I’m tempted to yell “bravo” to local newspaper web site DaytonDailyNews.com for giving access to over 500,000 stories since 1990 in their archive, searchable and sortable. The typical newspaper web site would try to profit off such a feature, by charging per story for access to the back issue archive.

I think DDN must realize that there’s more upside to potential search traffic and special interest. I really enjoyed searching for archived Cincinnati Reds stories by DDN baseball writer Hal McCoy (one of the best baseball writers working, IMO).

However, in typical newspaper industry fashion, searches and stories in their archive are not linkable (and therefore are not bloggable). So, as much as I’d like to help drive traffic to their news archive for then (for free, I might add), I just have to link to the search page and tell folks to search for themselves.

Gah! Newspaper industy! What are you thinking?! If you’re going to unlock the archive, then unlock the archive. How else are folks going to know what in there unless people like me and others search and link to that stuff?

The forest is right in front of you! Don’t you see it? The trees are right here!

Oh. Yeah. The trees. Well, you’ll see for yourself after you’re done cutting them down.

/sigh