Digitally-archived newspapers have clear ROI, says Cold North Wind president

A deal with the venerable New York Post to put 200 years of the newspaper online is just the first of several major announcements Ottawa-based Cold North Wind Inc hopes to make in the next few months. Similar deals are being negotiated with news organizations throughout North America and Europe. While the process appears to be an expensive one for newspapers to undertake, company president and CEO Bob Huggins says the return on investment is clear to media executives. News organizations have been making money on their ASCII archives for several years, and Huggins says Post executives expect significant revenues by selling subscription access to their archives. He notes that the academic community is an especially heavy user of media subscriptions, and that the University of Michigan holds a small stake in the company. Huggins is also anticipating demand from genealogists – a market a recent Morgan Stanley study concluded was over 40 million strong. The deal with the Post, announced late last month, involves putting 200 years of archives online in a searchable format. Terms for the deal were not disclosed, but Huggins says his high-end machines generate nearly a dollar-and-a-half per page in revenue for the company. There are over 800,000 pages on the Post’s microfiche archives. The process involves using high-end scanners dedicated to reading microfiche, running those scans through an optical character recognition program, and having staff index the resulting pages. As an end-product, the company produces low-resolution .gifs which can be viewed in the paper’s original format. Eisen says some unusual fonts, as might be used in advertisements, aren’t text-searchable, but the page appears as it would have originally in print. The process is almost entirely automated using over $1 million worth of servers, processors and scanners in the company’s Ottawa lab. To access the information, users will click on a link to Cold North’s Paper of Record portal, where they can view the content online. While posting printed material to the web has become a contentious issue in light of controversies over who owns the rights, Huggins says the issue doesn’t affect his company. He recognizes that there is a window of approximately 30 years of still-living writers who are unlikely to have given permission for their works to be posted in electronic format, but that issue is a matter for the papers to solve, not Cold North Wind. As for the material that is posted, the company is watermarking the content but not encrypting the downloads. Technical staff at the company say the low-resolution format of the images mean the material is unlikely to become coveted by copyright infringers. Earlier this year, Torstar Corp made a $2.5-million investment in Cold North Wind to buy nearly 20 per cent of the company. The other principles include Huggins, an Infoglobe alumni, Jeff Nelson, formerly with Thompson Corp, Alex Wells and Scott Clark. The company has raised $5.1 million in financing since launching in September, 1999, and the 25-person organization runs from offices in Ottawa, Boston, Dallas and New York City.

Digitally-archived newspapers have clear ROI, says Cold North Wind president

News | 03/08/2001 5:00 am EST

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