Our Hometown Blog

Our-Hometown’s WordPress Publishing Platform offers at least one often-overlooked, but significant advantage over the traditional print edition: a built-in historical archive of every article ever posted to the website, fully searchable and browsable at the tap of a button.

This is important for a number of reasons, but let’s start with the obvious: Traffic. Many newspapers already have a system in place for archiving and digitizing their printed editions, perhaps with help from an outside organization whose mission is to preserve historical records. In these cases, however, even if your print editions are successfully converted to PDFs and made available to the public online, they are often hosted on a third-party website — meaning you never reap the benefits of people reading your historical content, and neither do your advertisers.

Another reason that these digital archives are so important is to preserve your publication’s Reputation. Many newspapers have worked for decades to carve out a niche in their community and earn the trust and respect of a loyal base of readers. Now that things are trending towards a digitally-dominated publishing landscape, there may come a day when you can no longer offer a print edition, and you certainly don’t want all of the hard work that you and those before you have done to be forgotten. When some new digital up-start comes to town promising to be the #1 source of news, you can point to your years & years of historical archives to prove that you’re the true authority in the region.

Last but not least, historical archives are simply great for Content. More content usually equals more money. Many newspapers publish a “This Day in History” type of article where they highlight significant news events that occurred on the edition’s date in past years, often times going back fifty or one-hundred years, depending on the age of the paper.

The Archbold Buckeye publishes a weekly article titled, “Golden Notes Of Archbold’s Memorable Past” which perfectly demonstrates this technique. Each week, this article contains clippings from articles published in historical editions of the Buckeye from ten, twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five and one-hundred years ago to give readers an idea of what was happening back then, and for some, maybe even spark a long-forgotten memory!

You could easily search the archives already generated by your website on our platform to research past events and pull content and quotes from to create your own similar article.

Our-Hometown’s WordPress Publishing Platform automatically archives all Articles and PDFs published to the website, and customers migrating from another service are able to import existing stories and PDFs from your past provider. If you have PDF archives you’d like imported to your website, please reach out to Our-Hometown’s Support Team by e-mailing ops@our-hometown.com!

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