Tuesday, August 12, 2014

In the news 100 years ago today

The news from 100 years ago are back!

Some time ago, years ago, decades ago, well, when print media were paper, some publications had a regular section of news from 100 years ago, or 150 years ago. You may not have seen any of these publications - we recall one German monthly, one French monthly.

The look back was limited to one page or so, hand picked, yet interesting as f###.

For example, from 150 years ago: Open car passenger train going at 30 miles per hour, and everybody survived! Nobody was crushed by the air pressure at this speed, yeah.

At some point, these sections were abandoned, because they took up space better utilized for ads - but now they are back on the internet.

All the war commemorations this summer were as useless as always. A hug and a flag, and not a word about the most destructive sentence in human history: I was following orders.

That's when we discovered several German papers had created a 100 years ago today section on their web sites, for example, FAZ and SZ both have them. The modern marvel of optical character recognition makes digitizing the old microfiche archives incredibly cheap.

Amazingly, both papers must have editors who still believe in intelligent readers, as opposed to tabloids like Bild. But then, full frontal or side boobs were not printed in the daily papers 100 years ago.

Reading unfiltered news from 100 years ago is exhilarating and scary, sometimes within a couple of paragraphs of each other.

Let's hope they keep this rediscovered tradition going!

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