Getting News From Around the World With Today's Front Pages

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com |
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We recently told you about a website called PastPages.org. It saves the homepages of 70 news websites from around the world every hour. That report led us to look for a website that saves images of newspapers from around the world. We found Today's Front Pages, a site operated by The Newseum. The Newseum is a museum of news
reporting and the media in Washington, DC. Paul Sparrow is Senior Vice President with the organization. He says, "One of the most interesting things about newspapers is that they are a snapshot in time. They capture a moment when the people working with a newspaper, say these are the most important stories affecting our community."Paul Sparrow says visitors to the Today's Front Pages website can choose to see all of its newspapers. Or they can look only at newspapers from one area of the world, such as Asia, Africa or South America. Visitors can also sort newspapers by alphabetic order, either by state or by country. Today's Front Pages does not archive, or save, front page images. But it does archive newspapers from historically-important dates such as November fifth, 2008. That was one day after Barack Obama was elected president. Paul Sparrow says readers can learn a lot from the historical newspapers in The Newseum's collection. He says they will get a better understanding of the culture that existed long ago. The website shows only the front pages of general-interest newspapers that publish daily. Student newspapers are not displayed. Some papers are not included because they do not have the technological ability to send their front pages electronically to the Newseum. And others simply choose not to do so. The site displays the front pages of 836 newspapers from 93 countries. It warns that "the front pages are in their original, unedited form, and some may contain material that is deemed objectionable to some visitors." If you are in Washington, you can see many front pages from around the world on display inside and just outside The Newseum. Only about ten percent of the front pages the Newseum receives every day are displayed, but all are available online. You can read and hear our reports online at
voaspecialenglish.com. For VOA Special English, I'm Mario Ritter.