The New York Times launched a pay wall in March, asking avid readers to subscribe. There was much ado made of this decision, but the New York Times already had another pay wall in place – not just in Canada, but around millions of articles in its library.
Media companies are looking for revenue, and increasingly they’re looking for it in their own archives. The Times and Wall Street Journal digitized their archives a decade ago, but many smaller papers haven’t yet, which has made libraries a hot topic — at least it was a hot topic at a conference held last week at the University of Missouri called the Newspaper Archive Summit.
News libraries contain a rich trove of history, of interest to everyone from genealogists to historians to casual readers. So the idea, of course, is to charge those readers for access to the library. “Whether you can monetize it or not is the question,” says Victoria McCargar, a former editor at the L.A. Times, and now a digital preservation consultant.
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