At SmallTownPapers, we regularly monitor activity on our archive pages – we analyze which archives receive the most traffic and we work to understand where the interest originates. One of the most visited pages got our attention big time – it’s the TV listings for one particular week in 1985. We wondered why this has garnered such intense interest in recent days.
The frequently visited archive listing shows page 6 of the September 12, 1985 edition of a small weekly newspaper from rural Louisiana, The Ponchatoula Times. What’s so interesting is that the item drawing people to this page is the 7:00 AM Saturday listing of “The Berenstein Bears” – sandwiched in between a show called “Snorks” and the James Bond thriller, “Never Say Never Again.” Why in the world are people looking back 30 years at a listing of “The Berenstein Bears”?
The visits are coming from sites which are trying to determine whether the children’s book and television series is, in fact, the Berenstein or Berenstain Bears. What was it originally and when did it change (if it did in fact change)? A Facebook page is dedicated to the discussion (facebook.com/therealberensteinbears) and several websites explore how the spelling of the beloved series might have changed over time. According to published articles, the authors insist the title was and is “Berenstain.” Theories of parallel universes and mass memory distortion are explored as possible explanations for the dual spellings. The discussion hit a fever pitch last month and links to the archive page have been strong ever since.
Perhaps most compelling to us is that, in an attempt to answer the question, people turn to the most trusted source available – the community’s newspaper. They will search the archives, knowing that newspapers would have made every effort to ensure the reference was accurate.
We often think of newspaper archive access as most critical for people conducting historical research or genealogists tracing their ancestry – but the truth is that there’s so much more that people want to find in their town’s newspaper archives. People want to be able to easily search through archives in a quest to answer a variety of questions about their lives, their community, and the world in which they live. Having easy, online access to past issues of a community’s history has uses far beyond the obvious.
*SmallTownPapers, Inc. is the parent company of Discover America’s Story.
