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HarpWeek
pitches U.S. history
to teens—and marketers as well
by RANDALL ROTHENBERG
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Some 17 years
ago, John Adler, then a successful advertising research executive,
saw in The New York Times an advertisement for an entire set
of Harper’s Weekly magazines for the years 1857
through 1916. A history buff since his Dartmouth days—"I’m
just interested in old stuff," he says—Adler bought the
collection.
"I didn’t know what
I was going to do with them," he says, "so, like Rip Van
Winkle, I just put them to sleep for 20 years."
When the periodicals
awakened, they found themselves in the hands of the Internet’s
unlikeliest entrepreneur. |
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John Adler, now
72 and retired from research is the founder and guiding spirit
behind HarpWeek, a cross between a company, an obsession and, if his
vision proves true, an educational tool of redeeming power.
Adler and his team of
technologists, historians, archivists and salespeople have spent the
past seven years scanning and collating every story, every
advertisement, every illustration and every interstitial bit that
appeared in Harper’s Weekly during its life, effectively
putting into a multimedia database the history of America during the
last half of the last century. |
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The ancestor of Time
and Newsweek, Harper’s Weekly was where the nation
turned for information about the last Presidential impeachment—that
of Andrew Johnson. It hosted the Thomas Nast cartoons that helped
sunder New York’s Boss Tweed, opening the way for a new kind of
power politics in the Big Apple. The Civil War that preceded (or
perhaps lives on in) today’s "culture wars" is
documented in its pages.
"I had public service
in mind," Adler told me over a laptop at Bozell, New York,
where he’d borrowed an office from his friend, CEO Dave Bell, to
demonstrate HarpWeek for me. "I wanted to make this content
available to people. This was the most important publication in the
country in its day, the shaper of public opinion, and no one had
indexed it. There were Winslow Homer paintings, but no one had
information about them. So I decided to make it my retirement
project."
Adler never could have
predicted the millions he would pour into his academic pursuit.
Fortunately, he had some money to spare. After research and
consulting stints at Gimbel’s and Booz-Allen & Hamilton, he
created AdTel, a pioneering TV advertising research company. He
later spent years as a successful M&A advisor to the
packaged-goods industry. Adler’s marketing successes fueled his
pastime. |
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His good deed
rapidly became all-consuming. At times, it seemed as if Adler was
hiring as many PhDs as a small university. Their days were spent
poring through the magazine and manually indexing each word and
image, the better to capture the real meaning of the weekly’s
work.
An 1858 story about a New
Jersey woman and her pistol got indexed under "women’s
rights," for example. His researchers knew to assign pieces
about "contrabands" to the category "slavery,"
the death of which is also recorded in copious detail in the
HarpWeek archives. Their work has helped sell HarpWeek, on CD-ROM
and now through Web subscriptions, into scores of colleges, which
see it as an invaluable historical research tool.
Much of the work, though,
is up on the Net gratis. Early advertising history (including, in a
spot that would do Bob Dole proud, an endorsement of Grover &
Baker sewing machines by none other than Mrs. Jefferson Davis) is at
[http://advertising.harpweek.com].
But to continue the
expensive task of archiving, Adler is seeking to turn his hobby into
a profit-making business. To that end, he is targeting a younger
market, high schools, and seeking consumer-products advertisers that
might want to sponsors pages, sections, even specialty contests, in
return for access to the teens. "What I’d like," Adler
told me, "is for us to generate $5 million in ad revenue.
Microsoft could do it. Hallmark or Levi’s could do it." |
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To some, that
goal might reek uncomfortably of Channel One and other ventures that
have crassly looked on kids as an ad market and have tailored—dare
I say "dumbed down" or "tarted up"? —their
content accordingly. But as I surfed through HarpWeek and scoured
the unexpurgated history of the last American century, much of it
annotated and explained by today’s leading scholars, my qualms
melted.
It is possible to do well
and do good at the same time. Ken Burns’ documentaries (funded in
part by General Motors Corp.) are one example; HarpWeek may well be
another.
"Our goal," says
John Adler, "is to have the Nexis of the 19th
Century."
Anyone want to help? |
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