The Wayback Machine
Posted: October 02, 2007
The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization based out of San Francisco. Their goal is to create a library of Web pages in order to better archive the goings on of the Internet and offer a permanent database of Web sites for researchers and historians.
I made good use of The Wayback Machine (The WBM) recently while doing research for a project in my media ethics class. I am writing a case study about a student journalist at Central Connecticut State University. In February, John Petroski, the opinions editor of CCSU’s student-run newspaper The Recorder, wrote an opinion piece titled “Rape only hurts if you fight it.” His satire did not go over well, and he eventually resigned from his position at the newspaper.
The newspaper currently has no contact information for Petroski. But, with a little help from The WBM, I was able to navigate back in time to The Recorder’s Web site just before Petroski left the paper. I found his contact information and continued from there.
It would have been a lot more difficult to find this information without this archive. It has other uses as well; check out what The New York Times was saying on Sept. 11, 2001.
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