Times of London makes archive available for free

As I've recommended here several times, the Miami Herald should open up its electronic archive in an effort to increase online readership and thus ad revenue, well The Times of London has made 200 years worth of its archives available for free. Of course this will be a much used resource by many web surfers.

H/T: Penultimos Dias

Interesting

McClatchy's Washington DC bureau has its own web site. And you can access any article they have published on the site, since its inception, for free.

For the sake of argument

I've been looking at this issue of free vs. paid archives for a while now and it has drawn some attention. Let me be clear about a few things. First of all, I don't thing making archived articles free will save the Herald. The Herald needs to be saved by its management thinking differently than they have to date. It's obvious that what they've done until now is not working. The pay per view archive model is to me just a symptom of the myopia that plagues the folks at McClatchy and 1 Herald Plaza.

In investigating the bit about the archives I came across a few items:

First is this from blogger and former journalist Dan Gillmor, who suggested strongly in January of 2005 that the future was in an ad supported, free to the consumer model:

I recognize the institutional and financial hurdles that will make it difficult to pull off in many companies today, even if they like the idea in a general sense. But I also believe it's almost inevitable....

There are two immediate questions for publishers. First, how much money are they making today from pay-per-view archives? The Poynter Institute's Bill Mitchell said over the weekend (on a mailing list), "The range of news orgs generating significant revenue from archives with current biz models may be more limited than I had assumed."

That's good news. It means that the financial risk of changing the model is small in many, if not most cases.

Second, and related to that, what are the benefits of shifting to an open archive? I'm utterly in Waldman's camp that it would heighten a newspaper's authority, helping keep it at the center -- or not far from there -- of the community's civic agenda.

Every newspaper of any quality has published hundreds of articles that readers can find nowhere else and which bloggers, among others, would surely cite and point to as a vital part of the permanent record of a community. These include investigative pieces, certain features and other stories. If available upon publication at a permanent URL, they quickly rise in search engine rankings, where others will find them later.

I'm convinced that increasingly sophisticated Web advertising, especially keyword-based text ads, will create a revenue stream of some size for such stories. This will be especially the case when they've moved high enough in search-engine rankings to be found without searching the newspaper's site, but that's not crucial...

Someday soon, some paper is going to try this. It'll be a great experiment. I believe it'll be a successful one, too.

A few weeks later in this article from USC's Annenberg Online Journalism Review was published. It's from February of 2005. At the time the New York Times was using the "pay per view" model for its archives and the CEO of the New York Times digital staunchly defended it:

Martin Nisenholtz, the dean of online publishers as CEO of New York Times Digital, says there are two main reasons NYTimes.com charges for most of its archives: The marketplace has already valued the content to be worth much more, and there's no way to recoup that value through paid-search ads (such as Google AdWords) or even display advertising.

"We're not about to give away something that the marketplace is paying a huge premium for already," Nisenholtz told me, "unless you could get a lot more than that premium in some other way, which you can't, believe me, there's no way. There's no analysis to show that Google AdWords gets you anything close to what we make on archives on the Web -- never mind all the money we make on the after-market sales. It's so ridiculous as to be laughable."

As I pointed out before, the Times reversed its course in September of 2007 when it announced that a large portion of it's archives would be available free of charge:

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com....

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

Interestingly Nisenholtz was not quoted in the story though he remains aboard at that the Times.

Shortly after the Times' announcement, Ken Doctor, who was at one time the VP of content services for Knight Ridder Digital, wrote this post about the paid or free dilemma:

Soon as they figured out they couldn't charge for today's content, they felt compelled to charge for something. Hence, archives. Walled-off and searchable, but through separate interfaces, at per-article and bundled costs. These products have created good revenue streams, but not major ones. That's what has led both Time Inc. and the New York Times to unbuckle their archive belts and open them up to the public.

As Dan Gillmor sagely pointed out as the Times announced the freeing of the archives (and the termination of Times Select), the Times seized the opportunity to become the publisher of record, instant world news, everywhere, a real platform for 21st century growth. Local news publishers are now scratching their own heads, wondering if they can become the publishers of record for their metro areas and communities, and whether they'll be similarly (though on a smaller scale) rewarded.

This is the crux of my argument. Whether its coverage Hurricane Andrew, Elian Gonzalez, or the 2000 election and recount saga there's a lot of important content about south Florida out there that everyday netizens would read if they had access. Right now, interested folks end up at news and newspaper sites that are literally and figuratively far away from those stories.

From the archives... UPDATED

The petulant self-appointed pope of south Florida bloggers has taken issue with my suggestion to free the Herald's digital archives which are currently in jail behind a pay wall. He claims the Herald makes more money with the pay per view model than with an ad supported model that's free to readers. In the comments section I responded, explaining how many of the most visited newspaper and magazine sites offer free archives going back at least a couple of years with most offering more than 15 years worth of free archives.

But here's another opinion. It comes, ironically enough, from an article in the New York Times' archive from September of last year when the Times announced that it was dropping it's paid archive model which was at the time generating $10 MILLION a year in revenue:

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

The article also states that at the time of the decision, "the Times’s site [had] about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings."

As of March of 2008, the Times site was drawing 18.8 million unique visitors (that link is, incidentally, to free archived article from Editor & Publisher). That's a 44% rise in web site traffic in a little more than half a year. And the Times already had the most visited newspaper web site in the country BEFORE it made many of its archived articles available for free viewing.

Do I think this is going to save the Herald? No, of course not. The failure to follow industry leaders in this area is but a symptom of what ails the Herald. It demonstrates a "head in the sand" mentality that must be prevalent at McClatchy headquarters and at 1 Herald Plaza while Rome is burning.

UPDATED:

Because 'Pope Pompous I' continues to defend his asinine position (simply because its contrary to mine), I thought I'd point out that the top news web site of any kind in America is CNN.com. Of course, CNN's free archives go back to 1996. The point is that if you are going to have a web site, and you want it to be a "successful web site", that is to say one that is a viable business, then maybe you should model it after, you know, other web sites that are successful.

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.

Report: Herald outsourcing library/archive responsibilities

I received the following email:

Seven journalists and librarians are employed by the Herald's archives.

This email was sent company-wide from Anders Gyllenhaal on May 16th-

Outsourcing:
As you know from past notes, we've experimented with a number of outsourcing projects across the company, including the company's call center, some advertising make up, and several small projects within the newsroom. For more than a month, the company we're working with, Mindworks, based in New York and New Delhi, has been monitoring our online story comments to supplement our own work in tracking and removing inappropriate comments. This has worked fairly well and has added a new layer of review that we've struggled to provide from within. We are considering other non-news work that can be done from outside our building, such as archiving photos and text. These are difficult experiments to test and it's uncertain how successful they will be or exactly how they'd fit into how we work. But in a time when we need to stretch resources, we will be looking at a number of ways of doing things differently and will keep the newsroom posted on progress. If you have questions about any of this, please do not hesitate to ask.

Free advice for Herald.com

I've posted before about the paid wall behind which the Herald's archives sit. Many papers do the same thing. Obviously as newspapers move toward more of an online medium and away from the printing press, having searchable content will be key to maintaining and attracting eyeballs. I don't think a pay per view model will be sustainable in the future.

In any case, I was reading an article on The Toledo Blade's web site today about the expatriate American, William Morgan, who fought with Fidel Castro's 26th of July rebels during the Cuban Revolution. There's been a legal battle going on related to the long dead guerrilla's citizenship and The Blade mentions previous reporting it has done on the matter in the past. I was thinking that it would be great if The Blade posted links to that previous reporting. That way an interested party could go back and see how the story evolved. This would require bringing those articles out from behind the paid wall, even if only temporarily.

This could be an interim step toward moving to an ad supported, free archive. Probably too reasonable for anyone at 1 Herald Plaza to implement.