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.
Stephen is a communications consultant based out of the UK. You can connect with him on Twitter or check out his LinkedIn profile. | Email Stephen
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Todd And
Yep! I’m really excited about this news and hope they don’t neglect the 18th century stuff.
Justin
Mmmm, Fish and Chips – thank goodness the only way to consume that content is into my belly