About 10 years ago, when I was at The New Yorker, I worked on launching the redesign, paywall, and the move to WordPress. We actually had most of the archive technically ready to go. The data wasn’t the hard part.
The real blocker was permissions and rights. Contracts going back a century obviously never contemplated digital publication, domains, or the internet at all. Untangling who owned what, and securing the right to republish everything online, was a massive legal and logistical undertaking.
That’s what held us back then, not so much the technology. Really glad to see that chapter finally closed.