Newsletter Archives

ThePaperBoy.com.au

Those of us who travel frequently like to be able to check out the local newspaper of the city we are visiting. It is nice to get a feel for local issues, to find out how the local team is doing, and to see what kind of weather to expect.

And any good researcher knows that one of the hidden sources of in-depth information on a company or local industry is the newspaper in the city where the firm or industry is based.

One intriguing source of local newspapers around the world is ThePaperBoy.com.au. This web site was built and is maintained by Ian Duckworth, a travel writer who points out that he lives in Perth, "a great place to live but a really long way from everywhere".

This site lets you search for newspapers by the paper's name, by city or by country. The search results page shows the newspaper name, city, state, country, and language, along with a live link to each newspaper. Keep in mind that this is not a full-text news search, such as what you would find in news.google.com.au or World News Network, although ThePaperboy.com does include the ability to search current headlines of BBC and MSNBC. Aggregated news sources are fine if you need current news, but there are times when either you want to monitor one news source on an on-going basis or you need to search the paper's archive going back a year or two. For these types of information needs, going right to the sources through a tool such as ThePaperboy is the best approach.

Searching ThePaperboy.com is free, although the free version does include some small ads along the top and side margins of the screen. The subscriber version is ad-free, and includes a number of useful features, including the ability to:

Search the full text of major news wires and aggregators
Bookmark your favourite news sources
Customise your view of ThePaperboy's home page with your selection of headline feeds and newspaper links
Search CNN, Yahoo News, CBC and NineMSN

A subscription is US$2.95/month, payable through PayPal (with discounts for prepayment of a six-month or full-year subscription). There is also a free 7-day trial, so you can see if you think a subscription is worth the US$2.95.

ThePaperboy includes both large newspapers and those targeted to more niche markets. A search for Sydney newspapers, for example, turned up the major papers such as the Morning Herald, but also found more narrowly-focused newspapers such as the Irish Echo and The Chaser ("Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence").

Ian Duckworth, the editor of ThePaperboy, is continuing to add to ThePaperboy's collection; during the first quarter of 2004, he had added papers from Belize, Spain, Turkey, Jamaica, Argentina and the US. This site has a useful help page, and Duckworth responds quickly to queries.

One drawback in ThePaperboy's search-by-city function is that national newspapers (such as The Australian) are not retrieved by city -- only when you search for all Australian newspapers or, of course, search by newspaper name.

An affiliated site, TheMagazineBoy.com, lets you search for magazines by title, country (but no option for a narrower geographic area), subject and language. Unlike the wide coverage of ThePaperboy.com, TheMagazineBoy only covers 41 countries. This site feels a bit less developed than ThePaperBoy, but it can be useful for finding major magazines in a country.

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