Without the question mark, that was the catchy headline in CNET... which also links to live blogging about the announcement.

Here's the thing itself, an advertising-supported search engine for whatever newspaper archives Google can find online or contract to scan, digitize and index: http://news.google.com/archivesearch

You can already search the historical archives of many magazines and newspapers through their Web sites, some at no charge and others on a pay-per-view basis. What Google offers is one-stop searching across those databases.
 
For example, a search for "Titanic sinks" -- filtered to just 1912 to avoid references to the Titanic as movie or metaphor --  found me almost 500 items, starting with the Christian Science Monitor, Atlanta Constitution, Hartford Courant, Chicago Daily Tribune and Boston Daily Globe -- but all of those are in the pay-per-view ProQuest Archiver. 

As might be expected, the search also found numerous stories in the free New York Times archive. The surprise was a Google News Archive copy of The Daily Advocate of Victoria, Texas, for Friday afternoon, April 19, 1912, headlined "Band Plays as Titanic Sinks." It will serve as an example of Google's own archival newspaper viewer. Will word-associated Google text ads work with this kind of search? So far, I'm not tempted by the ad for a "1918 farmouse sink."

Here's Google's archive search "About" page, which I hope will be expanded soon.

 Here's more detail, from the site's Help pages:


Of course Google's not the only outfit that thinks old news can be good news. Here's a piece I did a few years ago about the National Digital Newspaper Program, an article I should update... but not today.

More than 200 years of previously microfilmed and scanned newspapers are available through Proquest Historical Newspapers, if you are lucky enough to be at an institution with the right pay-as-you-go subscriptions.  The relationship between Proquest and Google isn't entirely clear in the early announcements, but perhaps Google will find headlines and offer a preview of stories behind Proquest's pay-service firewalls.

(My own university library apparently has turned down my request to add the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper to its Proquest subscription. Perhaps it was because of the annual subscription cost. I'll have to get a few campus historians to join in the request, which also should quash any suggestion that I just want to ego-surf my own old clippings to prepare my memoirs.)

Proquest offers these titles (links are to PDF advertising brochures from Proquest):

• The New York Times[~]1851-2005
• The Wall Street Journal[~]1889-1991
• Washington Post[~]1877-1992
• The Christian Science Monitor[~]1908-1995
• Los Angeles Times[~]1881-1986
• Chicago Tribune[~]1849-1986
• Hartford Courant[~]1764-1984
• Boston Globe[~]1872-1925
• The Atlanta Constitution[~]1868-1944
• The Guardian & The Observer[~]1791-2003

And it says these are "coming soon":

• New York Tribune[~]1841-1922 
  
• San Francisco Chronicle[~]1865-1922 
  
• The Baltimore Sun[~]1837-1922  
• Irish Times & Weekly Irish Times[~]1859-2007   
  
• The Scotsman[~]1817-1958
  

What a great time to be teaching Media History!

Note: I posted an early blurb about this at http://boblog.blogspot.com, where I'm posting more often, but less verbosely.

5:58:16 PM  #  

A school-is-about-to-start technology in learning session showed one of anthropology professor Michael Wesch's collaborative class video productions today, which has me thinking about how to use this blog and my original Blogger blog http://boblog.blogspot.com in class...

Here's Wesch's website with a huge discussion of the video:
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119

Among other new media ideas I'm considering...

• http://lib.radford.edu (especially the Proquest newspaper and magazine archives for media history class)
• http://archive.org (also for old media)
  
• http://Twitter.com (as a reporing/surveillance tool?)
  
• The print edition of the Wall Street Journal, which actually is home delivered in Radford, unlike The New York TimesWashington Post. (To be eyewitnesses to the Murdoch transformation, online and in print.)
  
• http://Facebook.com
• http://scripting.com (and other bloggers headed for the presidential nominating conventions)
  
• http://www.radford.edu/comm (to help the faculty define our new School of Communication)
  
• http://PBwiki.com (used with some success last semester)
• WebCT/Blackboard
  
• Collaborative features of Google docs... which gets back to the video above, which started with that huge class collaborating on a script. My biggest class, "Media History," is still smaller than 50, so we should give it a try.
  

10:07:26 PM  #  

As I shuffle through archived clips and bookmarks, I'm going to post a bunch of quotes here while figuring out which to use in my fall classes... Somehow a bunch of February and summer items wound up jumbled together in a folder... Intriguing juxtapositions...

Mark Bowden, in The Atlantic for July/August, chronicling Rupert Murdoch's arrival at the Wall Street Journal:


Louis Hau in Forbes. "Down on the Wire" in February:
Roger Black, design guru, blogging in May:


Mark Glaser of PBS, interviewing experts on copyright and fair use last week:


Philip Meyer of UNC Chapel Hill, in a USA Today February oped:

"News media love conflict, and when religion and science clash in political arguments, they like to stoke the flame..."

Bob Giles of the Nieman Foundation, announcing two investigative reporting awards in the spring Nieman Reports:


Alan Mutter, in a February blog entry, "Can newspapers afford editors?"





8:25:37 PM  #  

Staff cutbacks by one corporate news conglomerate after another are creating a legion of "self-unemployed" journalists... Dennie Williams, long ago a colleague of mine at The Hartford Courant, points out the difference between covering breaking news on a staff paycheck and uncovering harder-to-break news with fewer reporters, fewer editors, and nobody answering the phone after 4 p.m.

See his Editor & Publisher column on the plight of freelance journalists: An Investigative Reporter's Plea.


On a related note, Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, recently made a pitch for "can-do" optimism about alternative funding for investigative work in this PBS MediaShift interview by Mark Glaser, Digging Deeper:


What's a "doer" to do? Lewis is launching an Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. Also see the "recent work" section of his home page, including Nieman Reports and Columbia Journalism Review articles on non-profit sources of funding journalism projects.

In fact, while you're at the Nieman Reports site, check out the rest of that issue, particularly these two sections...

Nonprofit approach:

Seeking New Ways to Nurture the Capacity to Report

By Charles Lewis

Selling the Iraq War: Unearthing False Advertising

By Charles Lewis

Universities and Investigative Journalism
By Charles Lewis

New Sources of Funding, New Sources of Reporting

By Gilbert Cranberg

Going Online With Watchdog Journalism

By Paul E. Steiger

Watchdog Reporting: Exploring Its Myth

By Florence Graves

Understanding the Value of Investigative Reporting

By Bill Buzenberg

When a Few Dollars Make a Big Difference

By John Hyde

Fund for Investigative Journalism: Practices and Policies

By John Hyde

Seeking Support for Investigative Projects

Compiled by Rachel Schaff

Transparency Increases Credibility

By Mark Schapiro

Good Journalism Can Be Good Business

By Daniel Brogan

Digital transformation:


All of a sudden, I think I've got a good start on the reading list for my Specialized Reporting class for this fall!

11:56:52 AM  #  

"America's newspapers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads," says the Project for Excellence in Journalism's study called "The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America's Daily Newspapers."

Among the things being lost are many of the newsroom jobs at both papers I've worked for, The Hartford Courant and the Raleigh News & Observer. Here's a fascinating scary site that maps the losses nationwide: Papercuts.

PEJ says managers need to "find a way to monetize the rapid growth of Web readership before newsroom staff cuts so weaken newspapers that their competitive advantage disappears." That's hardly "stop the presses" news!

As papers narrow their focus to local and community news and try co co-opt local bloggers into supporting local newspaper brands, who watches the wonderful people and big crooks in the worlds of business and politics? Are we moving to an era of very few reporters covering big national stories? Foundation-funded investigative journalists? Trusting all coverage of national and world news to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, USA Today, TVnews departments, BBC and NPR? (And I don't mean celebrity a la mode stuff, sports and fake reality entertainment news.)

Meanwhile, the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication is struggling with its own self-definition. More than 50 professors have joined in the on-line discussion creating 10 times more traffic on the group's e-mail list this month than ever before. The question: Should the division's name be changed to "News Division" or Newspaper/Online News Division" or will that just start a turf battle with the AEJMC divisions formerly concerned with radio, television, magazines and technology?

I vote for having a "Journalism" division to deal with the online multimedia common ground and continuing the industry-specific divisions with clarified mission statements.

For now, the Newspaper Division's definition at national headquarters says:

For evidence of the work division members do, here are recent articles from its journal:

• "Official Sources Dominate Domestic Violence Reporting,"
  by Cathy Ferrand Bullock
  
  
• "How Online Journalists Rank Importance of News Skills,"
  by Shahira Fahmy
  
  
• "Survey Measures Burnout In Newspaper Sports Editors,"
  by Scott Reindary
  
  
• "Suicide Story Frames Contribute to Stigma,"
  by Valica Boudry
  
  
• "Tribune-Review Revives Competition in Pittsburgh,"
  by Linda Steiner and Nora Bird
  
  
• "Comparison of Demographics For Media in 1995, 2006,"
  by Guido H. Stempel III and Thomas Hargrove
  
  
• "Study Asks If Reporters' Gender or Audience Predict for Paper's Cancer Coverage,"
  by Maria E. Len-Rios, Sun-A Park, Glen T. Cameron, Douglas L. Duke and Matt Kreuter

I'll settle for everyone agreeing that "newspaper" means "all the things newspapers have done, all the things newspaper companies do now, and all the newspaper-like things that other organizations do online." Everything is "online," so slashes and hyphens plus that word are redundant.

Traditional media and "alternative media" of all kinds do the same things "online" -- text, audio, pictures, video, interactivity -- it's just the way digital convergence works. That's why I've added "the new TAO" to this blog's subhead. Watch for "newsTAO.com"!

1:34:48 PM  #  

The Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication is contemplating a possible name change and has an excellent discussion going on its e-mail list. Here's my contribution:

8:09:14 AM  #  

The AEJMC Newspaper Division's spring and summer newsletters are now online, including plenty of news:

• National faculty awards for professors Dorothy Bowles at UT Knoxville and Janna Quitney Anderson at Elon University (see page 3 of that PDF newsletter)
  
• A call for discussion of changing the Newspaper Division's name to reflect changes in members' research and in the converged news industry itself. (As I mentioned on the division home page, what was once the International Newspaper Marketing Association, now uses the word "Newsmedia" in its name, but other groups like the Newspaper Association of America and American Society of Newspaper Editors still emphasize their roots. The American Press Institute is still around, too, along with its Newspaper Next project.)
  
• Listings of conference paper presentations and forums at the annual AEJMC Convention, which will be in Chicago next month.

AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, which consists of 17 divisions, 10 special interest groups and 2 commissions, all providing newsletters, research competitions and convention programming.
12:37:25 PM  #