1.4 (3) Create an impressive archive
The share tool thought us that it’s nice to be nice. Nothing much will result from enabling readers to share your content, however, if there is hardly any content to be shared or if the needed information seems to be impossible to find. This is when an archive comes in handy.
When the most successful newspapers create archives, they make sure to create decent ones: for example the New York Times has an archive stemming back to 1851. No big deal. TimesOnline is beta testing one which goes back all the way to 1785. Once it starts running, it is intended to feature content produced by The Times, Sunday Times and TimesOnline.
Times Media’s digital publisher Zach Leonard said that the archive will first be used on a subscription-based format to get revenue from the business community. Only then will the attention be directed at the consumer market.
“Coming to areas like the law we have a tremendous legal archive, which to a certain audience is incredibly valuable and they have the ability – as a business audience – to pay and they are comfortable with that kind of thing, a business based subscription”, said Leonard at an Association of Online Publishers conference in London in October 2006 (Luft, 2006).
In April 2008, two years after this initial interview, Anne Speckman, editor-in-chief of TimesOnline, told journalism.co.uk that the archive will initially be free to users but this might change over time with a possibility of adding some kind of a subscription plan (Oliver, 2008).
Delivering information is what newspapers and magazines are supposed to be all about. With the Internet as a new platform this mission can be (and is!) taken to a new level. Paper editions can be stored in publicly available archives but access to them is difficult for some people. Even if you do have access to such a place, it must be a pain to search through countless print issues in the desire to find that specific information – especially when you’re not quire sure which issue to look in and end up going through thousands. With creating extensive online archives newspapers and magazines are acknowledging their audience’s desire for information and their need to find it quickly and easily. And this is exactly what they are delivering.
