It is amazing to start in a project like this and have the power of a tool like Newspapers.com. With over a billion articles scanned and indexed, the days of digging up microfiche rolls and running them in the machines at the university library are well and truly gone.
It is all about tuning your search judo to find your hits.
Of course there are also the old school way — finding the actual article clipped and saved.
This cover page story in the Boston Traveler Features ran before they set off. It was a great piece and so it isn’t a surprise they clipped it, framed it and kept it for 70 years.
The sad part is where all of these papers have gone. A search for “Boston Traveler Features” doesn’t even land a wikipedia listing, just a bunch of other press clippings. The Boston Traveler, which was the Boston Evening Traveler and owned by the Boston Herald since 1912. It ran as the evening paper until 1967. Today, with news running in social media and blogs like this one, it will be much harder for folks looking back to see what has happened. Will Facebook and YouTube maintain their archives when their advertising dominance has passed and they aren’t printing money?
We are producing so much content these days and a lot of it is in walled social media gardens. I’m sure there are Ph.D. students considering this. Would love to see their predictions for researching a local story when local news is published on a proam blog that was published in its first years on GeoCities, then moved to Tumblr before figuring out how to run WordPress on BlueHost.
And in 50 years?
The Power of the Bigger Story
When they landed in Guatemala their story really picked up steam. Imagine, the middle of the McCarthy era and they land in the “Communist Revolution” here in the Americas.
Love the fact that the Hartford Courant, which would run a ton of article about my Dad later in his career, picked up the story. Of course they ran to fill a tiny gap at the bottom of the page and even then cut it off.
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