The SF Chronicle uses blogs and ancient history to improve their print product

The San Francisco Chronicle has been doing some really innovative things recently. They’ve begun printing blog entries from their web site in the daily print edition. It’s good reading that rounds out the wire stories nicely. Every print publisher should be doing this.

They’ve also been printing the front page of the paper as it was 100 years ago in memory of the damage done by the Great Quake. Though many references are meaningless, you can imagine life in 1906, which, in some cases, doesn’t sound all that different to the world today. Here’s a particularly gruesome tidbit from 100 years ago:

COLORADO SPRINGS, April 24. – Passing through this city to-day on a Denver and Rio Grande train, bound for Chicago, where her parents reside, was a San Francisco fugitive who said her name was Miss Logan. She wore a bandage on her left hand and said that while she lay unconcious upon the floor of the lobby of the St. Francisco Hotel in San Frncisco after the earthquake last Wednesday morning the third finger of her left hand was cut off and she was robbed of rings that she wore there.