Could be a great resource for searching and watching news clips … while it lasts
Internet Archive, which hosts the Wayback Machine (very helpful to find now-dead websites or earlier versions of existing ones … like CJR — looking good in 1996!), has just added a new collection to its Internet library: news clips.Another resource we've used for research is the Vanderbilt Television News Archive which is, as they modestly point out, "the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news."
Launched Monday, TV News Search and Borrow lets users search through over three years of painstakingly catalogued and transcribed clips from 20 networks (ABC to Univision). I tested it by searching for Fox News’s coverage of the time when Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) was filmed at a town hall meeting talking on her cellphone while one of her constituents, a cancer survivor, spoke out against President Obama’s healthcare law. You can imagine the field day Fox News pundits had with that one. And lo, there is it on TV News — clips from when it happened in August 2009 up until an April 2010 flashback, courtesy of Greta Van Susteren. Annoyingly, they’re set to automatically play if you so much as hover your cursor over them, which means my office had to hear a lot of Fox News while I was researching this post.
It’s a pretty cool resource, but I wonder how long TV News (which did not get back to me before deadline) will stay up before the networks whose clips it archived without getting permission will demand that their content be taken down....MORE
