Data Base‐ics & Trends: The Future of the New York Times Online Available to Purchase

Deborah Silcox assured the audience that Mead resorted to no “under the table” deals to obtain NYTIS. Rather, the New York Times, deciding to get out of the online business, offered it to Mead with a seven‐year exclusive contract. Besides the New York Times, NEXIS now provides full text access to approximately 60 other publications, to which The Financial Times of London and Forbes are the newest additions. NEXIS also includes the full text of Encyclopedia Britannica and the Federal Register. In accessing the New York Times, NEXIS users have a choice of entering several files: the Infobank, to search the New York Times full text; the ABS file, to search abstracts and descriptors; the AMI file, the NYTIS advertising and marketing intelligence service; a combined file of ABS and AMI; DDWA, Deadline Data on World Affairs; and TODAY, which displays daily summaries from the New York Times. NEXIS, however, is only available through a special terminal provided by Mead for which users pay a $50.00 monthly maintenance and database access charge, and an initial $400.00 installation fee (this fee is waived for previous NYTIS subscribers signing up with Mead). An additional printer for offline printing costs another $150.00 monthly. Mead is currently reissuing the NYTIS thesaurus with some embellishments and offering it to NEXIS subscribers at no extra cost.