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The Internet The Media News

All the TV News Since 2009, Now Available At the Internet Archive 70

6 writes with news that the Internet Archive has launched an online archive of TV news content. According to the NY Times, it will "include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news." In addition to preserving the works of humankind, the archive is for helping citizens "better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs."
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All the TV News Since 2009, Now Available At the Internet Archive

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  • by ilikenwf ( 1139495 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:19PM (#41391119)
    CNN and Fox News, etc will be all over this one - lots of nice, juicy (sometimes out of context) quotes and clips to use in their attacks toward the opponents of their biases...
    • by Anonymous Coward

      You think the networks don't already maintain their own archives?

      Hell, if the Daily Show can do it...

      • Where does The Daily Show get their news archives? Sometimes they pull up clips that are fairly old, so it's hard to believe they have a bunch of Tivos running in a back room.

        • I know they spend a lot of time searching Lexis Nexis TV & Radio news transcripts. I'm not sure if that give you the actual clip or just a reference. But if you are willing to pay for archival footage, I think you can get that kind of stuff fairly easily as long as you can tell them "I want these 14 seconds that aired at 12:34 on 8/12/08". Not something that is very friendly to the inexperienced researcher (or the person who doesn't want to pay for lexisnexis.
        • There are organizations who record essentially all the news, and have people catalog it and tag it etc., and have been doing this for a very long time. So if for example The Daily Show wants to do a bit where they show 50 different local news reporters reading the same phrase from some AP story they all ran, they just go to the news catalog people and say "give me all the clips from the last 2 days containing [whatever phrase]."
          There was a news story about the whole process a few days ago, but ironically I
    • by ichthus ( 72442 )
      With searchable transcripts, all one will have to do is search out the video in it's entirety to get full context and debunk any deceit through selective editing. More information is usually a good thing.
      • by ichthus ( 72442 )
        Dammit. "Its entirety", not "It's".
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Hey, stop with the selective editing already!

      • A nice thought, but the debunking never seems to attract the attention that the bunk does.
      • It's true that is all it would take for someone interested in finding out, but what is page 1 bunk always ends up being page 7 when debunked. People tend to remember the initial statement and not the corrections.

    • by Bigby ( 659157 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:37PM (#41391307)

      I hope they make everyone look so bad that the public just gives up on the "lesser of two evils" method of voting.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Are you kidding? The politicians on the right flip flop so much on every possible issue that the last thing in the world any of those networks wants is a public with a memory that goes back farther than a week. For proof of this, see The Daily Show, which often has hilarious segments featuring talking heads arguing with their past selves, each taking a diametrically opposite position on an issue. And they manage that trick using just an intern and a video tape machine. Imagine what a searchable archive of t

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by CanHasDIY ( 1672858 )

        Are you kidding? The politicians on the right flip flop so much on every possible issue that the last thing in the world any of those networks wants is a public with a memory that goes back farther than a week.

        Yea, thank goodness the politicians on the left never do that stuff, right?

        Obama: "Mine will be the most transparent administration in history."

        Caveat: I think they're all greedy, self-absorbed douche-bags. No bias.

        • Obama: "Mine will be the most transparent administration in history."

          I'm pretty sure that is a misquote since googling it only turns up anti-obama sites. That's poor form if you want to show something actually hypocritical and not just more fauxbama stuff.

          Best I can make out, it refers to his promise to increase access to government records by putting lots of stuff into an internet database. [suntimes.com] I remember when it went online as the Open Government Initiative. [whitehouse.gov] You will see the word "Transparency" is the first ont he sub-heading of that page.

          If you want to get a more grounded

          • Obama: "Mine will be the most transparent administration in history."

            I'm pretty sure that is a misquote since googling it only turns up anti-obama sites. That's poor form if you want to show something actually hypocritical and not just more fauxbama stuff.

            From whitehouse.gov [whitehouse.gov]:

            My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

            You should probably do a little more research yourself, before making such accusations.

            BTW, 5 seconds and one Google search is all it took to find the above quote.

            • by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @04:21PM (#41392739)

              Still a misquote - you might call it a summarization, but leaving out the part about "establish a system" completely changes the meaning because what you actually found on the whitehouse website narrowly refers to the OGI.

              • Whatever happened to "Hey, dude, guess you're right, thanks for clarifying?"

                Nevermind; the point is, Obama has claimed that he intends to have a very open and transparent government, yet his administration has prosecuted orders of magnitude more whistleblowers than every previous administration combined. Regardless of how he stated his intent, it's glaringly obvious he has no intention of making good on transparency.
                • Whatever happened to "Hey, dude, guess you're right, thanks for clarifying?"

                  Because you are wrong. The page you linked to is all about the OGI - it ends with him specificlly directing the CTO and the OMB to create the OGI, and he kept that promise. You can't accuse the guy of flip-flopping on a promise he actually kept.

                  The only reason you think the crappy handling of the whistleblowers is a flip-flop is because you bought into the overly broad scope of the original misquote which, given the use on all the anti-obama websites, was probably designed specificly to mislead like that

                  • Whatever happened to "Hey, dude, guess you're right, thanks for clarifying?"

                    Because you are wrong. The page you linked to is all about the OGI - it ends with him specificlly directing the CTO and the OMB to create the OGI, and he kept that promise. You can't accuse the guy of flip-flopping on a promise he actually kept.

                    The only reason you think the crappy handling of the whistleblowers is a flip-flop is because you bought into the overly broad scope of the original misquote which, given the use on all the anti-obama websites, was probably designed specificly to mislead like that.

                    Whatever you've got to tell yourself to sleep at night, bro, I really don't give a rat's ass whether you acknowledge reality or not.

    • by Hentes ( 2461350 )

      Still better than politicians saying one thing today and the complete opposite tomorrow, relying on the public having a very short term memory.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The news is seldom even accurate. Why would anyone care more about two year old lies than current lies?

  • by TaoPhoenix ( 980487 ) <TaoPhoenix@yahoo.com> on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:19PM (#41391129) Journal

    How did they manage the copyright clearance for THAT!?

    • by pipeep ( 2106308 )
      It's not all streaming. They'll mail you a DVD if you want to watch the content. The only thing they stream are 30 second clips (which falls under fair-use), so that you can make sure you have the right video.
      • Yes, and it' $50 to borrow a clip for 30 days. The service is based on the Vanderbilt Television Archive, which has been providing a similar service since 1968. (They didn't start on the Internet, obviously.) This is a service that will be of use primarily to the news media and PR professionals. It isn't "all the TV news," either, by a long shot. I just tried searching for a small company that's made national news several times and got zero hits.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:39PM (#41391337)

      Actually US Broadcast news has special copyright exemptions http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/17/1/108

    • by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:42PM (#41391367) Journal

      The act of copying all this news material is protected under a federal copyright agreement signed in 1976. That was in reaction to a challenge to a news assembly project started by Vanderbilt University in 1968.

    • by Bigby ( 659157 )

      Maybe the attach advertising and the originator gets a cut of the revenue. After all, it is just old news. Why not make some more money off of it.

      Then they can enforce their copyright on postings to YouTube.

      Profit!

      • Naw, see this is why I have been griping that one Copyright Hand isn't talking to the other. I haven't checked the license details, but that's three years worth of x channels of news. That's a lot of data, and it's not that old, it's fairly current. So I'll check later, but the magic recipe here is "derivative works" which is your YouTube Mashups.

        Compare that to the Music side where 24 song up to THIRTY YEARS OLD are worth $200,000 in sharing fees. See the problem? That's why my ex-gamer Combo Alarm is goin

  • ALL = American? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by diodeus ( 96408 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:20PM (#41391131) Journal

    I guess "All the news" need not contain any foreign sources. Disappointing.

    • They should have qualified that with "All important news." Us Americans just keep pissing other people off when we don't acknowledge their existence no matter how unimportant they are. On behalf of America I would like to apologize to Canada for ignoring you again.

    • Considering the apparent purpose for this, having foreign news seems like it would be a pointless addition.

    • All the news by 20 agencies, not every agency everywhere.

      That is the goal, but I could see how some agencies in other countries might not be willing or able to provide the material.

      The BBC America seems to be part of the import.

    • settle down, folks!
      the reason why only american news sources were included in this first roll out is because the search function relies on indexing the closed captioning text.
      no cc == no text == not indexed == not included in search results.
      they're working on several different non-trivial approaches for broadcasts without closed captioning...
  • This could help very interesting research regarding how often certain topics are discussed, or certain buzzwords are used. It's pretty exciting I think.
    • This could help very interesting research regarding how often certain topics are discussed, or certain buzzwords are used. It's pretty exciting I think.

      Given how many news programs are aired live and CC subs are done in realtime, i bet the research is going to be more limited than you think unless you want to start by analyzing frequently misspelled words.

      • by vlm ( 69642 )

        Given how many news programs are aired live and CC subs are done in realtime, i bet the research is going to be more limited than you think unless you want to start by analyzing frequently misspelled words.

        That could be a fun data analysis project in itself. If only the dataset went back 2 or 3 more years, it would be interesting to chart how long it took to get captioners to properly spell Barack Obama, or any unusual name.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Well we all know that if it wasn't important enough for the US news it didn't happen. Kind of like the Paralympics.

    • by vlm ( 69642 )

      This could help very interesting research regarding how often certain topics are discussed, or certain buzzwords are used. It's pretty exciting I think.

      I want to run a Fourier analysis on the human interest stories. I've always been told the tired old "LSD is regaining popularity" has a wavelength around 36 months, roughly every 3 years, blah blah blah.

      Also fun to track stories about fads. Remember when every Prius on the road was spontaneously accelerating on the highway?

      Another truly weird analysis project would be analyzing coughs and colds, like a graph of each time a newscaster sneezed. I bet that analysis could be fully automated and over a long t

      • You'll rarely catch them coughing or sneezing, since the various cuts and breaks (not to mention "cough buttons") are specifically designed to help them avoid broadcasting those over the air. An anchor person isn't actually on screen for very long at a time, even during breaking coverage or major news, so they have plenty of opportunities to clear their throat, blow their nose, or grab something to drink as the cameras are on a reporter in the field, an expert in the studio, a video clip shot earlier in the

    • Indeed. I could see something like Google Ngram Viewer [google.com] being developed for going through this sort of thing for all sorts of interesting purposes, ranging from linguistics research and the etymology of idiomatic sayings to scripting more accurate period dramas [blogspot.com]. It could also be used to produce something along the lines of Google Trends, letting people see what the media is focusing on at any particular time. Moreover, it would form an interesting contrast if you had a timeline showing the rise and fall of v

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Lets show the evil or blundering ways of our opposing political party.

  • oh the politicians will hate this, will make flip flopping a little harder.
  • Finally! An opportunity to definitively pin down exactly when the Hilton-to-Kardashian transition occurred.
  • and lame "over to you, Phil" handoffs.

  • In addition to preserving the works of humankind, the archive is for helping citizens "better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs.

    I would think it would be more important to use it to better understand the failings of the US mainstream media and its blind and relentless support of the two-party system.

  • by Beetle B. ( 516615 ) <beetle_b@@@email...com> on Thursday September 20, 2012 @12:06AM (#41395861)

    No Al-Jazeera English?

    No BBC?

    Really?

    • the reason why only american news sources were included in this first roll out is because the search function relies on indexing the closed captioning text.
      no cc == no text == not indexed == not included in search results.
      they're working on several different non-trivial approaches for broadcasts without closed captioning...
  • I have also compiled an archive of all actual produced journalistic news coverage since 2009.

    I don't keep the uncompressed video for space reasons. I only have one 4GB Flash drive to keep the 9 minutes of actual journalism that has been put on TV in the last 3 years, and 9 minutes of uncompressed video might exceed that.

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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