Work­ing for The Wash­ing­ton Post in 1972, Bob Wood­ward and Carl Bern­stein blew open the explo­sive Water­gate scan­dal – some­thing one news­pa­per exec called “maybe the sin­gle great­est report­ing effort of all time.” (The whole saga gets doc­u­ment­ed in All the Pres­i­den­t’s Men, avail­able in print and film.) Almost 40 years lat­er, Wood­ward still writes for the Post, and, even though he has pub­lished some clunk­ers since, he remains one of the most promi­nent inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists in the US. Above, Wood­ward describes how jour­nal­ists get their infor­ma­tion, how they risk blow­ing their sto­ries, and where jour­nal­ism might be head­ing in the dig­i­tal age.

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The emer­gence of “new media” and “social media” — it has all looked fair­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary, the begin­ning of some­thing entire­ly new. But, when you step back and con­sid­er it, these inno­va­tions mark per­haps just an accel­er­a­tion of a trend that began long ago — one that Mar­shall McLuhan, the famed com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­o­rist, first out­lined in the 1960s. The vin­tage clip above gives you a feel for this, and McLuhan him­self appears at around the 2:45 minute mark. As you watch this video, you start to real­ize how pre­scient McLuhan was, and how social media is almost the log­i­cal ful­fill­ment of the trend he saw emerg­ing.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Lots of new archives have been com­ing online late­ly. So, why not give them a quick men­tion.

CSPAN: This week, the Amer­i­can cable net­work final­ly com­plet­ed the dig­i­ti­za­tion of its vast video archive. What does that mean for you? It means you can access online every C‑SPAN pro­gram aired since 1987. 160,000 hours of video in total, cov­er­ing 23 years of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal his­to­ry. The Times has more on this sto­ry.

Pop­u­lar Sci­ence: Thanks to Google, you can now freely access a 137-year archive  of Pop­u­lar Sci­ence. As Pop­Sci, found­ed in 1872, writes, “Each issue appears just as it did at its orig­i­nal time of pub­li­ca­tion, com­plete with peri­od adver­tise­ments. It’s an amaz­ing resource that beau­ti­ful­ly encap­su­lates our ongo­ing fas­ci­na­tion with the future, and sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy’s incred­i­ble poten­tial to improve our lives.” If you spend some time with Brain Pick­ing’s recent post, you’ll see why the Pop­Sci archive holds so much inter­est. As a side note, you can also find a vast archive of Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics via Google Books. Just click here and, as Wired put it, “let the nerdgas­mic loss of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty com­mence.”

Spin Mag­a­zine: Google Books has also added to its vir­tu­al mag­a­zine shelf every issue of Spin, the music mag­a­zine Bob Guc­cione Jr. found­ed in 1985. As Boing­Bo­ing men­tions today, it’s inter­est­ing to see “how awful­ly dat­ed the design of the mag­a­zine is.”

Salman Rushdie: Now this isn’t a pub­licly avail­able archive, but it’s worth know­ing about. Archivists at Emory have been work­ing with the dig­i­tal assets of Salman Rushdie and devel­op­ing a new field — “dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gy” — that will help schol­ars pre­serve and method­i­cal­ly study the dig­i­tal remains (text doc­u­ments, emails, brows­er logs and files) of writ­ers and artists. You can watch Rushdie talk about the project, its chal­lenges and ben­e­fits. (There’s anoth­er clip of him speak­ing here.) Then you have the archivists them­selves talk­ing about how they’re pre­serv­ing Rushdie’s lit­er­ary remains, down to the yel­low sticky notes he attached to his com­put­er. (Note: The Times has a piece on this project this week.)