This is neat. A developer by the name of Phillip Mendonça-Vieira “accidentally” collected about 12,000 screenshots of the front page of The New York Times‘ website. Instead of trashing these images, he put them to good use by creating a time-lapse video that binds together important (front-page worthy) news events that happened over the past year. Specifically his computer captured the site’s images twice an hour from September 2010 to July 2011. Watch it all unfold in the video embedded above and read some poignent words from Mendonça-Vieira below.
Having worked with and developed on a number of content management systems I can tell you that as a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It’s all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we’re no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis. Archive.org comes close, but there are too many gaps to my liking.
This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.