Herald Archives: an appeal to logic

One of the things Herald Watch has been crusading for is a free electronic archive for the Heralds. I can't take credit for the idea, I got it from Alesh at CriticalMiami.com. As a last ditch effort I thought I'd express a clear rationale for doing so.

It's often said that journalists write the first draft of history, and it's true. Historians often go to the library and conduct research on historical events by looking at microfiche copies of old newspapers. Libraries were really the only institutions with the resources to store such things. So you had a product that had two potential uses. The primary one was to inform readers about events of the day and the secondary one was a reference for future generations.

During the early 1980s, most newspapers began a conversion to computers. Articles could be stored electronically. That's why the Herald's electronic archives goes back to 1982. The Washington Post's and New York Times' electronic archives likewise go back to the 80s.

But the internet has created a new class of consumers for newspaper content. That class consists of bloggers, amateur historians and otherwise curious web surfers. These are people who, for the most part, aren't going to sift through reels of microfiche searching for a story that may or may not exist.

The Herald has a searchable electronic archive but you can only see a brief citation of the articles that your search returns. You must pay to be able to read the actual articles. To my way of thinking, this is ass-backwards.

Let's take a minute to discuss advertising and where it fits in. Newspapers, though sold to readers, have always been subsidized by advertising revenue. Advertisers have historically used newspapers in order to reach large numbers of consumers. If you were Burdine's and were having a big sale you might have purchased a full page ad in Section A of the local paper. The shelf life of that paper and thus the ad was a couple of days max. That's because the next day brings a new newspaper and yesterday's news is relatively worthless to the primary newspaper consumer. Now if I go to the library and pull up a Miami Herald from 1955, I not only get to see the articles but also the ads, many for companies that don't even exist anymore. It's a sort of time capsule, which is cool but not exactly valuable to the Herald. They get no incremental revenue from it.

Which brings us to the electronic archives. Just like the printed paper, the main herald.com site is supported by ads. But the archives are not, instead relying on the aforementioned "pay per view" system. Now imagine having historical content (like the kind you'd find at the library) and being able to serve it to this growing class of information consumers along with current advertising. It's like airing re-runs that you own the rights to and getting to sell the advertising all over again.

The public has found that there is value to "yesterday's news" if it can be accessed efficiently. The Miami Herald is no longer simply a newspaper. It's a CONTENT PROVIDER (to borrow a phrase). Whether that content is two days old, two years old, or two decades old, the Herald's mission should be to find ways and places for its content, its consumers and its advertisers to meet not to put barriers in between them.

Recently I have penned several opinion pieces for PajamasMedia.com. In one of them, I scrutinize Herald coverage of the Cuban exile community. My editor wanted me to link to the Herald articles in question which date back to 1983. The problem is that the articles are behind a paid firewall (I was able to obtain the articles for free at the Miami-Dade County Public Libraries' web site, which is free but a chore). I instead linked to the Herald's citation for each article. I doubt a single reader paid for the articles I linked to, though some might have read them if they were free. Potential eyeballs to serve advertising to.

The very idea of the "World Wide Web" is that sites link to each other making information more accessible. And the Herald is doing its best to make its content inaccessible.