Clippings

Andrew Tobias points out a great new Google service with a little history (to which I can add, been there done that).

In the old days, it worked like this. (Really, it did.) Your company — or, if you were an author or a movie star, your publisher or Paramount — would pay a monthly retainer to a clipping service that subscribed to virtually all the newspapers and magazines in the land. Those services employed little old ladies (one assumes) to read it all and snip any mention of you or your company or its products. To those snipped out clippings would be affixed a little label with the name of the newspaper in which it had appeared and the date . . . and each week a stack of clippings would appear in your mail and the mail of all their other clients. Now, you just click here and get it all free and instantly as it happens. (If you were on TV, a company would call you and offer to sell you an audio recording it had made. Today, you just TiVo it.)