Editorial

Resurrecting Old News on www.bayweekly.com

Time heads for the future, and newspapers hurry behind, never able to catch up because we keep stopping to snap shots of each day, or week, as it passes.

Time is captured on newspaper pages only long enough for you to look at it in retrospect as you continue your own rush into the future. Then you wrap your crabs in our pages, and there goes the week that was.

Thus news died. If you wanted to exhume the past, you traveled, in person, to newspaper morgues — though you could read the ghostly shadows of big papers on library microforms.

Then along came the World Wide Web to give time a new dimension. Bay Weekly added a web edition in 1998. Every week since, present time has stretched longer each week for on-line readers. Ever since, it’s been as easy to pull any past issue from Vol. VI, No. 1 onward from archives as it’s been to read the week’s real-time paper.

But our first five volumes remained iced down only in our own morgue — or in the libraries of a few history-minded readers who’d kept all their past issues, no doubt neatly filed.

As our 10th Halloween rolls around, we’re bringing those old issues back from the dead. Each week Webmaster Christina Crayle will be adding not only our newest issue to www.bayweekly.com but also issues from our past. Experimenting with their recovery, we added six issues — numbers 47 through 52 — from Vol. V, 1997, earlier this year.

By this year’s end, all of Vol. I will be on-line. We’ll work forward from there till our whole past is present on-line.

If you browse those issues in their entirety, you’ll find some nice surprises. But that’s not the only way to use our on-line edition or make use of its new depth. This year we’ve also added a new search feature.

Now, if you want to find out what we’ve written about any person, place or thing (and a lot more besides), you can recover it all quicker than you can say I know you’ve written something but I can’t quite remember what or when. It’s all free, and we won’t make you register with us to read our information.

It’s as easy as typing your subject into the search box located on the navigation bar on the left side of the site. Click enter and away you go.

Behind this new magic is Google, the mother of all search engines. By registering with Google, we allow them to “index” — take a digital snapshot — of bayweekly.com, just like taking a family portrait. Each snapshot records how the family has changed.

Snapshots are taken once every four weeks. Once a snapshot is taken, you will be able to search within Bay Weekly and the web to locate the most current information at that moment in time. Each snapshot will include information added since the last picture was taken. Items like movies and calendar won’t be available for searching beyond the current week, as we don’t archive them.

Snapshots are a way to open the box and peek inside — connect to each web site — and see what is in there, how deep it is and what it contains. Go on-line to www.bayweekly.com to discover our old issues and articles. Soon, we will have all our past issues on-line.

Happy searching.