David A. Windham
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2023-08-30-posts.md

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title: Newspapers.com description: Today I learned how useful the Newspapers.com website can be. slug: newspapers-com <!--- authors:

Today I learned how useful the Newspapers.com website can be1. I gotta email from our athletic director about championship banners for the gym related to tennis. Being as I'm not from Greenwood, I had no clue about the history so I forwarded it to a couple fellas I know who knew more. The feedback left some gaps, so I started scrubbing online when I ran into the ubiquitous Newspapers.com site.

I signed up for access and was able to quickly whip up all of the rest of information on the tennis teams. Newspapers.com includes more than 800 million pages from 20,000 newspapers. Once you've made 500+ edits on Wikipedia, you qualify for a free account via the Wikipedia Library so that they can be used as citations2. I've previously written about these types of references before when I was thumbing through an archive project at a university at a local university finding information about my grandfather from his 1920's yearbooks3.

I think we sometimes forget about more traditional archiving in the information age. For the last couple centuries, newspapers have been the best resource of information. I'm old enough to remember thumbing through microfilm scanners for references4. I remember thinking to myself in the early 2000's when Google first started scanning books how powerful this could be5. They built custom scanners and trained the software to recognize hundreds of font faces in hundreds of languages. Oxford let scan over a million of their books and it's now essentially the worlds largest library. The advent of AI is just going to make it quicker to find this sort of information.

I worked in the Newspaper industry several years building websites for an assortment of papers. I'm not sure they've ever really made the online transition that well. Our local paper is full of networked advertising and syndicated news. During high school I attended several journalism camps several at the University of South Carolina because, at one point I thought it'd be fun to be a photojournalist and travel. I'm kinda glad I dodged that bullet, given that the opportunity to land myself in some war torn conflict abroad. I've watched the industry pick and roll back and forth between paywalls and different subscription models. I sometimes think about getting into the business for fun, but I'd likely end up with legal troubles given my penchant for brutal honesty. I've watched other folks start their own smaller scale publishing outfits and mostly they just end up slinging advertisements or mud... the oft misattributed quote that "News is something somebody doesn't want you to print; all else is advertising." is spot on6.

Aside from now being informed about all of the local tennis stats and history, I went digging through early editions of our local paper and searching other keywords for fun. I was able to find some of my own tennis records and even some golf and tennis records for my grandfather. I confirmed that there are a slew of Windham's in and around South Carolina7. I found the 1953-54 obituaries for my great grandparents alongside of information on his senate tenure8.

The most enlightening thing I came across that really helped put my own experience into perspective were a couple articles about my dad9,10. Dad drop out of a Senate race in 1980 which I'd guess he was likely doing for in his namesake tradition, but the last clip from 1991 says quite a bit more about his character and hints the type of person I'd really prefer to be. I suppose I'll start working on my golf game 😂.

  1. Newspapers.com - https://www.newspapers.com
  2. Wikipedia:Newspapers.com - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newspapers.com
  3. Samuel David Minnick - https://davidawindham.com/samuel-david-minnick/
  4. Microform ( Microfilm ) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform
  5. Google Books History - https://books.google.com/googlebooks/about/history.html
  6. Quote Investigator - News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print. All the Rest Is Advertising - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/20/news-suppress/
  7. David A. Windham - Ancestors - https://davidawindham.com/ancestors/
  8. L.R. Windham, Ex-Solon, Darlington - The State - 1954/10/24 - https://www.newspapers.com/article/127952000/
  9. Leo Windham Drops out of Senate Race - The State - 1980/04/04
  10. The Lindsay rule applied - The State - 1991/07/21