John Naisbitt, the author of the book
Megatrends, founded NewsBank. The company was launched in 1972. NewsBank was bought from Naisbitt by Daniel S. Jones, who subsequently became its president. In 1983, NewsBank acquired
Readex. With the completion of the merger, NewsBank had acquired one of the earliest organizations in America to archive
microform. In that year, NewsBank had 100 in-house employees, while another 100 employees worked from home and traveled to the company's headquarters, bringing back newspapers to their residence from there, and then coming back to the company with indexed information on these publications. The subscription price for this service initially was
US$5,000 per library. The company announced in 1993 a CD-ROM product indexing full text of 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 providing researchers access to an index to periodical literature in the subject of
theater, with its ''NewsBank's Review of the Arts: Performing Arts'' on CD-ROM. It 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. In 2001, NewsBank compiled the
Foreign Broadcast Information Service index and made it available via CD-ROM. NewsBank joined forces with Micromedia, Ltd., a division of IHS Canada, to help distribute its products in 2001. In 2004 NewsBank maintained archival access to hundreds of media references since 1996. In 2005, NewsBank was structured in a pay-for-use format, with access differentiated for different types of users including
public libraries,
public schools, as well as
higher education settings. In 2011 NewsBank reached an agreement with
The Daily Northwestern newspaper of
Northwestern University to archive all of its historical publications. The task archived more than 90,000 pages of material from the school. It included a plan to archive not just
The Daily Northwestern but also prior related publications from 1871 to 2000, and index the material so it could be keyword searchable on the Internet. Dan Jones, President and CEO of NewsBank, had a prior relationship with the university, serving as a university trustee and president-elect of the Northwestern Alumni Association. ==Coverage==