Inert Ramblings

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Boston Globe Archives for Free?

I really don’t get it. If a newspaper is going to charge for its archives, you’d think that it wouldn’t make its archives available for free depending on what you clicked on. The Boston Globe does just that.

I did a search to see if Scott Kirsner’s followup article about the Pepper Pad had been published yet, but only the previous article showed up. Just for gits and shiggles I clicked on the article, but was redirected to a subscription signup page.

So, even though the article is publicly available for free and indexed by Google News and a dozen other sites, the Boston Globe still expects you to pay for their search capabilities. Maybe I’m totally missing something here, but I really don’t see the incentive to subscribe. Maybe I’ll change my tune if I ever feel the need to do an advanced search back to 1979.

July 22, 2004 - Posted by Sciri | Numbtastic | | 3 Comments

3 Comments »

  1. It gets better. The search engine you get on the main Globe site is completely different from the super-secret FREE one (well, up to 20 articles a month) that print subscribers have access to, if they can remember where it is.

    Comment by adamg | July 22, 2004

  2. So, do print subscribers actually have a username and password, or do they simply login with a simple token like their phone number or mailing address or something?

    Comment by Sean | July 22, 2004

  3. You use your subscriber number to get a user name and password. The archive is in the subscriber-services area somewhere (I tend to use it roughly once every three months and have to hunt around for it a bit).

    Comment by adamg | July 22, 2004

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