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.
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.
I have accounts on both. In 2018, I would visit Ancestry 80% and MyH 20%. MyH was good for post-1940 records.
Now it's ~99% A & 1% MyH. I try MyH when I can't find something on Ancestry - generally w/o luck. Most of my MyH hits are profiles from FamilySearch (probably ones that I made).
In Australia at least, the state and national library sites offer free, searchable access to newspapers going back since the early 1800’s. Even obscure community papers are available.
Is a similar thing not offered by the equivalent US institutions? What is the threshold of ‘worthiness’ for a publication to ge archived and served by Library of Congress?
The same is available here, but through local libraries, so not necessarily available to everyone, because most everything is at the whim of local government in the US.
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?
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.
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.
Well you can, go to your local library and look at microfiche. It's how we used to do it. Primary research. If you're lucky they may have OCR or a tagging system. If not, reels of microfiche
I'm old enough to have visited a library and pulled old rolls of microfiche off the shelf to hunt for an archived news article. Being able to pull most of those same records while sitting in my backyard is pretty amazing.
I do fear that too much of the modern era will end up locked behind paywalls and ultimately lost once private equity has no use for it anymore.
In case this is useful to anyone, there's lots of digitised newspapers freely available in the Library of Congress: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Chronicling America is great, but as you’ve noticed it’s limited to issues that are in the public domain. It’s not just LC, the National Digital Newspaper Program[1] has been funding hundreds of libraries across all 50 USA states to make it possible since the mid-00s.
Australia’s national library offers Trove[2], which has a huge collection of Australian public domain newspapers.
Most of their repository is likely funded by your tax dollars and is there for the public to use.
Trove is fantastic. It came in handy very recently for the same project I used the Library of Congress for[1]. The Museums of History New South Wales has a great online archive as well[2].
there's a wealth of data locked up in these old newspapers and it's kind of a shame it's only being valued by these genealogy corporations. They're not really the best stewards of the data.
Archiving is really expensive and time consuming. Making it actually useful is more so.
Archiving some things like photos is also complicated from a rights perspective given it wasn't even on the radar when a lot of the content was originally used.
It would be awesome if all these newspaper archives were freely available via Archive.org or a similar service. Seems strange to need a subscription to view old newspapers. Perhaps part of the fees pay for hosting costs and the work that goes into compiling so many sources and slapping a easily navigable UI on top of it, etc.
Finding papers and digitizing them takes a a lot of work. Is nice that sone not for profits like archive.org do that work for no cost but expecting others to do it for you for free is what seems strange to me.
Archive.org, for example, does a lot of good work. But without too much hyperbole, there's essentially an infinite amount of paper with lines on it in libraries, historical societies, and private collections around the world. It's never going to all be digitized.
I’m the target audience for this, as I use Newspapers.com for a lot of my research. There are a lot of services like this. $99 is cheaper than the current $75/6 months I pay for them.
I think Newspapers.com needs the competition, but I wish it was from a source other than a directly competing genealogy company.
My impression on both is that they are US/European centric. Not very true to their "scouring the world for newspapers" line. So, they only show events that impact or are reported on in those areas. I know that newspapers.com has a few (2 or 3) asian newspapers but that is all.
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.
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.