Thursday 25 February 2016

US-only IrishNewspapers.com to close

IrishNewspapers.com, the US-only version of IrishNewsArchive.com, is to close down. Subscriptions are no longer available to purchase, but existing subscribers will be able to access all the content and resources of the site until their current sub expires.

IrishNewsArchive.com, which is owned and managed by the Martin family from Sandyford in County Dublin, will continue to be available globally. It is planning to add new titles shortly. (See following blogpost here.)

Announcing the news, Phillip Martin, the company's Operations Manager, told Irish Genealogy News that the existence of two sites – IrishNewspapers.com and IrishNewsArchive.com – each offering pretty much exactly the same content, was confusing users.

"There was a sense that we were competing with ourselves by having both sites available in the US," he said. "We've therefore decided to step back and re-evaluate our strategy in order to move forward. Overall, we have found the experience of launching into the USA in partnership with Ancestry to be a positive one and hope that we can build on this experience to bring the archives to a wider audience in the near future, possibly in a different format or package."