Footnote and Gannett - A Partnership Made for News-Messenger Readers?

There was interesting reading in my email box today. Footnote, the home of 57 million digitized historical documents, has partnered with the Gannett Company, the publisher of 84 daily newspapers (including our own News-Messenger) to add historical newspaper content to the online world. Two of those newspaper’s, Florida Today and Poughkeepsie Journal (NY) have already had digitized pages added to Footnote’s ever growing list of documents.

According to Footnote, they plan to digitize “the full run” of these two newspapers. That could be quite an accomplishment since the Poughkeepsie Journal dates back to 1785! Footnote has kicked off the venture with news articles featuring Woodstock and the Moon Landing. No word on whether any of our own local newspaper will eventually be added to Footnote’s content, but that might be worth Footnote’s subscription price, which goes up to a $79.95 annual rate as of August 1.

Footnote is currently running a limited time special rate of $59.95 for the annual subscription. Which of Gannett’s newspapers will have their content added to Footnote? I don’t know. Since Ohio is woefully underrepresented in Footnote’s current small town historical newspaper collection – I couldn’t find any when I took a quick peek – my guess is that at least some of their Ohio newspapers will eventually be part of the collection. If the News-Messenger ends up as one of them, wouldn’t it make a nice promotional, giving the subscribers to the News-Mess a discount on an annual Footnote subscription? Just a thought….

© 9 July 2009, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder