The British Newspaper Archive

When I was a kid, I asked my dad why we used newspapers to light the fire in our fireplace, or why it was newspapers that the fishmonger wrapped his fish in.

I was told it was because old news is practically worthless. Todays news is worth buying a (relatively) expensive newspaper, but yesterdays news is literally garbage.

So when the online revolution slowly started I was surprised that news archives weren’t just opened up and available.

My school had to buy and expensive access to full news archives. 90’s linguistic research, such as word counts, required long discussions with newspaper publisher to get access to the articles, and then the source data had to be kept secret for fear of leaking, well, old news.

What is the loss to publishers to just give it away? I supposed today you can argue that there is real money in LLM source data, but surely that wasn’t something publishers were contemplating in the past 3 decades.

For US papers, we have newspapers.com. I relied on this for my articles about the Pullman Strike, using screen capture and OCR to process it. It was tedious but I don't think a lot of readers want to look at images.

It's really incredible how much text those pages contained. There weren't a whole LOT of pages, of course.

I love reading through old newspapers and magazines.

Even the ads! There's just something very VERY different about the ads in old print. The design and the prices are interesting to check out.

This is a great resource. Used it to research writing in the Scots language in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Slightly disappointing that nothing is free-to-view after 1950.