Cleveland Newspapers?

Conspicuously Missing

Cleveland Newspapers?

There’s one city we’re missing in our series on old newspapers.

Seriously, I don’t know why this is, but there are no usable Cleveland newspapers on the newspaper archive websites I’m familiar with.

This is what it looks like on newspapers.com:

Now, I know from other research that what we want to find is the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The foreign language papers won’t do us much good, including the ones I can actually read. Echo, for example, was a German language socialist weekly paper that didn’t offer much in terms of sports coverage.

I’m not sure why the Cleveland Plain Dealer coverage is so lacking. Perhaps the good people at newspapers.com are still scanning pages. Perhaps there are rights issues. It’s hard to say.

Anyway, I know that the Plain Dealer archives can be accessed if you happen to have a Cleveland library card. I was going to write a big post about how awful that is, about how information should be freely available when it is not protected by copyright, and so on and so forth.

However, I then realized that there is an alternative.

The Plain Dealer offers its own newspaper archive retrieval service, which you can find here. I’m pretty sure that it’s basically a ProQuest searching service. We’ll talk about my hatred for ProQuest some other time.

The problem, though, is the price for access, which is ridiculous:

This is insane. Anybody who does research into historical newspapers knows that a single article is never enough. You’ve got to see the whole page. You need to know what else people were talking about, including whether there were gossip pieces or short editorials next to the article you’re looking for, whether there were interesting advertisements, and whether there were things happening that you just don’t know about.

You can’t find old baseball advertisements if you’re paying $4 per article, or are limited to a measly 150 articles per month. That’s insane. At the rate I look through old newspapers, I’m pretty sure I exceed 150 articles per day.

And $26 per month for an ongoing subscription is an incredibly high price for what you get. This blog isn’t sponsored; however, I can tell you that the highest priced package at newspapers.com is $75 for 6 months of unlimited access. You get more than one newspaper that way, too.

Anyway, that’s the reason why I don’t have access to the Cleveland newspapers. If you know of an alternative, please let me know!