Accessing 123 years of the Herald

By Rudi Alcott, Former Herald publisher

February 11, 1901. The top headline read “Senate passes naval appropriation bill.” Whether it passed or not was up to a house vote at a later date which I did not research to its completion. Perhaps the best “story,” disguised as an ad really, in the middle of page one was the following:

• Free Copies for Examination.
  A copy of this issue of the Daily Herald is sent to every home in the city, to permit readers to judge of its merits. If you want the news, local and general while it is news, and several hours earlier than it can be served to you by any other paper; if you wish to be loyal to your city, to see its best interests zealously promoted, to assist in its development by giving your influence in the proper direction, you should have the Herald for a daily visitor. It will give you in its news columns a complete record of the city’s affairs, and its editorial discussion thereof will always be for the general good.

With that word salad of a subscription ask, so began the Everett Herald. We have printed the news for Snohomish County for over 123 years. This has generated more than 1,293,000 pages of content to date, and there’s plenty more to come.

Recently we began digitizing this content through a partnership with Newspapers and Ancestry.com. Through the years and the fires, floods, earthquakes, ownership changes, and archiving methods of microfiche and microfilm the Herald has been preserved in its entirety, and amazingly through all this chaos, we are missing only four editions. Now converted and preserved in a digital format the Herald will be future proof for generations to enjoy. This format allows you to browse by year, date, or edition; clip a specific part of a page or a story; print or download a copy; or share an edition via email. All the pages are scanned with optical character recognition and converted to a text string, so they are searchable using the embedded search engine. The pages are preserved in their original format including articles, photos, bylines, cutlines, and advertisements.

Moving forward the Herald will make available the most recent 24 months of archives on Heraldnet.com for subscribers. These will not be available on the archives site at newspapers.com until they are outside of the 24-month timespan. This is a standard industry archiving practice to protect our subscribers. Conversely, only the most recent two years will appear on Heraldnet.com. Any archive older than that will be on newpsapers.com and will require a separate paid subscription to access.

I realize current Herald subscribers may not like paying for a separate subscription to access older archives, but digitizing a century and a quarter’s worth of content was extremely expensive. Plus, consider the following:

• The Herald’s archives contain a wealth of historical information, including news articles, editorials, and advertisements that provide insights into past events, trends, and societal attitudes. Do you want to know what happened on the day you were born, read about World War I, the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption, find a classmate or loved one’s obituary or just go down a rabbit hole to find out how much a new car in 1947 cost, then the Herald’s archives are the place to start.
• They can be used for research purposes. If you are a student, researcher, or a professional in fields like history, sociology, or journalism, access to our archives can be essential for conducting research and gathering trusted sources.
• Do you have a personal interest in history, genealogy, or local events? Our archives can be a treasure trove of information about your family, community, or areas of interest.
• Our archives include articles and information that are not available in current issues or online searches. Subscribing allows you to delve deeper into specific topics or events.

By subscribing to our archives, you’re supporting the preservation of Everett’s historical records and journalism. Your annual subscription helps maintain and digitize future copies of the Herald.

There are two options for subscribing. You can get the Herald’s archives for a small yearly fee or subscribe to all the newspapers in the Ancestry archive from across the globe, including the Herald’s, for an additional fee.