From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media News Media / Journalism Timeline

Copies of Acta Diurna ("Daily Events", or the "Daily Public Record"), are carved on stone or metal and presented in message boards in public places like the Roman Forum beginning about this time.

They were also called simply Acta or Diurna or sometimes Acta Popidi or Acta Publica. These are thought to be the first daily gazette.

"Their original content included results of legal proceedings and outcomes of trials. Later the content was expanded to public notices and announcements and other noteworthy information such as prominent births, marriages and deaths. After a couple of days the notices were taken down and archived, (though no intact copy has survived to the present day).

"Sometimes scribes made copies of the Acta and sent them to provincial governors for information. Later emperors used them to announce royal or senatorial decrees and events of the court.

"Other forms of Acta were legal, municipal and military notices. Acta Senatus were originally kept secret, until then-consul Julius Caesar made them public in 59 BCE. Later rulers, however, often censored them" (Wikipedia article on Acta Diurna, accessed 07-31-2009).

Tipao (Chinese: 邸报 Pinyin: dǐ bào), palace reports or imperial bulletins or gazettes published by central and local Chinese governments, were among the earliest news media.

"Different sources place their first publication as early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) or as late as the Tang Dynasty (June 18, 618–June 4, 907). They carried official announcements and news, and were intended to be seen only by bureaucrats (and a given di bao might only be intended for a certain subset of bureaucrats). Selected items from a gazette might then be conveyed to local citizenry by word of mouth and/or posted announcements. Frequency of publication varied widely over time and place" (Wikipedia article on Tipao, accessed 08-01-2009).

Kaiyuan Za Bao, or Kaiyuan Chao Pao, Bulletin of the Court, an early newspaper, is published during the Kaiyuan era. It may also be considered "the world's first magazine."

Handwritten on silk, Bulletin of the Court collected political and domestic news, mainly for distribution to government officials.

Printed newsletters begin circulating in Europe.

Aboard the caravel Niña, sailing back from the New World, Christopher Columbus wrote an open letter to the monarchs of Spain, describing his monumental discoveries. When he docked in Lisbon, Portugal on March 14 Columbus added a postscript and sent the letter to the Escribano de Racion, Luis de Santangel, finance minister to Ferdinand II and the high steward or comptroller of the king's household expenditures. Santagel had convinced  Isabella I to back Columbus's voyage eight months earlier, and Santagel was the first convey the news of Columbus's success to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.

Santagel turned over the text of Columbus's letter to printer Pedro Posa in Barcelona, and as early as April 1, 1493, Posa issued a 4-page pamphlet in small folio entitled Epistola de insulis nuper inventis (Letter on Newly Discovered Islands). Only one copy of the original printing survives. It was discovered in Spain in 1889, and passed through the hands of antiquarian bookseller Maisonneuve in Paris before reaching antiquarian bookseller Bernard Quaritch in 1890. In 1892 Quaritch sold it to the Lenox Library founded by James Lenox. This library later merged with the New York Public Library where the pamphlet is preserved today. ISTC no. ic00756000.

Columbus's letter was the first eyewitness news account to become a bestseller. The second edition, published in Spanish in Valladolid, also survives only in a single copy. ISTC no. ic00756500.

The third edition, in Latin, was published in Rome by Stephen Plannck, probably in early May 1493. ISTC no. ic00757000.

The first illustrated edition, with woodcuts supposedly copied from drawings by Columbus, was issued by Michael Furter, for Johann Bergmann, de Olpe, in Basel, Switzerland, probably in May, 1493. ISTC no. ic00760000.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of the Basel edition from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0002/bsb00026585/images/index.html?id=00026585&fip=67.164.64.97&no=6&seite=8, accessed 01-02-2010.

Giuliano Dati translated the letter into Italian verse for publication in Rome June 15, 1493. ISTC no. id00045890. Dati's version was reprinted in Florence and Brescia in 1493. Of each printing of Dati's version only one copy survived.

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 35.

The earliest English newsbook, a forerunner of the newspaper, may be a pamphlet of 4 leaves called Hereafter ensue thee trew encountre or Batayle lately don betwene. Englande and: Scotlande. In whiche batayle the. Scottsshe. Kinge was slayne, printed in London by Richard Fawkes (Faques).

The pamphlet provides an eyewitness account of the large and bloody Battle of Flodden Field won by the English against the Scots, with a list of the English heroes involved.

Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions Held at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London (1963) no. 640. Schwarz, Vivat Rex! An Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII (2009) no. 24.

The Morgan Library and Museum holds a contemporary manuscript account of the Battle of Flodden Field: MA 3673. Schwarz, Vivat Rex!, no. 25.

Johann Carolus, who previously earned his living by producing hand-written news sheets for wealthy subscribers, acquires a printing press and publishes the first European newspaper called Relation, in Strasbourg.

The earliest extant examples of Relation are dated 1609. In that year Heinrich Julius, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, founded Avisa Relation oder Zeitung.

News services in England continue to distribute hand-written news manuscripts, rather than printed news sheets, to subscribers.

Corante : or, Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France is published by the printer Nathaniel Butter. The earliest of the seven surviving copies is dated September 24, 1621, but it is thought that this single page news sheet began publication earlier in 1621.

Corante was the first private newspaper published in English. As a result of a 1586 edict from the Star Chamber, it carried no news about England.

Nathaniel Butter publishes the first edition of a periodical variously called News from Most Parts of Christendom or Weekly News from Italy, Germany, Hungaria, Bohemia, the Palatinate, France and the Low Countries. "From its miscellaneous contents and periodicity of production, it is regarded as the true forerunner of the English newspaper." Because the Stuart regime discouraged domestic reporting, it contained no news about England.

Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne publish Certain News of the Present Week, or the Weekly News. It is the first regularly printed English newspaper with numbered issues.

French physician, philanthropist and journalist, Théophraste Renaudot, with the support of Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu (Cardinal Richlieu), publishes the first issue of La Gazette, the first weekly magazine in France.

"Before the advent of the printed Gazette, reports on current events usually circulated as hand-written papers (nouvelles à la main). La Gazette quickly became the center of France for the dissemination of news, and thus an excellent means for controlling the flow of information in a highly centralized state. Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII were frequent contributors."

"La Gazette had for objective to inform its readers on events from the noble court and abroad. It was mostly focused on political and diplomatic affairs. In 1762, its name became Gazette de France, with the sub title Organe officiel du Government royal (Official organ of the royal Government). In 1787, Charles-Joseph Panckouke already proprietary of the Mercure de France and the Moniteur universel — that he had just founded — rented the magazine.

"La Gazette remained silent about the birth of the revolution, and didn't even mention the storming of the Bastille on the 14th of July in 1789, limiting itself to government acts. For the satisfaction of his customers, Charles-Joseph Panckouke published a supplement, Le Gazettin (little Gazette), that gave its readers summaries of debates at the National Constituent Assembly. In 1791, the ministry of foreign affairs, who owned La Gazette, took it back. Nicolas Fallet was named director and it became a tribune for the Girondists. He was succeeded by Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort. La Gazette became a daily magazine in 1792, 1 May. Following the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, 21 January, it was renamed Gazette nationale de France (National Gazette of France)" (Wikipedia article on La Gazette, accessed 07-31-2009).

Publick Occurrences is issued in Boston, but suppressed after only one issue. It was the first newspaper published in North America.

Lapse of the Printing Act in England ends pre-publication censorship in that country, stimulating the growth of newspapers and other publications.

Edward and Elizabeth Mallet begin publishing the Daily Courant, England’s first daily newspaper.

The Daily Courant continued publication for 30 years.

The Boston News-Letter begins publication, edited and published by John Campbell, a bookseller and postmaster of Boston. 

This was the first “successful” newspaper in the North American colonies.

The Daily Universal Register begins publication in London.

This newspaper was eventually renamed the The Times.

The Times of London newspaper publishes its first issue printed on a steam-driven Koenig power press.

The output of the new machine was initially 1,100 sheets an hour—more than four times higher than the manually operated press previously used by the newspaper.

Friedrich Koenig adds a perfector to The Times of London steam power press, allowing the press to print almost as many copies on both sides of the sheet on one pass through the press as had been previously printed on one side only. By 1818 Koenig's steam power press achieved an output of 2400 impressions per hour.

The English Church Missionary Society establishes a press in Malta to publish books in Arabic and Turkish. These include Christian texts and also secular educational texts intended for Muslim, Christian and Jewish pupils in the new missionary schools and colleges of the Middle East. They also issue a periodical in the style of a newspaper.

Through 1842 this press issued over 150,000 books for distribution throughout the Middle East and Turkey.

Roper, Arabic Books Printed in Malta 1826-42, Sadgrove (ed) History of Printing and Publishing the the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (2005) 111-130.

Circulation of The Times of London is 11,000.

Herbert Ingram and Mark Lemon of Punch publish the first issue of The Illustrated London News. "Costing sixpence, the magazine had 16 pages and 32 woodcuts. It included pictures of the war in Afghanistan, a train crash in France, a steamboat explosion in Canada and a fancy dress ball at Buckingham Palace."

This was probably the first attempt to publish an illustrated news publication. The Illustrated London News continued as a weekly until 1971.

The Associated Press (AP) is founded in the United States to reduce the high cost of telegraphic transmissions among six highly competitive newspapers.

Circulation of The Times of London newspaper is 38,000.

Paul Julius Reuter (originally named Israel Beer Josaphat) sets up an information service, later called Reuters, using a "fleet of 45 carrier pigeons",  to deliver news and stock prices between Brussels and Aachen, terminal points of the German and French-Belgian telegraph lines.

Reuter's pigeons carried the messages between Brussels and Aachen within two hours, beating the railroad by six hours.

Paul Julius Reuter founds the Reuters news agency in London using telegraph lines, and a fleet of carrier pigeons that grows to exceed 200.

Reuter opened an office in London’s financial center close to the main telegraph offices. He transmitted stock market quotations and news between London and Paris over the new Dover-Calais submarine telegraph cable, using his "telegraph expertise."

Journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond and former banker George Jones found The New-York Daily Times.

The newspaper changed its name to The New York Times in 1857

Reuters opens offices all over Europe, following telegraph lines.

The Times of London newspaper installs a Walter press, developed by the owner of the newspaper, John Walter, that prints on continuous paper, further increasing the speed of production.

Circulation of The Times of London newspaper is 70,000.

During the four and a half months Siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War normal channels of communication were interrupted and the only way for the provincial government in Tours to communicate with Paris was by pigeon post.

French photographer and inventor René Dagron "proposed to the authorities to use his microfilming process to carry the messages by carrier pigeons. Rampont, the man in charge of the carrier pigeon program, agreed and a contract was signed on 11 November. According to the contract Dagron was to be paid 15 francs per 1000 characters photographed. A clause in the contract, signed by an official named Picard, gave Dagron the title of "chief of the photomicroscopic correspondence postal service" mentioning in French: 'M. Dagron a le titre de chef de service des correspondences postales photomicroscopiques. Il relève directement du Directeur Général des Postes,' which translates as 'Mr. Dagron has the title of the chief of the photomicroscopic correspondence postal service. He reports directly to the Director General of the Post Office.'

"After a period of difficulties and through hardships brought on by the war and the lack of equipment, Dagron finally achieved a photographic reduction of more than 40 diameters. The microfilms so produced weighed approximately 0.05 grams each and a pigeon was able to carry up to 20 at a time. Up to that point a page of a message could be copied in a microfilm approximately measuring 37 mm by 23 mm but Dagron was able to reduce this to a size of approximately 11 mm by 6 mm which was a significant reduction in the area of the microphotograph.

"Dagron photographed pages of newspapers in their entirety which he then converted into miniature photographs. He subsequently removed the collodion film from the glass base and rolled it tightly into a cylindrical shape which he then inserted into miniature tubes that were transported fastened on the wings of pigeons. Upon receipt the microphotograph was reattached to a glass frame and was then projected by magic lantern on the wall. The message contained in the microfilm could then be transcribed or copied. By 28 January 1871, when Paris and the Government of National Defense surrendered, Dagron had delivered 115,000 messages to Paris by carrier pigeon" (Wikipedia article on René Dagron, accessed 04-26-2009).

J. D. Hayhurst, The Pigeon Post into Paris 1870-1871 (1970) provides a comprehensive account, and reproduces a number of original documents including photomicrographs.

The New York Tribune publishes a series of 36 relief blocks on its front page showing the targets at an International Rifle Match in Dublin, Ireland.

The blocks were produced in New York from target coordinates transmitted over the Atlantic telegraph. These were the first significant series of illustrations published in a daily newspaper.

John Muir and a group of professors from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University found the Sierra Club in San Francisco. It is the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization in the United States.

"The Club's first goals included establishing Glacier and Mount Rainier national parks, convincing the California legislature to give Yosemite Valley to the US Federal government, and saving California's coastal redwoods. Muir escorted President Theodore Roosevelt through Yosemite in 1903, and two years later the California legislature ceded Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to the Federal government. The Sierra Club won its first lobbying victory with the creation of the country's second national park, after Yellowstone in 1872. In the first decade of the 1900s, the Sierra Club became embroiled in the famous Hetch Hetchy controversy that divided preservationists from "resource management" conservationists. For years the city of San Francisco had been having problems with a privately-owned water company that provided poor service at high prices. Mayor James D. Phelan’s reform administration wanted to set up a municipally-owned water utility and revived an earlier proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy valley. The final straw was the water company's failure to provide adequate water to fight the fires that destroyed much of the city following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Gifford Pinchot, a progressive supporter of public utilities and head of the US Forest Service, which then had jurisdiction over the national parks, supported the creation Hetch Hetchy dam. Muir appealed to his friend US President Roosevelt, who would not commit himself against the dam, given its popularity with the people of San Francisco (a referendum in 1908 confirmed a seven-to-one majority in favor of the dam and municipal water). Muir and attorney William Colby began a national campaign against the dam, attracting the support of many eastern conservationists. With the 1912 election of US President Woodrow Wilson, who carried San Francisco, supporters of the dam had a friend in the White House. The bill to dam Hetch Hetchy passed Congress in 1913, and so the Sierra Club lost its first major battle. In retaliation, the Club supported creation of the National Park Service in 1916, to remove the parks from Forest Service oversight. Stephen Mather, a Club member from Chicago and an opponent of Hetch Hetchy dam, became the first National Park Service director" (Wikipedia article on Sierra Club)

Lord Northcliffe founds the Daily Mail.

It soon achieved a daily circulation of 1,000,000.

Newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps combines three regional news services into the United Press Associations, the forerunner of UPI.

Edward Kleinschmidt invents the teletype, which replaces Morse code clickers in delivering news to newspapers. The teletype was first used by United Press.

To combat false and misleading claims for circulation, advertisers, advertising agencies, and newspapers found the Audit Bureau of Circulations. This was the world's first circulation auditing organization.

The first radio news program is broadcast by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan.

Times New Roman, a serif typeface supervised by Stanley Morison of the English branch of Monotype, and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times, makes its debut in the British newspaper, The Times.

"Morison used an older font named Plantin as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space. As the old type used by the newspaper had been called Times Old Roman, Morison's revision became Times New Roman and made its debut in the 3 October 1932 issue of The Times newspaper. After one year, the design was released for commercial sale. The Times stayed with Times New Roman for 40 years, but new production techniques and the format change from broadsheet to tabloid in 2004 have caused the newspaper to switch font five times since 1972. However, all the new fonts have been variants of the original New Roman font.

"Because of its ubiquity, the typeface has been influential in the subsequent development of a number of serif typefaces both before and after the start of the digital-font era. . . .

"Although no longer used by The Times, Times New Roman is still widely used for book typography. It is one of the most successful and ubiquitous typefaces in history." (Wikipedia article on Times Roman, accessed 04-26-2009).

The Bettmann Archive, founded in New York in 1936 by Otto Bettmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany, contains 15,000 images.  Bettmann later characterized this time as "the beginning of the visual age."

By 1980, the year before Bettmann sold the archive to the Kraus-Thomson Organization, the archive contained 2,000,000 images, carefully selected for their historical value, mainly under the five categories of world events, personalities, lifestyles, advertising art, and art and illustrations.

In 1984 the Kraus-Thomson Organization acquired the extensive United Press International (UPI) collection, containing millions of worldwide news and lifestyle photographs taken by photographers working for United Press International, International News Photos, Acme Newspictures, and Pacific and Atlantic.

In 1995 Corbis, a company controlled by Bill Gates, bought the Bettmann Archive.

"Beginning in 1997, Corbis spent five years selecting images of maximum historical value and saleability for digitization. More than 1.3 million images (26% of the collection) have been edited and 225,000 have been digitized. Because of this effort, more images from the Bettmann Archive are available now than ever before.

"In 2002, the Archive was moved to a state-of-the-art, sub-zero film preservation facility in western Pennsylvania. The 10,000-square-foot underground storage facility is environmentally-controlled, with specific conditions (minus -20°C, relative humidity of 35%) calculated to preserve prints, color transparencies, negatives, photographs, enclosures, and indexing systems" (http://www.corbis.com/BettMann100/Archive/Preservation.asp, accessed 01-17-2010).

According to Asa Brigg’s The History of British Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 4, p. 524, newspaper circulation in Britain as a distribution medium for news reached its peak in 1950 and 1954. Thereafter more news was distributed over radio and television than through print.

UNIVAC I, serial 5, used by the CBS television network, successfully predicts the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of the United States.

This was the first time that millions of people (including me, then aged 7) saw and heard about an electronic computer.

The computer, far too large and delicate for moving to be considered, was actually in Eckert-Mauchly's corporate office in Philadelphia. What was televised by Walter Cronkite from CBS studios in New York was actually a dummy terminal connected by teletype.

Univac 1, serial 5 was later installed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in Livermore, California.

Compugraphic introduces the Linasec I and II, the first general typesetting computers.

These automated tapeprocessors produced justified tapes to drive the Linotype machines used in the newspaper industry.

"The net production of the Linasec-in excess of 3,600 lines per hour compared to the manually-set 600 lines per hour, break open the market by enabling newspapers to carry more detailed, late breaking news stories."

Harris introduces editing terminals for newspapers, which are quickly followed by terminals from Raytheon, Atex, Digital Equipment Corporation and others. The terminals output strips of type on film from phototypesetters.

Atex works with the Minneapolis Star newspaper to develop the first electronic pagination system that allows the creation and output of full editorial pages, eliminating the need for manual paste-up of strips of film.

The Atex system featured "Atex Messaging" which is widely believed to be the forerunner of both email and instant messenger applications. Atex publishing systems were "based on highly modified Dec PDP-11 minicomputers, designed to produce news sections of newspapers. The systems included clustered CPUs, a distributed file system and dumb terminals that displayed memory-mapped video and featured keyboards with up to 140 keys: Distinctively, the cursor keys were on the left-hand side. A custom operating system tied everything together."

Duke University graduate Students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis establish USENET, one of the first computer network communications systems. 

USENET was conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET."

The first newsgroups seem to have been established virtually at the inception of USENET.

"The first newsgroups on Usenet, according to Truscott, were known as NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx. After Horton joined Usenet, he began feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet. Mailing lists from the ARPANET fed into Usenet were identified as FA.xxxx newsgroups. Truscott notes that, "Only when ucbvax joined the net, did `fa' appear." Truscott explains that he didn't know about the ARPANET mailing lists until Horton joined Usenet.

" At first the Usenet community could only read these ARPANET mailing lists, but couldn't contribute to them. "It was a one-way gateway - ARPANET into Usenet only, done with recnews, as I recall," writes Horton. But at least it was possible for the Usenet community to follow the interesting discussions carried on via the ARPANET mailing lists during this early period of Usenet" (http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x10, accessed 01-16-2010).

Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III launches the Cable News Network (CNN). The husband and wife team of David Walker and Lois Hart anchor its first newscast.

In cooperation with the Library of Congress, The National Endowment for the Humanities begins funding the United States Newspaper Program— "a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present."

Moderated newsgroups are introduced on USENET.

Feeling isolated after having recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and having observed people helping one another online at The Well and Usenet, Craig Naymark founds craigslist, as a bulletin board for social events.  It will evolve into a "central network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with jobs, internships, housing, personals, erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories – and forums on various topics." Craigslist will eventually make a profit by charging under-market fees for job ads in ten cities and for brokered apartment listings in New York City.

On Thanksgiving morning ABC's World News Now  becomes the first television show to be broadcast over the Internet, using the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software. This is the beginning of IP/TV.

The New York Times interactive web edition begins.

Heritage Microfilm launches NewspaperARCHIVE.com, making available newspaper pages from 1759 to the present. In December 2008 it will advise:

Jim Romensko founds mediagossip.com, providing daily news, commentary, and insider information about journalism and media.

Later in 1999 Romensko was hired by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies to write the blog Romensko on the Poynter website. The blog characterizes itself as "Your daily fix of media industry news, commentary, and memos."

American writer Nicholson Baker publishes Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.  An excerpt appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past."

This exhaustively researched polemic detailed Baker's quest to expose the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and '90s.

"The term 'double fold' refers to the test used by many librarians and preservation administrators to determine the brittleness and 'usability' of paper. The test consists of folding down the corner of a page of a book or newspaper, then folding it back in the opposite direction—one double fold. The action is then repeated until the paper breaks or is about to break. The more folds the page can withstand, the more durable it is. (In the late 1960s, preservation founding father William Barrow was fond of using a machine-run fold tester to back up his claims about the number of endangered books.) This experiment was used by library officials to identify their institution's brittle books, and, in some case, to justify withdrawing items from the shelves or replacing them with another format (most often microfilm). Baker's take on the double-fold test? '...utter horseshit and craziness. A leaf of a book is a semi-pliant mechanism. It was made for non-acute curves, not for origami.' (p. 157)"

"In 1999, Baker took matters into his own hands and founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save some of the collections being auctioned off by the British Library. A year later he became the owner of thousands of volumes of old newspapers, including various runs of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York World. In May 2004 the entire collection was moved to Duke University, where it is stored on climate-controlled shelves and looked after by the Rare Books and Special Collections division. As part of the gift agreement between the American Newspaper Repository and Duke, the collection will kept together in perpetuity, and no disbinding or experimental deacidification will be allowed.

"Baker makes four recommendations in Double Fold's epilogue: that libraries should be required to publish lists of discarded holdings on their websites, that the Library of Congress should fund a building that will serve as a storage repository for publications and documents not housed on-site, that some U.S. libraries should be designated with saving newspapers in bound form, and that both the U.S. Newspaper and the Brittle Books Programs should be abolished, unless they can promise that all conservation procedures will be non-destructive and that originals will be saved" (Wikipedia article on Double Fold, accessed 07-28-2009).

Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo found Metblogs.com. In May 2009 the Metroblogging website characterized this as the world's largest "network of city-focused blogs, covering local issues in more than fifty cities around the world."  On May 24, 2009 there were 57 city-specific cities and more than 700 bloggers involved in Metroblogging, representing, among other things, a kind of news-gathering and broadcasting network.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress found the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). " Ultimately over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet. An accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information on the website will direct users to newspaper titles available in all types of formats."

In the wake of the July 7, 2005 London bombings and the Buncefield oil depot fire, the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) expands its user-generated content team, established in April 2005. After the Buncefield disaster the BBC received over 5,000 photos from viewers. This may be the beginning of adoption of citizen-generated journalism by mainstream industrial media.

The start-up company Obvious launches the social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter: What are you doing?. Twitter "allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length." This is under the 160 character limit of the SMS communication protocol for mobile phones.

Google and various print newspapers, including The New York Times, announce that they will test a modified version of Google's AdWords program to place advertisements in print newspapers.

"A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology . . . . In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads.

"But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo."

Yahoo and Reuters introduce programs to place photographs and videos of news events submitted by the public, including cell phone photos and videos, throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo's new service entitled YouWitnessNews. Reuters says that it will also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters also says that it hopes to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

The oldest currently published newspaper in the world, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (Post and Domestic Newspaper), the government newspaper and gazette of Sweden, published on paper without interruption since 1645, switches to  web publication exclusively.

Founded in 1995, craigslist, the leading classified advertising service in any medium, provides free local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries, generating more than 12 billion page views per month, used by more than 50 million people each month. Craigslist users self-publish more than 30 million new classified ads each month and more than 2 million new job listings each month. Each month craigslist also posts more than 100 million user postings in more than 100 topical forms. All of this it does with only 25 employees.

Because craigslist does not charge for classified advertising it has replaced a large portion of the classified advertising that historically was placed in print newspapers. By doing so it has substantially reduced the significant revenue that print newspapers historically generated from classified advertising. This has contributed to an overall reduction of profits for many print newspapers. Similarly, craigslist's policy of charging below-market rates for job listings has impacted that traditional source of newspaper revenue, and has impacted profits at physical employment agencies, and the more expensive online employment agencies.

After 100 years of publishing in print, The Christian Science Monitor announces that in April 2009 it will become "the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.

"The changes at the Monitor will include enhancing the content on CSMonitor.com, starting weekly print and daily e-mail editions, and discontinuing the current daily print format."

Apart from the historic election of Barack Obama, the first African American President of the United States, from the standpoint of the history of information and media, one element of this election and the campaign that preceded it was the blending of its coverage by broadcast media and the rapidly evolving interactive media on the Internet. Television networks repeatedly referred viewers to their websites for interactive news stories and additional information. While we watched the election on television or listened to radio we received information in emails, from websites, and from blogging and microblogging sites like Twitter. Within minutes after the election was decided I received an email from the Obama campaign signed by Barack Obama. Online newspapers updated election results in real time. Perhaps most remarkably, even the Wikipedia article on the United States presidential election 2008 was updated in real time on the web as election results were available. This I learned from reading a blog in The New York Times online—an online newspaper blogging about an article in an online encyclopedia. From the standpoint of the history of media this represents a blurring or blending of the historic distinctions that evolved over centuries between news media writing about the moment, and traditionally more static works of reference such as encyclopedias.

An email from info@barackobama.com received 10-04-08 8:18PM PST, 18 minutes after polls closed on the West coast and news media computers declared an Obama victory. Presumbably this email was sent to the millions of people who donated to Obama's campaign:

"Jeremy --

I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.
We just made history.
And I don't want you to forget how we did it.
You made history every single day during this campaign -- every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it's time for change.
I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign.
We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next.
But I want to be very clear about one thing...
All of this happened because of you.
Thank you,

Barack"

The day after the presdidential election President-Elect Barack Obama launches the website, Change.gov to communicate details of the transition to the presidency.

Artdaily.org, which characterizes itself as the First Art Newspaper on the Net, publishes an innovative collage of 208 front pages of print newspapers from around the world celebrating the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. If you click on each of the smaller image you see a larger one.

"The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, which honor the work of American newspapers appearing in print, have been expanded to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced today.  

"The Board also has decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories" (http://www.pulitzer.org/new_eligibility_rules, accessed 04-23-2010).

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper issues its last printed edition and becomes an internet-only news source, seattlepi.com.

"The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will print its final edition Tuesday and become the nation's largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product "(http://www.seattlepi.com, accessed 03-16-2009).

In an interview in the Financial Times, Google CEO Eric Schmidt

"reveals that Google seriously considered either buying a newspaper as a for-profit enterprise or hiring a pack of smart lawyers to reconfigure the paper as a nonprofit venture. He doesn't name which paper, of course, but the Financial Times reporters pointedly remind their readers that the hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners offered Google its twenty percent stake in the New York Times. Ultimately, however, the company decided that going so far as owning an outlet that actually produced copy, rather than simply aggregating and organizing it, would be 'crossing the line' between a content company and a technology company. Wall Street Journal writer Jessica Vascellaro argues that this position is growing increasingly flimsy. After all, she writes, both YouTube and Google's Book Search project are awfully close to resembling content production.

"The real reason may be twofold. First, as Schmidt readily concedes, the targeted papers are either far too expensive or burdened with too much debt and liabilities. Second, the advertising model for general news reporting is obsolete, and Google's execs have decided instead to work with papers such as the Washington Post . . .to come up with a new model that can subsidize serious general news gathering. The days when general display ads would float on the page, contextually disconnected from the substance of the stories, are over. But who wants their ads tied to stories of Gitmo torture? Unless the business model radically changes, there will be no revenue stream that props up the most serious and important news stories.

"So what does Schmidt have in mind for the Washington Post? 'It seems to me that the newspaper that I read online should remember what I read. It should allow me to go deeper into the stories. It's that kind of a discussion that we're having.' In other words, the paper will store and archive a catalogue of the stories you read, steer more stories along those lines to your eyeballs, and keep you coming back for more by knowing what you're most interested in. Google already remembers what you search for, in order to more accurately match ads to your search screen. Now, it seems, Schmidt would like to apply this technique to news gathering" (http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/feeling-lucky/2009/05/21/google-almost-bought-paper, accessed 05-22-2009)

"SAN FRANCISCO — As the newspaper industry and its classified advertising business wither, one company appears to be doing extraordinarily well: Craigslist.

"The Internet classified ads company, which promotes its “relatively noncommercial nature” and “service mission” on its site, is projected to bring in more than $100 million in revenue this year, according to a new study from Classified Intelligence Report, a publication of AIM Group, a media and Web consultant firm in Orlando, Fla.

"That is a 23 percent jump over the revenue the firm estimated for 2008 and a huge increase since 2004, when the site was projected to bring in just $9 million. 'This is a down-market for just about everyone else but Craigslist,' said Jim Townsend, editorial director of AIM Group. The firm counted the number of paid ads on the site for a month and extrapolated an annual figure. It said its projections were conservative.

"By contrast, classified advertising in newspapers in the United States declined by 29 percent last year, its worst drop in history, according to the Newspaper Association of America" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/technology/internet/10craig.html?hpw, accessed 06-10-2009).

"At one time, authoritarian regimes could draw a shroud around the events in their countries by simply snipping the long-distance phone lines and restricting a few foreigners. But this is the new arena of censorship in the 21st century, a world where cellphone cameras, Twitter accounts and all the trappings of the World Wide Web have changed the ancient calculus of how much power governments actually have to sequester their nations from the eyes of the world and make it difficult for their own people to gather, dissent and rebel.

"Iran’s sometimes faltering attempts to come to grips with this new reality are providing a laboratory for what can and cannot be done in this new media age — and providing lessons to other governments, watching with calculated interest from afar, about what they may be able to get away with should their own citizens take to the streets.

"One early lesson is that it is easier for Iranian authorities to limit images and information within their own country than it is to stop them from spreading rapidly to the outside world. While Iran has severely restricted Internet access, a loose worldwide network of sympathizers has risen up to help keep activists and spontaneous filmmakers connected.

"The pervasiveness of the Web makes censorship 'a much more complicated job,' said John Palfrey, a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

"The Berkman Center estimates that about three dozen governments — as widely disparate as China, Cuba and Uzbekistan — extensively control their citizens’ access to the Internet. Of those, Iran is one of the most aggressive. Mr. Palfrey said the trend during this decade has been toward more, not less, censorship. 'It’s almost impossible for the censor to win in an Internet world, but they’re putting up a good fight,' he said.

"Since the advent of the digital age, governments and rebels have dueled over attempts to censor communications. Text messaging was used to rally supporters in a popular political uprising in Ukraine in 2004 and to threaten activists in Belarus in 2006. When Myanmar sought to silence demonstrators in 2007, it switched off the country’s Internet network for six weeks. Earlier this month, China blocked sites like YouTube to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

"In Iran, the censorship has been more sophisticated, amounting to an extraordinary cyberduel. It feels at times as if communications within the country are being strained through a sieve, as the government slows down Web access and uses the latest spying technology to pinpoint opponents. But at least in limited ways, users are still able to send Twitter messages, or tweets, and transmit video to one another and to a world of online spectators.

"Because of the determination of those users, hundreds of amateur videos from Tehran and other cities have been uploaded to YouTube in recent days, providing television networks with hours of raw — but unverified — video from the protests. 

"The Internet has 'certainly broken 30 years of state control over what is seen and is unseen, what is visible versus invisible,'  said Navtej Dhillon, an analyst with the Brookings Institution" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23censor.html?hp).

The death of American entertainer Michael Jackson had a remarkably dramatic impact on the Internet:

"The news of Jackson's death spread quickly online, causing websites to crash and slow down from user overload. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times, two websites that were the first to confirm the news, suffered outages. Google believed the millions of people searching 'Michael Jackson' meant it was under attack. Twitter reported a crash, as did Wikipedia at 3:15 PDT. The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly one million visitors to the article Michael Jackson within one hour, which they said may be the most visitors in a one-hour period to any article in Wikipedia's history. AOL Instant Messenger collapsed for 40 minutes. AOL called it a seminal moment in Internet history,' adding, 'We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.' Around 15 percent of Twitter posts (or 5,000 tweets per minute) mentioned Jackson when the news broke, compared to topics such as the 2009 Iranian election and swine flu, which never rose above 5 percent of total tweets. Overall, web traffic was 11 percent higher than normal" (Wikipedia article on Death of Michael Jackson, accessed 07-04-2009).

USA Today announces that it will add Amazon Kindle e-book (ebook) sales to its weekly Best-Selling Books list in its Best-Selling Books Database:

"Starting today, USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list becomes the first major list to include Amazon Kindle e-book sales. The move reflects both the growth of e-book sales and Kindle's role in that market. 'Since 1993, USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list has always evolved to reflect the ways our readers buy books,' says Susan Weiss, managing editor of the Life section. 'Adding Kindle to our group of contributors makes sense given the growth in the e-book platform.' E-books, for all devices, claimed 4.9% of sales in May, according to book audience research firm Codex-Group. That's up from 3.7% in March. This week, Barnes & Noble announced the launch of its own eBookstore with 700,000 titles."

In "What's a Big City Without a Newspaper?" published in The New York Times Magazine, Michael Sokelove writes:

"Many working journalists in the country regularly check a Web site known to most as “Romenesko” (after its creator, Jim Romenesko), which aggregates industry news and these days consists mainly of layoffs and other dire news. It can be excruciating to read. Just this year, The Rocky Mountain News perished. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer became a Web-only publication with a tiny staff. Detroit’s daily newspapers are now delivered just three days a week. The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Company, and The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst, each went through near-death experiences as their owners won labor concessions after threatening to shutter the papers.

"Smaller newspapers, those with circulations under 50,000, are considered the healthiest part of the industry. “They’re not making 30 percent profit margins like they once did, but most of them are doing fine,” John Morton, a newspaper analyst who has followed the industry for decades, told me. Most analysts predict that the papers with a national profile and brand — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today — will find a way to survive and stay in print. (It must be noted that few can say exactly how this will happen.)"

"This fall, DePaul University journalism alumnus Craig Kanalley will teach what is believed to be the first college-level journalism course focused solely on Twitter and its applications. Kanalley is a digital intern at the Chicago Tribune.

"It is one of several innovative courses offered by DePaul’s College of Communication to help prepare students to work in the burgeoning digital landscape. Other journalism courses include niche journalism, reporting for converged newsrooms, backpack reporting and entrepreneurial journalism.

"Kanalley said his course, 'Digital Editing: From Breaking News to Tweets, is really about learning how to make sense of the clutter of the Web, particularly in situations of breaking news or major developing stories, and how to evaluate and verify the authenticity of reports by citizen journalists.'

“ 'Thousands share information about these stories and how they’re affected through Twitter every day, and there’s a need to sift through this data to find relevant information that provides story tips and additional context for these events,' Kanalley said.

"Students will especially focus on the social networking platform Twitter and apply concepts discussed in class to Kanalley’s live journalism Web site Breaking Tweets ( www.breakingtweets.com ), which integrates news and relevant Twitter feedback to create a one-of-a-kind Web experience for readers by providing eyewitness accounts of breaking news stories from around the world" (http://media-newswire.com/release_1098001.html, accessed 09-01-2009).

The following are quotations from Google CEO Eric Schmidt selected from his interview with Danny Sullivan of searchengineland.com, representing Schmidt's view of present problems and possible future solutions for newspapers and journalism impacted by the Internet:

"The number of readers for newspapers is declining. The market is becoming more specialized. There will always be a market for people who read the newspaper on a train going into New York City. There will always be a market for people who sit in in the afternoon in a cafe in the city and read the newspaper in the sunshine. The term “killing” is a bit over[blown]. Newspapers face a long-term secular decline because of the shift in user habits due to the Internet."

"In the case of the newspapers, they have multiple problems which are hard to solve. If you think about it there are three fundamental problems. One is that the physical cost of things is going up, physical newsprint. Another one has been the loss of classifieds. And a third one has been essentially the difficulty in selling traditional print ads. So, all of them have online solutions. And we’ve come to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to help them with the online."

"We think that over a long enough period of time, most people will have personalized news-reading experiences on mobile-type devices that will largely replace their traditional reading of newspapers. Over a decade or something. And that that kind of news consumption will be very personal, very targeted. It will remember what you know. It will suggest things that you might want to know. It will have advertising. Right? And it will be as convenient and fun as reading a traditional newspaper or magazine.

"So one way one to think about it is that the newspaper or magazine industry do a great job of the convenience of scanning and looking and understanding. And we have to get the web to that point, or whatever the web becomes. So we just announced, the official name is Google Fast Flip. And that’s an example of the kind of thing we’re doing. And we have a lot more coming."

"I specifically am talking about investigative journalism when I talk about this. There’s no lack of bloggers and people who publish their opinions and faux editorial writers and people with an opinion. And I think that one of the great things about the internet is that we can hear them. We can also choose to ignore them. So it’s not correct to say that the internet is decreasing conversation. The internet is clearly increasing conversation at an incredibly rapid pace. The cacophony of voices is overwhelming as you know.

"Well-funded, targeted professionally managed investigative journalism is a necessary precondition in my view to a functioning democracy. And so that’s what we worry about. And as you know, that was always subsidized in the newspaper model by the other things that they did. You know, the story about the scandal in Iraq or Afghanistan was difficult to advertise against. But there was enough revenue that it allowed the newspaper to fulfill its mission" (http://searchengineland.com/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-on-newspapers-journalism-27172)

"First, we're introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.  

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it's an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it's published on the web. . .

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. For example, in the screen shot, the big story was about GM's stabilizing car sales, which shows under "News results." Nonetheless, thanks to our powerful real-time algorithms, the 'Latest results' feature surfaces another important story breaking just seconds before: GM's CEO stepped down.

Click on 'Latest results' or select 'Latest' from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only 'Updates' from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you're in line to buy tickets.  

And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we've added 'hot topics' to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs.  

"Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we're announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-time-web.html, accessed 05-06-2010).

Google announces the Living Stories project, which provides a new, experimental way to consume news, developed by a partnership between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. 

"The announcement of the 'living stories' project shows Google collaborating with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat. Google has also taken steps recently to project an image of itself as a friend to the industry. 

"Living stories is a much-enhanced version of what some newspaper Web sites already do by grouping material by subject matter. In the case of The Times, the paper’s Web site has thousands of “topic pages.” But those efforts have not yielded heavy reader traffic or much advertising.  

"The Google project, presented without ads, is now at livingstories.googlelabs.com, part of Google Labs, where the company tries out experimental products. If it is judged a success, it would eventually reside on the site of any publisher that wanted to use it. Those publishers could also sell ads on those pages.  

"Google’s dominant search engine sells ads alongside search results that often include news articles, leading some newspaper industry leaders — particularly executives of the News Corporation, led by Rupert Murdoch — to cry foul. Other publishers say that, on the contrary, they owe much of their Internet traffic and revenue to search engines.  

"Google executives argue that the tools their company has developed, including search, make them the papers’ ally, a case made by Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, in an opinion piece published last week in The Wall Street Journal. Also last week, Google announced changes in the way its search function interacts with news sites, giving publishers more flexibility in limiting the material readers can see before encountering demands for payment or registration. The changes were relatively minor, but reinforced the message that the company wanted to help news sites.  

" 'There’s been a series of steps to work with and mollify news publishers, to improve the P.R., and you can see the living page in that same vein,' said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with the analysis firm Outsell. The project is a genuine step forward, he said, because 'on most news sites, site search, looking for a lot on one subject, is awful.'

"Google worked for months on the project with journalists and Web staffs at The Times and The Post. For now, it covers just eight broad topics, like health care reform and the Washington Redskins. At the top of each subject page is a summary, a timeline of major events and pictures, followed by the opening sections of a series of articles, in reverse chronological order. A set of buttons allows the reader to narrow the topic.  'It’s an experiment with a different way of telling stories,' said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company. 'I think in it, you can see the germ of something quite interesting.'

"A reader can call up an entire article without navigating away from the subject page, reading one piece after another without using the 'forward' and 'back' buttons. Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, said that having all the material appear on a single page would help the page rank higher in Internet searches than newspapers’ subject pages do now.  

"In various ways, the experiment duplicates or improves on what can now be done on publishers’ own sites, through a search engine’s news function or even on Wikipedia. Mr. Cohen said that if it worked well, Google would make the software available free to publishers, much as those publishers now use Google Maps and YouTube functions on their sites" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/technology/companies/09google.html?hpw).

Steve Jobs of Apple introduces the iPad, one-half inch thick, with a 9.7 inch, high resolution color touchscreen (multi-touch) diagonal display, powered by a 1-gigahertz Apple A4 chip and 16 to 64 gigabytes of flash storage, weighing 1.5 pounds and capable of running all iPhone applications, except presumably, the phone. The battery life is supposed to be 10 hours, and the device is supposed to hold a charge for 1 month in standby. The price starts at $499.00.

"The new device will have to be far better than the laptop and smartphone at doing important things: browsing the Web, doing e-mail, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading e-books. Otherwise, 'it has no reason for being.'" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/live-blogging-the-apple-product-announcement/?hp, accessed 01-27-2010).

Link to iPad on Apple website: http://www.apple.com/ipad/

Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics at YouTube, interviews President Barack Obama on YouTube's, CitizenTube.com:

"The President responded to your questions in a live YouTube interview at the White House on Monday, February 1st.

"You submitted over 11,000 questions and cast over 667,000 votes after the President's State of the Union address last week. We collected the top questions, ensuring we covered a range of issues, minimized duplicate questions, and included both video and text submissions" (http://www.youtube.com/user/citizentube#p/c/EB843ABAF59735FD, accessed 02-02-2010).

This was the first time that a sitting president was interviewed by social media rather than broadcast news media.

Sheri Fink, MD, PhD of ProPublica.org receives the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for her story, The Deadly Choices at Memorial. The story was published on the Propublica website on August 27, 2009 and co-published in the New York Times Magazine on August 30, 2009.

Political cartoonist Mark Fiore, whose work appears on SFGate.com, wins the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. Fiore produces animated editorial cartoons for publication on the Internet.

These were the first Pulitzer Prizes awarded for Internet-based journalism.

Twitter announces in its blog that it will donate its archive of 10,000,000,000 text messages (tweets) accumulated since the founding of the company in October 2006:

"The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States and it is the largest library in the world. The Library's primary mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation.

"Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.  

"It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

"The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is something we firmly believe and it has driven many of our decisions regarding openness. Today we are also excited to share the news that Google has created a wonderful new way to revisit tweets related to historic events. They call it Google Replay because it lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time.  

"Google Replay currently only goes back a few months but eventually it will reach back to the very first Tweets ever created. Feel free to give Replay a try—if you want to understand the popular contemporaneous reaction to the retirement of Justice Stevens, the health care bill, or Justin Bieber's latest album, you can virtually time travel and replay the Tweets. The future seems bright for innovation on the Twitter platform and so it seems, does the past!"

"Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz, expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets.  

"With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant onlineconversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful.  

"Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and 'replay' what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click 'Show options' on the search results page, then select 'Updates.' The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. . . ." (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/replay-it-google-search-across-twitter.html, accessed 05-06-2010).

The New York Times publishes "When History is Compiled 140 Characters at a Time" from which I quote:

“ 'Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,' said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, 'Digital History.' What’s more, he said, 'Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.'  

"Last month, Twitter announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress, and supply it with continuous updates.  

"Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. 'My initial reaction was, ‘When you look at it Tweet by Tweet, it looks like junk,’ said Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. 'But it could be really valuable if looked through collectively.' Ms. Taylor is working on a book about slave runaways during the Civil War; the project involves mountains of paper documents. 'I don’t have a search engine to sift through it,' she said.  

"The Twitter archive, which was 'born digital,' as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.  

"As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. 'Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,' Ms. Taylor said. 'And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.'  

"Twitter messages preserve witness accounts of an extraordinary variety of events all over the planet. 'In the past, some people were able on site to write about, or sketch, as a witness to an event like the hanging of John Brown,' said William G. Thomas III, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 'But that’s a very rare, exceptional historical record.'  

"Ten billion Twitter messages take up little storage space: about five terabytes of data. (A two-terabyte hard drive can be found for less than $150.) And Twitter says the archive will be a bit smaller when it is sent to the library. Before transferring it, the company will remove the messages of users who opted to designate their account 'protected,' so that only people who obtain their explicit permission can follow them.

"A Twitter user can also elect to use a pseudonym and not share any personally identifying information. Twitter does not add identity tags that match its users to real people.  

"Each message is accompanied by some tidbits of supplemental information, like the number of followers that the author had at the time and how many users the author was following. While Mr. Cohen said it would be useful for a historian to know who the followers and the followed are, this information is not included in the Tweet itself.  

"But there’s nothing private about who follows whom among users of Twitter’s unprotected, public accounts. This information is displayed both at Twitter’s own site and in applications developed by third parties whom Twitter welcomes to tap its database.  

"Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said, 'From the beginning, Twitter has been a public and open service.' Twitter’s privacy policy states: 'Our services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.  

"Mr. Macgillivray added, 'That’s why, when we were revising our privacy policy, we toyed with the idea of calling it our ‘public policy.’ ' He said the company would have done so but California law required that it have a 'privacy policy' labeled as such.  

"Even though public Tweets were always intended for everyone’s eyes, the Library of Congress is skittish about stepping anywhere in the vicinity of a controversy. Martha Anderson, director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library, said, 'There’s concern about privacy issues in the near term and we’re sensitive to these concerns.'  

"The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, 'We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.' The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called “qualified researchers.”  

"BUT the library’ s restrictions on access will not matter. Mr. Macgillivray at Twitter said his company would be turning over copies of its public archive to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, too. These companies already receive instantaneously the stream of current Twitter messages. When the archive of older Tweets is added to their data storehouses, they will have a complete, constantly updated, set, and users won’t encounter a six-month embargo.  

"Google already offers its users Replay, the option of restricting a keyword search only to Tweets and to particular periods. It’s quickly reached from a search results page. (Click on 'Show options,' then 'Updates,' then a particular place on the timeline.)  

"A tool like Google Replay is helpful in focusing on one topic. But it displays only 10 Tweets at a time. To browse 10 billion — let’s see, figuring six seconds for a quick scan of each screen — would require about 190 sleepless years.  

"Mr. Cohen encourages historians to find new tools and methods for mining the 'staggeringly large historical record' of Tweets. This will require a different approach, he said, one that lets go of straightforward 'anecdotal history.' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02digi.html?scp=1&sq=twitter%20+%20history&st=cse, accessed 05-06-2010).

"Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.  

"Over time, these aspirations have created a vibrant and inspiring community that helped transform a murmur of interest into something far greater than any of us ever could have imagined. Today, thanks to you, our site has crossed another milestone: YouTube exceeds over two billion views a day. That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.  

"What started as a site for bedroom vloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries. We bring feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers to far-flung audiences. Activists document social unrest seeking to transform societies, and leading civic and political figures stream interviews to the world" (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/, accessed 05-17-2010).