The Newseum

I am a bit of a news junkie, a bit of a collections junkie, and a bit of a design junkie. What in the world do all of these things have to do with each other you might ask? Well first I will talk about what I found yesterday and then in some later posts I will detail my other collections.

I found the an amazing site for reading the important news events in the world yesterday. Technically i did not find it I clicked on the link provided by TUAW and proceeded to lose my mind over a site called The Newseum. Although that link is not to the home page it is to the part of the site that i care most about, the display of the front page of 627 daily newspapers from 58 different countries.

Now you might ask something like "Dan when there are sites like Google news or Reuters why would you bother with an archaic format like the front page representation of a dying industry?" First I would say something like "you talk a lot like me that is kind of cool" or "that was a strange sentence structure, I am not entirely sure that worked out like you planed." but then I would tell you that I like the more local flavor that I can get by reading the same story in the Times from three different cities and I like to note the design differences that abound between my papers of choice.

Now if at this point you are saying ok big deal I can click through a whole bunch of PDFs that are really annoying because I have to scroll down to the different regions that I am interested in this is really time consuming. That is what i thought as well but then I came across this link and it made the whole thing more worthwhile.

If you actually went over there bravo. For those of you who didnt the summary is that Dave Bednarski wrote a script for Automator (nice program if you want to geek out your Apple) that takes the URL link to the pdf from Newseum downloads it and then combines the front pages of all of your selected newspapers into a single PDF that opens in preview when the workflow is done running. When that is done you can set iCal to run the script at a certain time every day and the end result is the major headlines from every paper you could want delivered to your desktop every morning without you having to do anything. Click here if you want to download the script.

I really like it so far although I think I got a little trigger happy with newspapers I thought I might want to read. Happy newsing.