program[1] has been funding hundreds of libraries across all 50 USA states to make it possible since the mid-00s.

Australia’s national library offers Trove[2], which has a huge collection of Australian public domain newspapers.

Most of their repository is likely funded by your tax dollars and is there for the public to use.

[1]: https://www.neh.gov/divisions/preservation/national-digital-... [2]:https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/

riffic 2 years ago |

there's a wealth of data locked up in these old newspapers and it's kind of a shame it's only being valued by these genealogy corporations. They're not really the best stewards of the data.

ghaff 2 years ago | |

Archiving is really expensive and time consuming. Making it actually useful is more so.

Archiving some things like photos is also complicated from a rights perspective given it wasn't even on the radar when a lot of the content was originally used.

eshack94 2 years ago |

It would be awesome if all these newspaper archives were freely available via Archive.org or a similar service. Seems strange to need a subscription to view old newspapers. Perhaps part of the fees pay for hosting costs and the work that goes into compiling so many sources and slapping a easily navigable UI on top of it, etc.

fffcvddd 2 years ago | |

Finding papers and digitizing them takes a a lot of work. Is nice that sone not for profits like archive.org do that work for no cost but expecting others to do it for you for free is what seems strange to me.

ghaff 2 years ago | | |

Archive.org, for example, does a lot of good work. But without too much hyperbole, there's essentially an infinite amount of paper with lines on it in libraries, historical societies, and private collections around the world. It's never going to all be digitized.

shortformblog 2 years ago |

I’m the target audience for this, as I use Newspapers.com for a lot of my research. There are a lot of services like this. $99 is cheaper than the current $75/6 months I pay for them.

I think Newspapers.com needs the competition, but I wish it was from a source other than a directly competing genealogy company.

ansmithz42 2 years ago |

My impression on both is that they are US/European centric. Not very true to their "scouring the world for newspapers" line. So, they only show events that impact or are reported on in those areas. I know that newspapers.com has a few (2 or 3) asian newspapers but that is all.

marapuru 2 years ago |

In the Netherlands we have a great online and free resource called Delpher that allows citizens to freely browse over 2 million newspapers from previous decades.

Its bizarre to see how important archival content like that is being monetized instead of commoditised by MyHeritage…

For example, Delpher allowed me to investigate the life of some of my family members from whom I knew close to nothing.