NewsBank, Inc.
NewsBank logo
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| Motto | Providing easy access to the world's largest repository of reliable information |
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| Formation | 1972 |
| Founder | John Naisbitt |
| Merger of | Readex |
| Type | Corporation |
| Legal status | Active |
| Headquarters | Naples, Florida, United States |
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Region
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United States Canada |
| Services | News database and educational archive resource |
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Official language
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English |
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President and CEO
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Dan Jones |
| Website | newsbank |
NewsBank is a news database resource which provides archives of media publications as reference materials to libraries.
Author of the book Megatrends, John Naisbitt, founded NewsBank. The company was launched in 1972. NewsBank was then bought from Naisbitt by Daniel S. Jones, who subsequently became its President. Naisbitt left NewsBank in 1973.
In 1986 NewsBank had one-hundred employees in-house. Another one-hundred employees worked from home and would travel to the company's headquarters, bring back newspapers to their residence from there, and then come back to the company with indexed information on these publications. The company's headquarters in 1986 was located in New Canaan, Connecticut. Chris Andrews was brought on in 1986 as Product Manager for CD-ROM. His job was to help the company transition from a paper format of delivery to libraries, to instead provide its indexes and full-text articles on CD-ROM format. The subscription price for this service initially was US$5,000 per library. Visitors to libraries with the new CD-ROM services found that their research time searching through the CD-ROM index instead of paper indexes was cut down from 30 minutes to five minutes. NewsBank used an arbitrary selection process for determining which news articles the company considered worthy for archiving; it based this on those that were not simply stories of regional interest and that were more widely appealing to a larger potential audience of future researchers.
In 1992 NewsBank had difficulty providing its users with a method to search for information based upon a specific geographic position. Newspaper results were listed by subject matter first and then subsequently by location. At the time it indexed articles via microfiche from more than 400 media publications in the United States. The company announced in 1993 that it would provide a CD-ROM product indexing full-text of newspapers from 35 publications including The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1994 NewsBank was the only company to provide access to an index to periodical literature in the subject of theater. The only method accessible at the time to researchers in the field was NewsBank's Review of the Arts: Performing Arts. NewsBank provided access to this service via CD-ROM. NewsBank started compiling the full-text of articles related to the local economy of geographic areas and providing this information via CD-ROM to its clients in 1994. The privately held company was cited by The Information Advisor as bringing in annual revenue of approximately $19 million, and employing a staff of 350 people. By 1998, NewsBank provided indexes via CD-ROM to newspaper articles from over 450 cities in the United States.
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Wikipedia