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The Internet Archive is now collecting TV news broadcasts.


SterlingNorth

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It looks like on Monday, the Internet Archive launched a new site which houses an archive of TV news broadcasts. It goes back to 2009 and it includes the big three cable networks and most of their shows, the big three broadcast network evening news shows, lots of local newscasts, syndicated political talk shows (like The McLaughlin Group), and of course The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

 

From the NY Times yesterday:

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.”

 

Right now, it looks good, although the organization could use a bit of work. Local affiliates are listed in with the network it is affiliate with, so WUSA's "9 News Now" and (presumably) KPIX's "CBS 5 Eyewitness News" are categorized under CBS. It's probably easier to just to a search if you're looking for a specific show or station.

 

Link: http://archive.org/details/tv

 

NYTimes: Internet Archive Amasses All TV News Since 2009

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Some of WGN's newscasts appear on the site, but they are restricted to the midday and 9 p.m. newscasts and appear to have been recorded off of WGN America (which carries just those two newscasts out of the station's 49 hours of news programming), rather than WGN-TV. At least one of the newscasts included actually features the tail end of a Cubs-Phillies game. :lol:

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*slow clap*

 

About friggin' time. We can search newspapers, magazines, and websites easily, why can't we have an ongoing archive of TV News? Seriously, they deserve major kudos just for the effort. Execution is... okay. The hiccups are expected. I'm not a fan of the "30 second clips" format, but if that's how we get all of these online, then I can deal. Besides, if you're only going there for news opens, well, it makes it that much easier. :p

 

Some of the content is not only categorized wrong, it's just wrong.

 

Unless CSPAN simulcasts Comcast Sports Network now.

I can get the error kind of? But on most cable systems they differentiate between "CSN" and "CSPAN", so it's not like it's hard to get that right. (Also, I don't know why they're bothering to index CSPAN in the first place, given that it has its own sizable archive.)

 

 

Some of WGN's newscasts appear on the site, but they are restricted to the midday and 9 p.m. newscasts and appear to have been recorded off of WGN America (which carries just those two newscasts out of the station's 49 hours of news programming), rather than WGN-TV. At least one of the newscasts included actually features the tail end of a Cubs-Phillies game. :lol:

It's likely that WGN America is what they're able to source, not WGN-TV Chicago. Their 9/11 archive is sort of the same way - they only had access to Washington feeds, and as a result most of the CBS coverage on that day isn't on there due to WUSA's baffling decision to go wall to wall with local coverage.

 

Having spent all of my a bit of time with this, the locals are primarily Baltimore/Washington and San Francisco. That means there's a nice cross section of local stations in there, running a gamut of styles. (New York would have been nice, but let's be thankful for what we ended up with.) If you're here for the graphics, then most of the major standardized packages are represented here - CBS is represented with KPIX, NBC has KNTV and WRC, and we see Gannett(WUSA), Scripps(WMAR), Sinclair(WBFF), and Fox(WTTG). Of course you also get to see individual packages, and have the privilege of burning your eye sockets with WJZ's ongoing crimes against graphical decency.

 

And that's not counting the archives of all the evening newscasts, Spanish language stuff, and so on. (Oh, and some networks called CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC show up there as well. Yeah, I don't know why I'd want to rewatch them either.)

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It's likely that WGN America is what they're able to source, not WGN-TV Chicago. Their 9/11 archive is sort of the same way - they only had access to Washington feeds, and as a result most of the CBS coverage on that day isn't on there due to WUSA's baffling decision to go wall to wall with local coverage.

 

It's not *that* baffling given that one of the places hit was The Pentagon, and for a while it wasn't really known if anything else was coming down the pike to hit DC. And following on that, there were a lot of people in DC area who needed to know how to get from there to home as a major part of the commuter transportation network goes through the Pentagon.

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