Mention the words "press cuttings" to journalists of a certain age and they will usually come over all misty-eyed about the yellowing newspaper files of their youth.
Until the mid-1990s, almost every media organisation – from the smallest local newspaper to national TV stations – maintained a cuttings collection. These libraries consisted of scrappy folders full of articles, arranged in a bewildering classification system. Only the librarian knew how it worked. Whether it was a simple fact-check, background information for an interview or just searching for story ideas, the journalist would put in a request and hope to walk away with a bulging file. Nostalgic types may also remember the library as a place to escape the mayhem of the newsroom, or somewhere for a quick smoke (yes, even in a room full of old newspapers).
If well maintained, the system was remarkably efficient. An up-to-date file stuffed full of newspaper and magazine cuttings could give an unparalleled picture of a subject or person. Of course, the whole operation was very labour-intensive. In the late 1980s, for example, the Daily Mirror employed about eight people just to paste cuttings onto pieces of paper before filing them away, while one spent the entire day cutting up newspapers. And then there were all the librarians to actually manage the files.
While the Guardian's cuttings operation was not on quite that scale, it kept adding to its collection until 2000. By then it was arranged in an easy-to-follow system, though this hadn't always been the case. After years of neglect, by the early 1950s the collection was in such a haphazard state that AP Wadsworth, the paper's editor, felt compelled to recruit a professional to sort out the mess.
It was thus that in 1951, a young librarian called Geoffrey Whatmore arrived at the Cross Street offices of the Guardian in Manchester, with the task of creating a methodical information retrieval system for the paper. He standardised subject headings for files – previously anyone could create a new one on a whim – and the efficient regime he created no doubt provided background material for Alphabetical Order, Michael Frayn's celebrated 1975 play about a newspaper library. Whatmore later went on to reorganise the Daily Mirror library and then for many years was in charge of the BBC's information services.
With the appearance of online electronic text databases in the mid-1980s, it was only a matter of time before the great cuttings collections would be rendered obsolete. A quick search could deliver cuttings from not only UK titles but the rest of the world too. The advent of the world wide web in the 1990s was the death knell for the thousands of files that been nurtured for decades, with many being simply binned.
At their very best, though, electronic databases such as Dow Jones Factiva or LexisNexis go back only as far as the mid-1980s. Beyond this, the journalist is at the mercy of old bound volumes of the papers, microfilm or, if lucky, a digital archive. However, until all big newspapers have been digitised and made publicly available, the cuttings file will still sometimes be the most useful resource available. The recent revelations about Jimmy Savile illustrate the point. Newspaper groups such as the Guardian that kept their old cuttings in storage were able to go back and look at the coverage from the 1960s and 70s.
Before getting too carried away with the nostalgia, it is worth remembering that the cuttings system was full of flaws. Files would frequently go missing – whether being "looked after" by a particular journalist, or left in the pub – or be rendered useless by spilt coffee.
Also, the system for flagging up errors in old stories was a world away from the sophistication of today's electronic archives. In theory, a note would be stuck to the offending cutting, or it would be removed altogether. However, this didn't always happen, or the correction would become detached and lost. These failings have resulted in a number of cases where a libel has been repeated. Likewise, many myths and misquotes have been propagated by journalists repeating what they found in newspapers' uncorrected files.