New York City’s newspapers should be digitized
Goshen, N.Y.: On May 3, 2021, the Daily News covered the first citation of “Big Apple” in print in the New York Morning Telegraph. New York track writer John J. Fitz Gerald (1892-1963) would use the term many times. On Feb. 18, 1924 (100 years ago), it was the title of a column, “Around the Big Apple with John J. Fitz Gerald.” He proudly declared: “The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.” He then admitted that he picked up his catchphrase from “dusky” (Black) stable hands at the Fair Grounds race track in New Orleans.
The New York Times was one of the first newspapers to be digitized and the Daily News was digitized in the 2010s. The 1924 Morning Telegraph column (in the public domain) is still not digitally available! Fitz Gerald could have returned to the Fair Grounds, met up with the stable hands again, and could have repeated the “Big Apple” story, this time with a name. All of that newspaper (once the leading entertainment daily newspaper in America) must be digitized. The Hearst newspapers of the New York American, New York Evening Journal and Journal-American are undigitized and unsearchable. Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror, former rival of the Daily News, is also unsearchable. Others include the New York World-Telegram, New York Mail and New York Globe.
All of these great newspapers are sitting in the New York Public Library’s Stephen Schwarzman Building. Schwarzman owns the Blackstone Group, which owns Ancestry.com, which owns Newspapers.com — the world’s largest digital newspaper archive. Barry Popik