Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Web provides great and not-so-great moments in news history All the Bob that was (mostly) fit to print When my students need good examples, I send them to the prize-winners at http://pulitzer.org, http://ire.org and http://spj.org, among other places. When I want "bad examples," I can provide my own... Thanks to the Proquest Historical Newspapers project, my name pops up 1,933 times in an "author" search of the Hartford Courant's online archive, including lead sentences written on more than a few days when I was trying too hard to be clever. I'm surprised that some of those leads got past the copy desk... I think I saw six metaphors in one-sentence! Yikes! (I'm sorry now that I never tried the "occult hand..." gimmick. I did cover the "invention" of the red white and blue pickle in 1979, but the item was buried beneath one about the pope's disco debut.) And then there's the problem line that says, "I had two leafy tires..." Don't blame me or the copy desk for that -- blame the optical character recognition scanner that turned 220 years of the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper into a computer-searchable database. Here's a picture of what the original story looked like, under the headline Adding insult to larceny. That 1,933 number sounds like I was terribly productive, but I notice that it is inflated by more than a year of daily "People in the News" columns, some of which show up twice in the archive. I was more "rewrite editor" than "writer" of the page two feature, a seven-day-a-week compilation of short items. Pretty lightweight newspaper work -- actually a lot like blogging -- but working on it six or seven short evenings a week gave me time to start going to grad school in the mornings. For regular stories, the Proquest search gets you the headline and first sentence of each item. For more than the leads, you have to pay a per-story fee -- from 50 cents to $4, depending on whether you want 500 stories, or just one. So... for only about $1,000 I can throw away those file folders full of yellow clippings. I'll think about it. Meanwhile, if you aren't looking for Connecticut stories, Proquest has pay-as-you go historic archives of a half-dozen other papers, some of which may be available for free at your local or university library. Check there before writing a check! I can guarantee you won't find my byline in any of these papers: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1868 - 1929) Chicago Tribune (1852 - 1984) Boston Globe (1872 - 1923) Christian Science Monitor (1908 - 1980) Washington Post (1877 - 1986) Los Angeles Times (1881 - 1984) You can click the "new search" buttons at those papers and find better bylines to search for... including Woodward and Bernstein at the Post. 4:34:54 PM    comment []

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