[HN Gopher] MyHeritage debuts OldNews.com, offering access to my...
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MyHeritage debuts OldNews.com, offering access to myriad historical
newspapers
Author : MISTERJerk2U
Score : 55 points
Date : 2024-03-02 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| jaysonelliot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| collaborative wrote:
| They are both around 4 milion paying users (each)
| geor9e wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know that. Two rivals doing the exact same
| thing. The move makes even more sense now.
| dima55 wrote:
| 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?
| jaysonelliot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| Just to add an example:
| https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/119646/13/WRAP-historical-analysi...
| marapuru wrote:
| 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.
| ajxs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Interesting that the newest available is from 1963.
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(page generated 2024-03-02 23:00 UTC)