nblinks

Have you heard about Newseum.org? Every night, three or four hundred newspapers worldwide upload PDFs of the next day's front page to the Web site, which makes them available for browsing and download. The "map view" feature is particularly exciting -- roll your cursor over all them dots and see what made the front page in all them places.

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/

I've actually, though, graduated from the map view to direct downloads. I figured out how to write a script that would get my computer to download, with a single click, the PDFs for the NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, Birmingham News (sweet home Alabama!), Sydney Morning Herald, Hindustan Times (Delhi), O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), El Tiempo (Bogota), El Universal (Mexico City), Toronto Globe and Mail, The Guardian (UK), El Pais (Madrid), Le Monde (Paris), and this paper from northern Germany with decent layout but a forgettable name. Then I can unplug the laptop, open them all in my PDF viewer, and read/skim/view it all.

I find the PDFs far far superior to looking at the same papers' websites -- more of each article is on the same page, and you can literally zoom in and out to read rather than having to click on a headline and be catapulted to a whole different page. And way more photo- and typo- and info-graphic possibilities.

Also, one gets to see the dizzying way in which stories -- and not just the major news stories -- bounce across the globe in different languages and layouts. One about Viagra use among young men started in Delhi, popped up the next day in one of the US papers, and two days later: Bogota.

Anyway, this has become a little obsessive, but oh well.

[via the web log newsdesigner.org]