Television News Archive
The home of the Wayback Machine now has every major news program since 2009 archived.
The home of the Wayback Machine now has every major news program since 2009 archived.
NYT (“All the TV News Since 2009, on One Web Site“):
Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads.
“We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” Mr. Kahle said.
As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.
The latest ambitious effort by the archive, which has already digitized millions of books and tried to collect everything published on every Web page for the last 15 years (that adds up to more than 150 billion Web pages), is intended not only for researchers, Mr. Kahle said, but also for average citizens who make up some of the site’s estimated two million visitors each day. ”The focus is to help the American voter to better be able to examine candidates and issues,” Mr. Kahle said. “If you want to know exactly what Mitt Romney said about health care in 2009, you’ll be able to find it.”
Of course, if you want to discredit or satirize a politician based on a clip showing some reversal of a position, that will be made easier as well. Or, as Mr. Kahle put it, “Let a thousand Jon Stewarts bloom.”
Many conventional news outlets will be available, including CNN, Fox News, NBC News, PBS, and every purveyor of eyewitness news on local television stations. And Mr. Stewart’s program, “The Daily Show” is one of those 1,000 series that is part of the new news archive.
This is pretty awesome. I hardly ever watch television news shows these days but the ability to easily search and find snippets could be quite useful, indeed.
Wow. This may save some Jon Stewart media producers some time.
This could be a great archive. I’d love to see them expand it as time and server space allows.
This.
I’m not sure what to think about this. It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to change and mature in their positions without some digging up “proof” of hypocrisy. I’m not saying the archive is a bad thing, simply that it may have unanticipated effects.