Tomorrow’s fish & chip paper?

Posted Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 10:28pm in Media, PR General  | 

Okay, Google is beginning to scare me now. The Official Google Blog has just announced that they’re beginning a new initiative working with newspaper publishers to digitise millions of news articles. From the blog, “For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint — from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores.

“Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.”

Of course, Google being Google, these articles will be easily searchable using the media company’s (Google is no longer *just* a search engine) technology. The blog post also says you can browse the articles as they were actually printed in the publication. Here’s an example.

From a research point of view this is very significant. Imagine being able to search every news article ever printed from the last 200 years directly from your Web. Here’s another question to the PR people out there. Will you count a news release generated article included in Google’s database as another piece of coverage?

I was going to link to Todd Andrlik to alert him to the news as I know he’s a collector of old newspapers. Glad I checked first though as he’s already spotted it.

Related Posts

• It's easy to be critical 06.22.
• Facebook: the lobbying boiling pot 02.12.
• UK internet users increasingly heart blogs 06.10.
• Straight from the hack's mouth 02.10.
• Recession looms, PR is doomed 01.22.

• Next post: « Show Him Numbers
• Previous post: Is online PR losing its real definition? »