Time-Lapse of 12,000 New York Times Homepage Screenshots

Web developer Phillip Mendonça-Vieira accidentally captured 12,000 screenshots of the New York Times homepage between September 2010 and July 2011, which he compiled into this fascinating time-lapse video.

Having worked with and developed on a number of content management systems I can tell you that as a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It’s all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we’re no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis. Archive.org comes close, but there are too many gaps to my liking.

This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.

via Joshua Nguyen

E.D.W. Lynch
E.D.W. Lynch

Writer and humor generalist on the Internet and on Facebook.