On the heels of the Daily Show opening its archives to the world FOR FREE!, comes word (1) via Sour Grapes’ Google Reader cache and (2) via link from the article that Grapes’ snagged of more archives coming online.
(1) The Economist will put the Economist Historical Archive 1843-2003 online for a free look initially and then on a subscription basis — fees not given.
(2) As of Nov 3d the Guardian and Observer newspapers will be available in an online digital archive. Free for November. Fee-structure post-November not given.
The first phase of the Guardian News & Media archive, containing the Guardian from 1821 to 1975 and The Observer from 1900 to 1975, will launch on November 3.
It will contain exact replicas of the original newspapers, both as full pages and individual articles. and will be fully searchable and viewable at guardian.co.uk/archive.
Readers will be offered free 24-hour access during November, but after this trial period charging will be introduced.
The rest of the archive will launch early in 2008, making more than 1.2m pages of digitised news content available, with Observer content available from its launch as the world’s first Sunday newspaper in 1791.
Hope springs eternal that both archives will discover, as the NYT did, that fees are not the way to go, that revenue generated by selling advertising based on page hits from a shipload of people is more lucrative than charging a fee to a coracle full.