In case you're similarly misled by this headline as I was, this is about making the archive specifically of "Editor & Publisher" available, not about some larger archive of the contents of American newspapers.
It's an amazing resource, but it's hidden away and researchers within Google have trouble accessing it even if they knew it existed. I spent
months with lawyers to get access to the original files for research and at one point they told me they were going to delete it! Whaaaaa!?!
It was something like 6 PB, which seriously, to Google isn't much, but the team that "owned" the data wasn't using it and to them it was just an expense. Ugh. People don't care about history.
Google doesn't want to make the web and the world searchable any longer like their original set values set, now they just want to put up just good enough service to get all your private information and then aim ads at you. Gone are those heady days of some streak of altruism in their mission as a corporation.
Which is infuriating because people would happily pay even a fairly premium price I suspect for good access to that archive, but of course Google can't just sell a good product for a reasonable price, it has to be FREE******.
(Each * here representing some unknown third party getting access to your email address, phone number, blood type and sexual preferences.)
New York State funded an effort to scan, but not digitize historical newspapers, and while the microfilm is stored in the state archives, the online versions are hosted by an eccentric guy who digitizes the microfilm as a hobby. The guy puts everything online, but makes it difficult to work with in a variety of ways.
That's fantastic, though this too appears to have quite limited scope, going by the about page. Certainly a great resource though, and since I'm currently doing some genealogy research on two separate branches of my family that emigrated to the US I'll definitively use it.
etrabroline did say "in the public domain." I consider Isaac Asimov's inclusion major, for example. I've even heard of a lot of the periodicals he's listed in.
