Okay. So I had this huge entry that I had been writing, and I lost it all. GAHHHH! I'm gonna try again.

I recently received a bunch of newspaper and magazine clipings/copies. I've been going through them enjoying the walk back through time regarding the opening of Phantom, the excitement, the love of Michael Crawford, everything. 

The articles will be added in to my newspaper/magazine section. I'm the process of going through them and finding out the publication, date it ran, and the writer. I've found out this information for maybe 95% of the articles. The rest I've had to resort to online and library searches...Been able to decipher a few of them, but some remain elusive, and driving me crazy!

But doing this has gotten me excited to update that whole section. So, this weekend I sat down with Google and the NYT archive search to begin to go through articles dating from 1985 to the present. Google has a nifty search engine for archived news: http://news.google.com/archivesearch. It's been interesting to see what was available back in 1985. Only 34 or so articles on POTO. I went through each year figuring 1986 or 1988 would be the biggest but turns out it was 2005 with over 5,000 articles. No doubt this has a lot to do with the movie. Also, most of these articles are pay-per-view costing around $2.95+ an article. The NYT arcive (http://www.nytimes.com/ ) is free after a certain date. 1985 and 1986 are both pay-per-view years, and 1987 on up is free. There are no images in this archive though until 2004. 

I also spent some time at our public library over the weekend and had a blast using their research tools. Some of the articles that are pay-per-view using google are free using the library tools. The search engines I used at our library are as follows: Factivia.com, EBSCOhost (aka MasterFILE Premier), and InfoTrac Newspapers. Best part, is I can use them outside of the library too. (I updated my library card to be able to use the service). Some of these databases do have photos, or .pdf files of the pages I'm looking for. 

A few other great search options, I've mentioned them before, but I'll mention them again: Newslibrary. It's a paid service but the article database is huge. Also Newsstand.com. I've used Newslibrary and Newsstand in tandem. Newslibrary's database, depending on the publication, goes back to the 80s. And Newstand's database, depending on the publication, goes back to about 2004 or so. Another good search engine is FindArticles. Again, it's a paid archive though. I also, by chance, found a site for magazine purchases. It's called Zinio. One can buy digital copies of the magazines, but it looks like hard copy back issues can also be bought.

 Now that I have this 'grand plan' I'm going to have to revamp the newspaper/magazine sections. They'll be probably broken  into the ALW musical, the movie, then other musicals/plays, and also international. The US section will be broken down by state, still, then publication, year, then date. Newest to oldest.

 Oh, and if anyone knows where to find an online database of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner which went belly-up in 1989, please contact me. I have one article that is a copy that I cannot read, and it's missing the bottom part of the text, as well.