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Brandon Sun - ONLINE EDITION

Pages from the past

By: Grant Hamilton

Monday, Mar. 26, 2012 at 2:10 PM | Comments: 0

The Brandon Sun's new cover photo, on Facebook.

As the online coordinator for the Brandon Sun, one of the things I do is keep our Facebook page updated.

If you like us on Facebook, you'll see that we post links to breaking news throughout the day, but we also give you a daily snapshot of our print edition by posting an image of the front page.

It's a bit of an art, trying to balance the news that we put out, and yet not end up spamming people with dozens of Brandon Sun links when they log on to their Facebook account.

(If you have any comments on our Facebook approach, by the way, I'd love to hear them. More stories? Fewer?)

Today, though, I did a little bit more: I flipped the switch on the Brandon Sun's new "Timeline" format.

As I'm sure you're aware, Facebook has moved from a wall format to a "timeline" -- allowing people for the first time to go back and add things to the past.

For an organization like the Brandon Sun, that means we can now include the whole history of the paper on our Facebook page. Of course, I can't hope to match the efforts of, say, the New York Times (which has a really great Facebook Timeline), but I have spent a little bit of time uploading a few historical front pages from the Brandon Sun's archive to our Facebook page.

Feel free to scroll through the few I've posted so far (click here, and select a date range in the light blue section at right), and I'll continue to post more every week, as I select pages from the past for the Brandon Sun "Weekend" edition.

But I'm also going to take requests.

Got a particular date you'd like to see the front page for? Or heck -- an inside page? I'll tackle just about anything from the moon landing* to your own birth announcement. Simply email me -- ghamilton@brandonsun.com -- and if I can track down the page, I'll post it for you.

Three caveats:

First, if I'm swamped by requests, it might take me a while.
Second, it's really easy to get pages from about 1960 up to now, but really difficult to get anything before that. We're working on digitizing our earlier histoday, but if you could keep your requests to the last five decades, that'd be best.
Third, no, unfortunately I can't send you a pdf or a high-resolution image of the page. But we'd be happy to sell you a copy of it. Email Tyler Stephens at tstephens@brandonsun.com or give him a call at 571-7451 and he'll hook you up.

I'm also testing, testing 1-2-3 on a new comment system. It should be embedded below.

____

* Oddly, the actual moon landing edition -- plus a couple of days earlier -- is missing from our digital archives. If I had to guess, I'd say that someone swiped the microfilm as a keepsake, and it was missing before we sent it away to be digitized. Have no fear, I just checked and we have another copy of the microfilm here. But there's no way for me to post that to Facebook.

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