Archivi.ng 1.0 Is Live: 50k+ Historic Nigerian Newspaper Pages At Your Fingertips
Explore, leave some feedback, share.
The very first version of Archivi.ng is now live.
It marks the beginning of our road to becoming a dependable repository of Nigerian newspapers and a window to history. We’ve transformed an old format into a modern, user-friendly interface, allowing seamless access to pivotal moments in Nigerian history.
We began scanning in April 2023 and have fully digitised the entire PM News archives spanning 17 years: 1994-2010. Starting today and for the next two weeks, we’ll be rolling out access to the 50,000 pages from the archives. We estimate they hold over 100,000 stories, each holding a small but essential piece of the great Nigerian puzzle we’re assembling.
The period we’ve scanned captures a very pivotal period in Nigerian history. The coverage begins in 1994, in what might be one of Nigeria’s darkest decades. PM News covered it all:
The pro-democracy reporting,
Sports teams, local and international
Political cabals
Agony aunts
Celebrity feuds
Ritual killings and Urban Crime, etc.
One of my favourite coverage was Soyinka’s shenanigans – it makes me wonder what type of millennial he’d have been if he had Twitter.
If you wanted to find stories from this period, it’d have required a trip to a library or archive. Our painstaking effort has cut your time from five hours to five seconds. You’ll now discover at the speed of thought and search.
We’re Still Very Much In Phase 1
For Phase 1 of Archivi.ng, we’re digitising newspapers from 1960 to 2010, and going live with PM News means we’ve accomplished about 20% of our goal for this phase. Phase 1 will be completed in the first half of 2024.
Our journey to achieving our Phase 1 goals faces two primary challenges:
Getting permission from publishers remains a hassle. If you know any publishers we should be talking to, please hit me up. We continue to follow up and pitch, even when the responses we’ve gotten have been, “We’ll do it ourselves”, even though there are no indicators of that or “come back later.”
Lots of money: We’ve been 100% donor-funded since the beginning, but we’ve started expanding our income bucket by applying for grants. Please reach out if you know a grant we could be applying for or a company’s corporate responsibility budget we might benefit from.
This Is What Comes Next
While we continue to seek partnerships and expand our archives, we will take the v1 of Archivi.ng to the next level. In the short to mid-term, our priorities will be:
Improving the Discovery Experience (Making it even easier to find exactly what you’re looking for and find other exciting things, both on desktop and mobile)
Improving the Engagement Experience (Making it more accessible to browse through papers, read and share)
Supercharging the archives with AI
Exploring integrations with external platforms (APIs, Collaborative projects)
None of this will be possible without your feedback, so please take the archives for a spin and leave some feedback.
I’ve looked at the data and followed the paper trail, and this much is clear: we wouldn’t have made it this far without you. Your donations, perspective and enthusiasm have carried us through. I’m looking forward to how far it takes us in the future.
Let’s get it going!
PS: We’ve been in the press a lot, I particularly like this story on Al-Jazeera.