The Internet Archive is one of the strangest sites in my bag of tools. The tl;dr version: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine keeps tabs on every page on the internet, and takes live screenshots of the entire web.
It happens to be incredibly useful when trying to dig up something that may have existed on an earlier version of the web and has since been deleted. It’s great, but it was also random. The archives happen every few days or weeks you never used to know if the site you were looking for would be there.
But now Internet Archive’s got a new tool that I really like: A button to save a page as it appears at that very moment. If you’re doing any reporting on a site that’s going through a lot of changes say, the HealthCare.gov site, which is getting lots and lots of updates you can ask Internet Archive to save copies of the site for you and allow you to track changes happening on the page.
Internet Archive also lets you search through hours of TV news archives for phrases or clips, and they’ve got a massive collection of books to search through.
(And if you’re just looking for a distraction, they’ve got ’80s computer games that you can play in your browser.)
Now get out there and tell some great stories today! (After you play Pacman, of course.)