by: Keach Hagey | Wall Street Journal

Newspaper front pages are considered such an important mirror of American culture that they get their own rotating daily museum exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

But there has never been an equivalent archive for the more ephemeral – but equally important – newspaper website home page.

Ben Welsh, a 29-year-old developer at the Los Angeles Times, is setting out to change that. This week, he is launching a campaign on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to fund PastPages, an online archive that hourly takes screenshots of dozens of newspaper home pages and other online news sites and makes them searchable by date and time.