Historical preservation: news site screenshots

Yesterday, after an hour’s worth of staring at the TV in shock and horror, my instinct for historical preservation kicked in. In the past, we have been able to glean a lot of information from newspapers. But this tragedy was different—the news was updated incrementally as the day went on. Unlike news of yesteryear, when the majority of news was written for a single daily deadline and published, yesterday’s news was continually rewritten as the events continued to unfold.

It made me wonder—is anyone archiving this? Even in graphical form? Will anyone ever care about the fleeting electronic transcriptions of this tragedy? Only time will tell. But it seemed a shame to do nothing when I had screenshot software at my disposal.I went to the computer room and began taking screenshots of various news sites as our cranky cable modem permitted. On my hard drive I have the original high-quality jpeg files, but due to their size I will not post them here. The ones I present here are knocked down to screen resolution. They’re probably a bit fuzzy, but I see no need to make my host implode just for the sake of making these available. If you want the higher-quality version, just email me.

I will look these pictures over once, to ensure that the links are correct. After that…I don’t know. For now, my gut feeling is that I would like to never, ever look at these pictures again. My emotions notwithstanding, they should be preserved.

The full flickr set is available here.

• Alabama live (al.com): 11:47 a.m., a special at 11:49  a.m.
• BBC (news.bbc.co.uk): 11:28 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 2:17 p.m.
• CNN (cnn.com): 10:45 a.m., 11:38 a.m., 12:13 p.m., 12:14 p.m., 12:55 p.m., 2:14 p.m., 3:06 p.m., 3:52 p.m., 4:22 p.m., 5:27 p.m. (also an article on the Taliban at 11:57  a.m.)
• CNNfn (cnnfn.com): 11:39 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.
• ESPN (espn.com, which mirrored news content): 2:21 p.m., 3:08 p.m.
• Google (google.com): noon
• MSNBC (msnbc.com): 11:55 a.m., 2:19 p.m., 3:09 p.m.
• New York Times (nytimes.com): 11:52 a.m., 2:15 p.m., 3:07 p.m., 4:27 p.m., 5:33 p.m., 7:11 p.m.
• Salon.com (salon.com): 11:36 a.m., 12:56 p.m., 2:15 p.m.
• Slashdot (slashdot.org): 12:14 p.m., 1:00 p.m.
• White House (whitehouse.gov): 1:28 p.m.
• WHNT (whnt.com): 11:27 a.m., 4:30 p.m.
• Yahoo (yahoo.com): 1:00 p.m., 7:11 p.m.

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