Update: For some reason it appears the Times has pulled this awesome research tool. I’ll try to find out why.

The New York Times launched an amazing research tool, creating a great online browser for all their content from 1851-1922. The Times is also offering the data in API so that, if you can, you can create your own browser. The Times blog says:

"As part of eliminating TimeSelect, The New York Times has decided to make all the public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge. These articles are all in the form of images scanned from the original paper. In fact from 1851-1980, all 11 million articles are available as images in PDF format. To generate a PDF version of the article takes quite a bit of work — each article is actually composed of numerous smaller TIFF images that need to be scaled and glued together in a coherent fashion."

If you do research - or are in any way in need of scanning the 1855 adverts for local New York haberdashers - this is not to be missed. Check out the TimesMachine. (There might be some kind of server problems right now.)

The article to the left references a large scale congressional investigation into lobbyist actions in an attempt to block President Woodrow Wilson’s tariff bill, a key element of his New Freedom agenda. The investigation sought to discover if Senators had been bribed or received undue influence from these lobbyists and ultimately required every sitting Senator to testify to their personal finances, campaign contritbutions, and relationships with lobbyists and other company agents. This amounted to the first full disclosure by members of Congress in regards to the personal finances, their campaign contributors, and the nature of the lobby. A first for transparency in Congress.

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John Podhoretz draws a distinction, in his New York Post column, between those who get their information from the awkwardly-named “Mainstream Media” (I prefer traditional media) and those who follow (or follow, in addition to newspaper and television) political blogs and Web sites, and hypothesizes that the latter are getting a much different election picture than the former. Those on “Blog Time,” Podhoretz argues, are more attuned to subtle or even significant shifts of voter zeitgeist: Rep. Harold Ford had a bad week; Republicans have put the worst of the ongoing Foley mess behind them; this district’s latest poll looks good for the incumbent, and so on so forth. Those on “Mainstream Media Time,” by contrast, are getting fed a steady diet of one way stories suggesting that Republicans are in trouble, according to Podhoretz.

For what it’s worth, my impression of the tenor of stories in papers and television versus what blogs are saying squares pretty well with Podhoretz, but I think the difference is better explained by the audience each is trying to reach–people who follow politics more closely will be far more interested in the ups and downs week-to-week than people who (apologies for putting it this way) have better things to do with their time. So while I might suddenly find it fascinating that new polls show challenger Eric Dickerson has pulled ahead of Rep. Julia Carson (and further, that that poll may well be inaccurate due to limitations in polling techniques for House races), I wouldn’t expect, say, someone who’s not obsessed with politics or who doesn’t live in Indiana’s seventh district to find this all that fascinating.

One thing I’d fault traditional media for is the extent to which, once again, its coverage is poll driven rather than substantive, and it seems like a lot of the blogs are following suit. Polls are interesting as far as they go, but the only poll that matters, of course, is the one on election day; to win that one, the campaigns and parties are raising and spending obscene amounts of campaign cash. I’m far more interested in who’s giving that money than anything in the latest poll results.

I’m also getting more and more interested in how campaigns are spending that money (and what they’re spending it on). Is there a channel of communication we’re missing, a microtargeting effort that lets a campaign (or rather, its volunteers) speak directly to voters, making pre-determined pitches on the basis of voter preferences to get people to the polls on Nov. 7? To me, that’s a much more interesting question than whether people who closely follow political blogs are much more up to speed on nuances in political races than those who don’t.

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