Completely off topic, but one of the projects I’ve been working on here at The Times has been the vast archive the paper is collecting online, assembling more than two hundred years of reportage, slowly but surely, for web consumption.
You can learn first hand information about the Jack the Ripper killings of 1888 on one page, for instance, or read an exclusive column from Albert Einstein published after astronomer Arthur Eddington proved the physicist’s then 14-year-old theory of relativity in 1919 during a solar exclipse.
It struck me that a publication like Variety, with nearly 100 years of specific entertainment news reporting and analysis, ought to look into something like this. They’ve got a daunting backlog of issues, hard bound in a room just outside the news room (and believe me, it can be fascinating to go back and look at Best Picture FYC ads for, say, “Predator 2” — seriously). But a system that puts generations of industry reportage at the click of a button would be fantastic.
Just a thought.