On 21/09/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/20/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/20/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering everything. I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover. The solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older events more. I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time periods! Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child kidnappings? What about the thousands of political scandals, major and minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.? It's all good info we're missing!
Problem is that a lot of the data that would be useful in answering your question is stored on microfilm and there isn't really a quick way to scan that.
Actually ProQuest has massive microfilm newspaper databases which are fulltext searchable that would fit the bill (the entire contents of the NY Times, Wash Post, LA Times, Chicago Trib, etc. which go back to the 1840s in some cases) as well as the American Periodicals Series which goes back to 1740. It's out there, though it helps to have an institutional account to get access to it.
Non-institutional UK users have the entire /Times/ archive (1790ish on) via local libraries, which is a similar situation. Goodness only knows what you can get if you *pay* for it.
(And then, of course, there's actual printed contemporary sources. I'm doing a lot of work at the moment by paraphrasing material in old almanacs, rewriting it to be slightly more comprehensible, slap on a couple of contextual sentences at the beginning and end... and, bingo, a biographical stub on a contemporary politican, or a short article summarising some 1840s law, or the like. No microfilm required...)