Improved Sporting News Archives
I know that I’m a little bit behind on this news. However, if you haven’t seen this yet, you really should check it out.
If you head over to this website, you’ll notice that there’s a new archive of scans of The Sporting News. And they all seem to be available for free.
More importantly, though, it seems that some of the files have been scanned from original newspapers instead of the old and lower quality microfilm pictures that we’ve been using for years.
For example, check out this April 3, 1919 issue:
Compare that to the microfilm images we’ve been using for years:
Though there are still a few imperfections, I think you can clearly see that the new scans are far superior to the old.
Now, not all the issues have been rescanned. And it’s kind of hard to find original issues from 1919 or earlier that haven’t completely fallen apart, which is why the old style scans still dominate:
But the improvements are absolutely welcome.
The truth is that you can’t really research baseball history without consulting The Sporting News. And this is especially true for seasons in the 1950s, back when the newspaper was at its height:
I’ve been thinking for a little while about putting together a major study on the history of The Sporting News. These new improvements might be enough to convince me to really push it forward.
Hi, as Chairman of the Sporting News I was sent the link to this thread. Some comments I made at the time of launch at the end of last year are here - https://archive.sportingnews.com/about/
The ability to not be able to download whole editions or yearbooks is quite deliberate at the current time, as we haven't yet completed our "Researcher / SABR" level logins where extended tools will be available for genuine enthusiasts (as opposed to AI bots and others just looking to scrape TSN content).
The ongoing data team work is primarily around the accurate text and image extraction and tagging of articles from new OCR scans allowing for sophisticated future search and analysis. This is being applied from current day slowly backwards till around 1945 where the text is relatively easy to "read". extended search will be available in Q2 this year.
I am aware many researchers may often be more interested in the period from 1886 to WW2, but we have been prioritising our work based on the overall volume of queries we get from the public. These earlier periods are also often problematic as we simply don't have many original documents from this period, meaning that we are also reliant on often poor-quality scans as the source material.
Please bear with us as we continue to complete more text and image extraction and appropriate tagging. If anybody has any urgent research needs, please contact us at archives-feedback@tsn.com and we will look to help.
Kind regards
Tom Hall
This is off topic, but wondering if you have the radio broadcast of that amazing 83 point game by Bam for the Miami Heat this past Tuesday. I have the complete game on video from the Miami TV broadcast. it's in 1080p and a big file, about 9 GB.