The National Newspaper Association, EMC and Cold North Wind To Introduce America's Chronicles Historical Newspaper Project.

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 11, 2001

More Than 300 Years of American Life to be Digitized As Original

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More than 20,000 community newspapers, some long out of print, have recorded American life since the 17th century and two unique organizations have set the common goal of providing Internet access to this documentation of American heritage.

The National Newspaper Association (NNA) and Cold North Wind Corporation signed a letter of intent today to create America's Chronicles(SM), an online search engine that accesses the digital archives of America's community newspapers, beginning with the archives of the 3600 NNA member newspapers.

The project could eventually result in 500,000,000 pages of original, historical content dating back to the 1600s and will be available online at www.americaschronicles.com. The site will be launched at the NNA's 116th Annual Convention and Trade Show in Milwaukee, September 12-15, with access to the first of many digital archives.

By working with community papers and the NNA, a not-for-profit trade association representing the grassroots of America's newspaper owners, publishers and editors, Cold North Wind will make digital access to this rich source of historical and genealogical content available for the first time.

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage, will provide data storage for the exceptionally large database required to create this digital archive. Cold North Wind partner microCreditCard, the Internet's leading credit card-based micro-payment facilitator and alternative billing provider, was chosen as the exclusive online payment service for its convenient digital content payment solutions.

Although the terms of the agreement were not fully disclosed, the subscription revenue from the project will go to the NNA and participating newspapers. NNA and Cold North Wind are also exploring ways to make the service available as a resource at public institutions. The two groups are calling on corporations across the country to get involved in this groundbreaking program.

"We are excited to breath life into hundreds of years of history that are currently buried in the archives of America's newspapers and libraries," said Diane Everson, publisher of The Edgerton Wisconsin Reporter, and president of NNA. "Our agreement with Cold North Wind will give readers everywhere access to historical events from the perspective of America's hometown newspapers. America's Chronicles(SM) will allow us to see how community, national, and international events changed the fabric of our ancestors' daily lives. Newspapers are truly the first draft of history."

"We are proud to partner with the NNA and make the archives of community newspapers available on the Internet for the first time," said Bob Huggins, president and CEO of Cold North Wind. "Our search engine will allow historians, journalists, researchers, sports writers, grad students and even school children to search centuries of continuous daily life as it was represented in hometown newspapers."

"Now is the right time to get involved in America's Chronicles(SM). Because of the historical significance of this project, we have already attracted the interest of large corporate donors that wish to help sponsor the digitalizing process," said Lockwood Phillips, president of the National Newspaper Association Foundation. "The funding this project attracts will help defray the cost to the smaller newspapers with limited resources."

The magnitude of the newspaper archive project requires Cold North Wind to increase online storage by more than 300%.

A robust EMC infrastructure that is a convergence of SAN and NAS environments, consisting of an EMC Symmetrix(R) Enterprise Storage Systems, Connectrix fibre channel switches and Celerra network file servers with a suite of management software including ESN Manager(TM), EMC ControlCenter(TM) and EMC TimeFinder(TM), will effectively and efficiently manage the large and growing newspaper archive.

Cold North Wind also uses EMC CLARiiON(R) IP 4700 "Chameleon" storage systems for image processing.

"Cold North Wind recognized that information is history's most important asset and EMC is excited to have been chosen to be the project's technology backbone for preserving these archives," said Eric Shefler, managing director of EMC Canada. "Our information storage infrastructure will provide today's, tomorrow's and future users with reliable 24x7x365 access to this invaluable historical content."

"microCreditCard is pleased to be chosen as the exclusive payment facilitator for this endeavor, which we believe is a landmark initiative. The Internet affects how we live day to day and now it is opening a window to the daily life of the past," said Leslie Poole, president and CEO of microCreditCard. "We are committed to help generate revenue for America's small to medium size community newspapers and provide an outstanding service to their readerships."

For centuries, the newspaper has been one of the few credible records of daily life in the world. Cold North Wind's digital imaging process creates and publishes images of every page in a newspaper - not just selected stories.

Currently, many newspapers only provide searchable online content from the past five to ten years, with limited or no access to older newspaper archives.

As a result, the sole method of searching newspaper archives is through microfilm, a time-consuming and difficult research method. Researchers, genealogists and readers throughout the world can now use the Internet to access original copies of archived editions of many daily newspapers.

National Newspaper Association

Established in 1885, the National Newspaper Association is the voice of America's community newspapers and the largest newspaper association in the country. The nation's community newspapers inform, educate and entertain 150 million readers every week.

The NNA's mission is to protect, promote and enhance America's community newspapers. The NNA works closely with policy officials to create a legal and regulatory environment conducive to the growth of community newspapers. It also provides business and educational programs and services to improve the quality, reach, and relevance of community newspapers throughout the country.

Cold North Wind

Founded in 1999, Cold North Wind is creating a worldwide online newspaper archive. The company uses best-of-breed technology to turn newspaper archives on microfilm into high-resolution, searchable, digital images on the Internet. Cold North Wind provides revenue-producing solutions to organizations that hold valuable microform archives, as well as to distributors of online content.

Through partnerships with newspapers, media corporations, micropublishers and content distributors, Cold North Wind is providing business solutions to enable publishers to create new revenue streams from archived materials. Cold North Wind Corp. is based in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Its parent company, Cold North Wind Inc. is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. For further information, please visit www.coldnorthwind.com.

EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) is the world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing the information infrastructure for a connected world. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Symmetrix and CLARiiON are registered trademarks, and ESN Manager, TimeFinder and ControlCenter are trademarks of EMC Corporation.

microCreditCard

microCreditCard is a leading payment processor for the online digital content market. The company's robust solution is one of the easiest and fastest to set up in the industry. In less than one day, an online merchant can start generating real revenue from premium content.

microCreditCard offers three tiers of service - microCreditCard Managed, Managed Plus, and Premium - depending on the needs of the merchant. For more information about microCreditCard, visit www.microCreditCard.com.

America's Chronicles(SM) is a service mark of the National Newspaper Association.