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A great archive of a paper that no longer prints. The News-Sentinel ceased print publication, and what survives of it online — the archive and history series at its egen.fortwayne.com address: the Cityscapes columns, the decade histories, the Summit City History Notes, the flood and war retrospectives — is a morgue without a building: invaluable, heavily used by every leg of this record, and one server failure away from being a memory. The morgue problem is the honest center of Fort Wayne research. The two dailies' twentieth-century files were the city's memory of itself; the police department's own case files for the 1940s were lost, which is why Battin's 1994 reconstruction, built from the papers' files, is a primary source here. The state library's free portal, Hoosier State Chronicles, holds no Allen County titles at all. The Journal Gazette's archive is a subscriber product. The deep runs sit on microfilm in one room on Library Plaza. Anyone who tells you they have "checked the Fort Wayne papers" from a desk has checked a fraction of them, and this record says which fraction, leg by leg, in its notes.
The working press around the two dailies completes the record: the Columbia City Post & Mail and the Decatur Daily Democrat (the latter open through Hoosier State Chronicles — the neighboring counties' papers are freer than Fort Wayne's own) for the region's view; Today's Catholic for the diocese; Whatzup and Input Fort Wayne and The Local FW for the living city's culture and development record; the Waynedale News and KPC's services for the neighborhoods and the caucus counts. And the discipline's negative side, printed because a checker should know it: this research met machine-made content farms wearing Fort Wayne dress — flyriver.com and roam.news among them — and a fabricated Substack list of "greatest moonshiners" and an unsourced Facebook catalog of Fort Wayne murders, every one of them rejected on sight of their sourcing, and none of them cited anywhere in this record.
Fed:
- Every leg; the crime leg's source discipline most of all.