Since the mid-1990s, journalism and the organizations that created and distributed the news have undergone a seismic upheaval. That turmoil, and the media industry’s response, is well documented elsewhere. We have a different mission. The goal of Newsroom History is to make a VISUAL connection to our collective past and celebrate our history. This is an important time for capturing journalism’s history. The generation of journalists who witnessed the transformation from analog to digital are retiring or have left the industry. We need to capture their stories before it is too late.
To ‘seed’ this venture, I will share many of my front page collected during my career as a graphics and picture editor, a newsroom leader, consultant and teacher. Before the Newseum was created and newspapers electronically shared PDFs of their daily front pages, the only way journalists could see what other papers were doing was to head to the library. Or watch a presentation by a speaker who collected those pages. That’s what I did. As did lots of other folks, especially in the early days of organizations like the Society of New Design.
It is time to give those pages a new life. The Newsroom History site provides some of that history and new life.