Ebony, Jet and Google

by Jade

December 11, 2008

It is really great to see this company continuing to use the tools that are out there to digitize their content. Back in October we were happy to announce that EbonyJet had joined YouTube to put up their archives. Yesterday news stories were all over the place about Google putting up old magazine archives in their book search. I was very excited to see that two publications from Johnson Publishing Company, Inc joined in to add part of their collection to this digital archive.

As per the press release from JPC Inc:

The first magazines available for view in the project are the post-1960 issues of Ebony, Jet and Black World and all issues of the children’s magazine Ebony Jr. The company’s first publication, Negro Digest (which became Black World), Ebony from 1945-59, Jet from 1953-1959, will be available in the coming months.

Each Magazine has a main page on Google Books that serves somewhat as a portal to the archives. From the page you can search, browse the different issues and see a Google map with locations mentioned in the magazine highlighted. There is also a tab to read the magazine from the same page without having to lose the main page tab.

Check out these African-American magazines Homepage’s on Google Books:

Category: Diversity, News, web 2.0 | Tags: ebony, ebony jet, ebony magazine, google, jet magazine

Eric Easter

Thanks for the shout, Jade. This is the first step. A couple of months from now you'll be able to flip through all the JPC mags direct from EbonyJet.com, but that tool is still in development.

Also doing a couple of mag cover widgets and a Jet Beauty widget, which should make the barber shops happy.

More importantly it gives us a chance to "recontextualize" all that content. There are so many people I had one impression of, and now reading articles about them in 1951 issues of Jet, it completely changes my perception. Gives us all kinds of stuff to write about.