The nytimes they are a-changin'
This did well on HN a week ago too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2778219
Seeing so many signs in the last year that HN is formed of different overlapping audiences that visit at different times of the day. Tons of dupes lately.
This is based on an incorrect assumption: ... no one is storing their frontpage layout data.
The Newseum has this covered for over 800 newspapers. A recent front page of the New York Times, for example:
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=NY_NY...
Wow, I had no idea the ads were so huge and invasive. It made me wonder how much Ralph Lauren spent to have their ads take what seemed to be over 50% of the on-screen real estate.
It's interesting to see the typo fixes and how long different stories last. At 2:11 a story relevant to us all. I wonder (with regards to his point about things disappearing forever) if a distributed effort among "tech people" to catalog a lot of websites would work, different people run nodes that are given tasks. Would be neat to keep a track of the top 1,000 article driven sites for a year (not just news, reddit, hn etc.)
> Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour
This has happened to me a few times. Recently I had accidentally collected over 100,000 copies of a website over a 3 month period after forgetting the thing was running.
Somewhat off-topic: watching the Chilean miners story in the video was heartwarming as the number rescued increased.
Perpetually.com solves this problem. In fact, they're already working with newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and for every major federally elected political candidate. More than just random screen captures, every article, every change, every link and state are preserved. It's like Apple Time Machine for the Internet.
Full Disclosure: I advise this company.
Reminds me of Spock's Tricorder in the Star Trek episode 'The City on the Edge of Forever'. Playing back history at high speed. Very cool.
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Wow, completely agree about how the layout, and emphasis on different headlines, topics, categories, advertising etc.. are all huge indicators of society's interests and conceptions of the world. That said, I would be surprised to learn that the nyt doesn't store their front page every day into some archive? If they don't, then someone must!
If they collected the html and not just screencaps, it would be interesting to see a word-cloud evolve and change over time too.
Too bad there isn't an annual follow up for every major story.
The pace of news is the pulse of the day