There’s an article at MarketingSherpa.com, How to Sell Online Subscriptions to (Very Old) Newspaper Archives that some may find interesting from a technical standpoint. It covers how and why The Scotsman (Scotland’s national print newspaper) was able to digitize its archives going back to the early 1800s. Those archives are very interesting and/or important to many genealogists.
Excerpt from the Article:
Knowing the growing popularity of online genealogical searches (individuals tracing their family roots), Brown envisioned even more online profits by taking thousands of articles from The Scotsman’s print back issues (going clear back to 1817) and making them accessible in a searchable digital archive.
While Brown’s initial research in the late 1990s on digitizing print archives proved to be too costly for the Scotsman.com, Brown later found more affordable solutions as the technology advanced.
Pretty massive project, but it succeeded well beyond what they expected, so hopefully it will spur other newspapers to consider doing the same.