Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

http://archives.chicagotribune.com

From the FAQ, the archives date back to 1849. For now, the (beta) archives are free. But that will change when the production version finally goes live -- so use it now while you can!

Yes, you can browse; just enter the URL with the date appended, thus:

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1963/11/23/

Thanks for the warning of what's to come. The New York Times spyderbyte archive of articles was fun while it lasted, but it became a pay site as well (most of its articles were pre-NFL era, and football news was limited to the colleges and the occasional AAU club like the Brooklyn Crescents. The time.com website, never that great to begin with because it was text only and sometimes revised from the original, went pay a few years earlier, and the SI Vault-- yecch. The Chicago Tribune archive has been a beautiful model of how imaged papers should be-- type in the date, pick out the page that you want without doing a digital version of turning the microfilm reel or having to guess where the sports section begins, and easy to jump around by tweaking the url. (As with microfilm reels of the Tribune, their November 3, 1948 issue on the website does not mention President-Elect Dewey).
I can certainly understand that they don't want it to do it for free, but I'll be sad to see it go.

Agree with what Mark has said - especially on what they did to the SI Vault.

I've been enjoying the Tribune archives, was assuming it would cost someday but hopefully not too soon.

Well, here it is two years later, and the Chicago Tribune archive is still free. In case you were wondering, there is a way to download page images as jpg files. For example, here is the URL of a page that talks about the 1960 College All-Star Game:

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1960/08/13/page/49

To download the jpg image, just append "xlarge.jpg" to the above URL, thus:

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1960 ... xlarge.jpg

Of course, jpgs are not word-searchable. But I suppose you could convert each jpg page image to a PDF then do an OCR on it, but that's a lot of work. I don't know how "kosher" this is in terms of copyrights, etc. so I download the page images sparingly. If someone writes a script to do a mass download, I'm sure their IT folks will detect it and shut the whole thing down. So please don't do that.

Thanks, guys! I just spent the afternoon poaching Trib pages thanks to the heads up.