MyHeritage debuts OldNews.com, offering access to myriad historical newspapers

They seem to be competing with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newspapers.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newspapers.com&#x2F;</a>, which has been providing access to historical newspapers for about 10 years now.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>At $99&#x2F;year, OldNews is also slightly more expensive than the basic Newspapers.com subscription.<p>Their UX is also lacking, with poor filtering options that make it difficult to select a specific publication, city, or range of dates.<p>It&#x27;s not clear to me how they hope to compete with the incumbent in the market.

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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newspapers.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newspapers.com</a> and they at least have a crude one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newspapers.com&#x2F;papers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newspapers.com&#x2F;papers</a>. Note that the Seattle Times (and newspapers from the NW in general) are missing. Does oldnews do better here?

It&#x27;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.

In case this is useful to anyone, there&#x27;s lots of digitised newspapers freely available in the Library of Congress: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chroniclingamerica.loc.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chroniclingamerica.loc.gov&#x2F;</a>

there&#x27;s a wealth of data locked up in these old newspapers and it&#x27;s kind of a shame it&#x27;s only being valued by these genealogy corporations. They&#x27;re not really the best stewards of the data.

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.

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&#x2F;6 months I pay for them.<p>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&#x2F;European centric. Not very true to their &quot;scouring the world for newspapers&quot; 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.<p>Its bizarre to see how important archival content like that is being monetized instead of commoditised by MyHeritage…<p>For example, Delpher allowed me to investigate the life of some of my family members from whom I knew close to nothing.