“LUS Fiber” – new resource at the Advertiser

The Advertiser posted a great new resource today: an extensive record of fiber stories going back to July of last year. You can get to it at: LUS Fiber.

Now you might have thought that all that information was available on the internet already. Well, it used to be and you might not have noticed the recent change that led to all the Advertiser’s locally produced material going into a for-pay archive after only a week (the Advocate gives you a month). With that change, the recent historical record suddenly vanished from the online world. I thought (and think) that this is a terrible decision both from a community and a business point of view. But it is common enough that it didn’t seem worth complaining about.

The Advertiser clearly would like to be the paper of record on this issue, and opening their archive in this way really helps. If you now want to go back and track the evolving story you can. The local paper’s archive should be a community’s memory. The more easily we can track our own history — the decisions made in the past, and their consequences — the better decisions we can make today. The Advertiser’s making these articles easily available goes a long way toward helping us think more clearly about this issue. If you want to know what Cassard or Huval said in July, you can now find out exactly.

Thanks!