Why this exists
America's early newspapers survived. Reading them is another matter. The scans exist, but they sit behind clunky viewers, and the computer-generated text underneath them is often too garbled to search — so two centuries of firsthand reporting stays effectively out of reach for anyone but specialists.
New technology should make our history easier to search and understand, not just easier to store. Old News America re-reads the original pages with modern OCR, reassembles individual articles out of the column jumble, and puts a research assistant on top that answers questions with citations pointing back to the exact page, column, and line — so you can always check the answer against the original ink.
The collections
Notes
Occasional write-ups on how the archive is built — reading 190-year-old type with modern OCR, reconstructing articles from newspaper columns, and teaching a research agent to cite its sources — will collect here.