News

Times Past – The New York Times

newsofmax12/25/2022

1 4 minutes read

The end of the year is an opportunity to look back and reflect. So today we bring you something in that spirit: an interview with Jennifer Parrucci, a senior taxonomist at The Times, about the interesting things she’s found. while digging through the newspaper’s 171-year archive.

Ian: What exactly is a taxonomist?

Jennifer: Well, no one knows what I do. They were like, “Are you a taxonomist?” I guarantee that our current articles can be easily searched and categorized. That work evolved from New York Times Index, is a reference book about the people, organizations, places, and events for which the article was written. It began to be published regularly in 1913.

For example, if I search for the first mention of John F. Kennedy in an article I can find, I get a three-sentence story about his return from England, where his father was the US ambassador, in 1938. I can find it because someone who worked on the index that year thought, He seems important enough. I will add his name.

I also made a huge spreadsheet of interesting gems I found while perusing the archives, mostly as a passion project. You go in and sometimes come across everything from the serious to the ridiculous, like a bandit caught in the act. because he stopped for a lemonade or a man who just ate pickles and crackers and ended up in the hospital. I also help reporters find old news about specific events, like April Fools’ Day or the Academy Awards.

The search must become complicated as the facts — and the relevance of the article — evolve.

It does. World War I is not indexed as World War I, because archivists at the time did not know there would be another war. So you have to think, OK, what will it be called? That’s one thing about repositories: Things change. Language changes. We used words that we don’t use today. We frame things in ways that we don’t do now.

You can also see how our journalism standards have changed. My favorite archival project I’ve worked on is collaborating on two books: Cats of the Times and Dogs of The Times. I had to go find every dog and cat story in the archives. I didn’t know that the story of a cat running through the church would be on page 2 of today’s newspaper, but it happened in 1897.

It’s almost like you’re describing another newspaper. Have you come across anything particularly strange?

Before Adolph Ochs bought The Times in 1896, some of the newspaper’s coverage was a bit confusing. There is a lot of social insurance. It’s more partisan. It also reported very seriously about ghost stories and other paranormal activities. An in-depth article, from 1870, called “The True History of Street Elves 27.”

I also keep a collection of my favorite silly stories on the front page. In the past, when people assembled newspapers, they had to arrange the cards by hand, sometimes there was enough space. So every now and then you’ll find short, weird front-page stories to fill it up. In 1854, it was reported that a scorpion was found alive on a driftwood log in a steamboat in Cincinnati.

The Times has TimesMachine, an online archive of issues we’ve used to cover historical events like the death of Queen Elizabeth II in this year’s The Morning. What is the value of making archives public?

Background. For example, on the day man first walked on the moon in 1969, a story about the Chappaquiddick car accident involving Senator Ted Kennedy was also published. on the front page. So is the story of the first man who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean alone. If you can’t flip through the digital pages, you won’t know those stories appear side by side. You won’t see ads flooding the newspapers. You won’t see what’s happening in the culture at the time. You will not see the photos. And I don’t know of any other papers with the breadth of archives we have.

Have you come across any Christmas-related funny stories?

There’s a story I love from 1900 when these boys set a bear trap for Santa, but they ended up trapping their cousin. There is another event from 1973 when a group called the Ethical Culture Association organized a meet and greet for Frankenstein monsters for children, as an alternative to sitting on Santa’s lap. . There’s also a book about our cats from 1935 where a kid in Boston tried to send the family cat to Santa. The cat was returned, alive.

More about Jennifer: She grew up in New York and studied library science at the Pratt Institute. Her father worked as an archive for The Times for 40 years. She remembers attending Bring Your Daughter to Work days at the newspaper’s old West 43rd Street building, where kids could make fake newspapers.

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