Awhile back, a friend of mine, Nate Papes, ran across Scott Walker, director of enterprise and investigation at Alabama Media Group, who had retrofitted a newspaper machine to display newspaper front pages digitally. (Update March 13, 2016: This link is dead; it appears Walker removed the post.) We talked about creating our own, but never followed through.

A few years later, Nate found a New York Times newspaper machine in a Joplin, Mo., junkyard and began to work on his own machine. I offered to write the software to make the box run since Walker’s was written for a Macintosh and we both were toying with Raspberry Pi computers. In the end, Nate kept his box as original to the Times box as possible and I wrote the software to run as JavaScript in the browser and pull the pages down.

Continue reading Building a digital newspaper machine →