German news magazine Focus puts all back issues online

Jan 14, 2008, 14:57 GMT

Hamburg - Focus, the German news weekly, placed all its back issues online Monday, marking 15 years since the magazine came onto the market as a conservative counterpart to the weekly Der Spiegel.

In line with other major world titles such as The New York Times, which last year stopped charging for access to back issues, Focus said the service at www.focus.de/archiv would be free.

Current issues would be placed online with 'a certain delay' so as not to threaten current sales. Part of the magazine's current content already appears on a news website, Focus Online.

Jochen Wegner, editor of Focus Online, said digitization and creation of the website had taken six months. Focus publisher Helmut Markwort said 100,000 articles were available.

Der Spiegel said it would go online in the spring with a portal offering free downloads of all articles since the liberal weekly was founded in 1947, but had not yet set a launch date.

The highbrow German weekly newspaper Die Zeit has already launched a free online archive of all issues back to its foundation in 1946.

Publishers in several countries have experimented with charging for access to such archives, but media insiders say this is usually not profitable. London's Guardian launched in November a subscription-only archive stretching back to 1821.

To digitize publications from the pre-computer age, old paper copies have to be electronically scanned. The words are then indexed by optical-character-recognition software.