A history of the News of the World – in pictures

With the last ever issue of the News of the World, proported to be the largest selling English language newspaper, on Sunday due to the phone hacking scandal the Guardian have a photo gallery looking back over the newspaper's 168 year history.

5 May 1821: The first words published in the Manchester Guardian

From the Guardian (see link for image of first page)

"Napoleon had died that very day, but there was no mention of his death for weeks. Instead, the Guardian immortalised a lost labrador on a front page made up entirely of advertisements. News did not replace ads on page one until 1952."

Google aim to digitize newspaper archives

Google are aiming to digitize every amount of information out there and make it searchable it seems (maybe one day even the notebooks my Mum has kept from the 1970s detailing how much food cost then). The latest step is to digitize the archives of newspapers which is truly going to be a massive task. There are already some of these archives available such as the Times Digital Archive which i find very fascinating. Though i'd really love to see some local newspapers such as the (Birmingham) Evening Mail and Sutton Coldfield News archives, i suspect these might not be in the Google search for a few years...