How it works
Every hour, TLC News reads the public news feeds that the newspapers themselves publish, and stores whatever is new. A feed is a short window: it holds only the most recent handful of stories, and older ones drop off it permanently. Reading every hour is what makes the difference between having a copy and having missed it.
Each story is stored with the time the paper published it, which is not the same as the time we collected it. That distinction is the whole product. It is what lets the archive be ordered properly years later, and it is why a story whose date cannot be read is left out rather than given today’s date to make it fit.
Nothing here is rewritten, summarised or scored. A headline is the paper’s own headline and every story links back to the paper that wrote it. TLC News is an index and a time axis, not a newsroom.
Who makes it
TLC News is made by Time-Line Continuum, which builds timelines of the things people want to remember: family histories, company histories, and this, a running record of what the papers reported. The collection has been running since 2014.
Questions people ask
Why does the timeline only go back about a week?
The timeline draws one newspaper across a stretch of time, and it opens on the most recent 7 days so that the day you are reading is easy to find. Drawing months at once would put thousands of stories on one screen, which is not something anyone can read.
The archive itself is not limited to a week. Every story ever collected is in the List view, and its own “Jump to a day” box will take you back as far as the collection goes. The timeline has Earlier and Later controls that move its window through the same archive.
Why do some older stories not open?
A few of the oldest entries were stored years ago with the web address cut short, and a handful never had one. Those stories are still here and still searchable, because what the paper reported and when is worth keeping even when the link to it is not.
Where that has happened the story says so before you click, rather than sending you to a page that is not there.
Can I search for an exact phrase?
Yes. Put it in quotation marks and it is treated as a phrase, so the words have to appear together and in that order. Without quotation marks, a search finds stories containing all of the words you typed, wherever they appear.
Why do I need an account to read it?
The archive is a large collection of other people’s reporting, held for readers rather than published to the world, so it sits behind a sign in. You can open an account yourself, and everything is free while the site is in beta.
Create an account if you would like one.
Technical details
What you need. Any current web browser, on a computer, a tablet or a phone. There is nothing to install and no plugin to add. The text is set larger than on most websites, and you can enlarge it further in your browser without the page breaking.
Opening an account. An account needs an email address and a password. Nothing else is required. Reading the news archive needs a free account.
What it costs. Nothing at present. If that changes, we will tell you by email before it applies to your account, and you can decide then. An existing account will not start being charged without notice. What an account includes.
Where the reporting comes from. The reporting is not ours. It comes from the newspapers named on the site, and each item links back to the newspaper it came from.
What we record. What you search for is not recorded.