As The New York Times moves to digitize its archive back to 1852 and make it freely available to TimesSelect subscribers, the New York Post has taken quite the opposite tact. The NYC tabloid has just sent all of its pre-1998 news clippings into storage purgatory in the sub-basement of its Sixth Avenue headquarters — in effect rendering them completely inaccessible.
The move was ordered by one of the paper’s digital czars who (mistakenly) felt the printed history was expendable, if not just clutter. The paper’s ink-stained reporting staff is not too pleased.
This means that the many bold-faced names who had woken up one morning to discover their ceremonious names unceremoniously splashed onto “Page Six” can breathe a sigh of relief. Their past sins — at least those prior to ’98 — are now literally tombstoned.