The online accounts were important when I first learned about the world of digital research in the early 1980s, and a decade and a half later, they continue to provide me - and, by extension, my clients - with information that I can't get anywhere else. 

 There's a whole lot out there - like newspaper articles, public documents, property transactions, court dockets and dispositions, and professional licensing information - that you still have to pay a few sheckels to get. 

 My task was first, to figure out what I had; second, to figure out if there were alternative (and less expensive) sources of the same information; and third, to figure out what was worth keeping and what could be jettisoned. 

 Here's the list, alphabetically by provider, of what I was paying to have access to and what I felt to be the strengths and weaknesses of each.  Let me say that I have no special relationship with any of these providers beyond what I negotiated for myself and my clients, and I didn't tell any of them that I was gathering data for cost comparisons when I called to verify the fees. 

My needs and the needs of my particular group of clients undoubtedly skew this analysis, so don't read the chart as an endorsement of any one service over any other.  It could be that when you do the same kind of evaluation, you come up with results that pick out different providers but best suit your financial and newsgathering needs. 

SERVICE	CONTACT	COSTS	+	-
AutoTrak +  Database Technologies	(800) 279-7710  (no WWW site)	No monthly fee  $1.50/online minute	Public record data, especially strong in Florida and Texas	Weak holdings in several states of importance to me (California)
CDB Infotek	(888) 333-3365  http://www.cdb.com/	No startup fee  $25/mo  $4-$70/search depending on record set searched  Selected Online Services have a surcharge ($.30-$.55/minute)	Public Records, especially strong holdings in California, particularly court dockets and case dispositions in selected counties	Weak public records access in several states, including Florida
Dataquick	(800) 863-4636  http://www.dataquick.com/	$200 startup fee  $50/mo  Access charges between $.72/minute and $.90/minute at 1200 baud peak times; $2.03/minute and $2.40/minute at 14,400 baud at peak; some discount for off-peak use.	Property ownership records, especially strong in California and Western States, and cheaper than Nexis for same data.  Trend over a period of years is for access to more states' real property data	Not especially strong property ownership records in other key states.  Higher prices for data east of the Rocky Mountains  User penalized financially for accessing system at faster modem speeds.
DataTimes	(800) 642-2525  http://www.datatimes.com/	No setup fee  $39/mo  $2.95/article to view or print full-text (reduced fees for less detail)	Strong holdings in regional newspapers	No full-text New York Times or Wall Street Journal access.  Virtually all holdings of regional papers duplicated by Dow Jones News Retrieval
Dialog	(800) 334-2564  http://www.dialog.com/	$295 start-up  $12/mo (billed bi-annually)  $15-$200/hr database access fees (most newspapers average $30/hr)  $1.25/record view/print fee	Good - and in some cases, exclusive -access to Knight-Ridder newspapers  Many arcane technical databases included	Anachronistic search engine  Difficult, non-Boolean search logic
Dow Jones News Retrieval	800-369-7466, ext. 159  http://bis.dowjones.com/  online-lib/index.html	No monthly fee  $2.95/record view/print fee	Wall Street Journal access  Good search engine, frequently updated	Relatively expensive.
Lexis-Nexis	(800)227-9597  http://www.lexis-nexis.com/	No startup fee  $50/mo  $.65/min connect  $6-$145/search fee  $1-$45/document print/download charge	Strong access to many major metropolitan daily newspapers, trade journals, and some other public record information.  Good search engine with full Boolean capabilities	Incredibly expensive retrieval; relatively weak holdings in regional newspapers; incredibly convoluted pricing structure effectively prevents user from estimating search costs in advance with any certainty

 So the idea was to cut back on overhead - mainly monthly fees - but keep open whatever research options I might require in the future.  (Many online services have a setup fee of some sort - $50 or $100, or possibly even more - to discourage those who might like to add or drop the service at will.)  A second goal was to refocus on what resources were available from what provider at what cost, and to figure out the most economical sources of information. 

 Right off the bat, DataTimes was gone.  I had been thinking about it ever since the monthly fee went up from $25 to $39 awhile back, but it became even more important when Dow Jones yanked access to the Wall Street Journal.  The folks at Dow Jones News Retrieval told me they had access to all of the papers DataTimes had, as well as the Journal.  I called DataTimes to verify that information and to give the free market a chance to work its competitive magic, but the DataTimes representative I talked to couldn't really say what DataTimes could do that Dow Jones News Retrieval couldn't.  I figured if DataTimes couldn't sing its own advantages in the marketplace, it was probably a service I really didn't need anymore. 

 And I could see that Dialog was another competitor that really wasn't going to make the cut.  I remembered the steep startup fee, but I really couldn't remember the last time I had logged on.  My recollection was that my login and password were so cumbersome that I could never remember them.  The search strategies Dialog required were so arcane and at odds with so much else in the computer world that I had to pull out the huge documentation notebook to formulate even the simplest search. 

 It didn't do much for Dialog's case when I discovered that at least one Knight-Ridder newspaper, the Miami Herald, allows direct access to its archives through its Web site (http://newslibrary.infi.net/hl/ ) at an overall cost less than that charged by Dialog (which is Knight-Ridder's commercial database service).  In essence, I discovered, Knight-Ridder had gone into competition with itself - and the Dialog division wasn't winning. 

The Miami Herald allows access to its archives for as little as 25-cents per article on nights and weekends, and $1.50 per article 6 am to 6 pm on weekdays.  (Another pricing option seems to give full archives access for $2.95 per month.)  The Philadelphia Inquirer, Knight-Ridder's powerhouse in the Northeast, is a little more expensive to get to through the World Wide Web - $6.95 a month - but it's a whole lot cheaper than Dialog. 

Of the remaining services, AutoTrak + and Dow Jones News Retrieval won for themselves the right to stick around.  Though retrieval itself costs money, there's no charge for keeping them part of my library of online services.  They're standing armies free to keep at the ready but expensive to send into action. 

CDB Infotek and Dataquick - at a combined cost of $75 a month, they rank as relatively expensive resources at the ready -  probably had to remain.  They each have different public records research strengths, and those strengths are often valuable to me and to my clients.  The cost to be connected - just to be ready to use them - is $900 a year.  But in the news environment in general, and the specific applications I use them for, it's a justifiable expense. 

And then there's Lexis-Nexis.  It has gone from being merely expensive to being outrageously expensive, but on the other hand, there's still nothing like it.  If for nothing else than the full-text archives of the New York Times, it would still be essential.  Besides, the monthly subscription fee has remained at $50, which means that its static impact on my budget - what it costs to keep it in my news arsenal - hasn't increased. 

So the exercise proved fruitful.  I was able to reduce my recurring monthly expenses for online research services from $176 to $125.  It's a cut of almost 30 per cent with a negligible decrease in availability of access.  Counted another way, I managed in the space of two hours to save myself $612 a year. 

It also confirmed what I have felt for a long time - that by and large the world of fee-based online research is undergoing some changes.  It's not the kind of cataclysmic change we've seen so often in the world of computers.  Rather, it's a slow-motion change as the Kingdom of Information searches around for what it wants to be and how available it wants to make itself.  Some things that used to cost money are now available free on the WWW.  Other things that used to cost money now cost even more. 

Overall, the message is clear.  I'm going to have to step up how often I survey my holdings in online research just to make sure I'm not spending money on what's already out there for free. 

© 1997  Paul Skolnick 
_____ 

PAUL SKOLNICK is managing editor of Thunder & Lightning News Service in Belleair Bluffs, FL.  He has been using online research since 1983.