Le notizie (dimenticate) del giorno prima

Robert Cottrell — che passa il suo tempo a leggere articoli per poi segnalarli sul suo sito, The Browser — si chiede perché i giornali investano poco o nulla nel loro archivio, nel dare nuova vita e spazio a pezzi di un anno fa, nonostante molti di questi mantengano la loro rilevanza nel tempo:

You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going to listen to that record because it was released last year,” or, “I’m not going to watch that film because it came out last month.” Why are we so much less interested in journalism that’s a month or a year old? The answer is that we have been on the receiving end of decades of salesmanship from the newspaper industry, telling us that today’s newspaper is essential but yesterday’s newspaper is worthless.[…] [Online] you can call up a year-old piece as easily as you can call up a day-old piece. And yet we hardly ever do so, because we are so hardly ever prompted to do so. Which condemns tens if not hundreds of thousands of perfectly serviceable articles to sleep in writers’ and publishers’ archives, written off, never to be seen again.