On 9/20/06, Delirium <delirium(a)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.
This is a Wikisource function, but that dosn't make it easier. I have
most of the first 20 years of McClure's Magazine. It was a monthly that
became famous for muckraking journalism, and exposing the behaviour of
big companies and government administration in the pre WWI era. 1,200
pages per year for 20 years gives 24,000 pages, and is a daunting task.
Weeklies and dailies don't make things any easier.
Ec