Why Everybody Instantly Found Ryan Routh's Old Arrest in Greensboro

A man who authorities are connecting to an assassination attempt against the former president shows up a LOT in his hometown's newspaper archives. So why did most folks only reference one old story?

A photographer from the News & Record found Ryan Routh reading on a warm December day in 1991.

If you missed it, a guy from Greensboro was arrested on Sunday and charged in connection with what federal officials are calling an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Here’s the latest on that.

Not long after Ryan Wesley Routh’s name became public on Sunday, reporters began to dig into his past. Pretty quickly, they found out about his arrest in 2002, thanks to an old story in the Greensboro News & Record:

Ryan Routh, 36, was arrested without incident at 1 a.m. Monday at United Roofing, 1735 W. Lee St., Greensboro police said.Routh was pulled over about 10 p.m. Sunday during a traffic stop, police said. But he put his hand on a firearm and drove to United Roofing, where he remained barricaded inside, police said.

Routh was inside for three hours, and faced several charges after he got out.

I did a deeper newspaper archive search for Ryan Routh. He was an Eagle Scout. He lived in Greensboro’s Cardinal Neighborhood as a kid, and attended Northwest Guilford junior high and high schools, where he played tennis. He attended North Carolina A&T for a while. The News & Record ran two stories about his (and his then-wife’s) home renovations in the late ‘80s and late ‘90s. He helped his son try to get a skate park built near Greensboro in the mid 2000s. And back in 1991, the Greensboro police awarded him a “Law Enforcement Oscar,” and called him the “citizen of the year.” From the story in the News & Record:

Ryan Routh isn’t a super hero. He’s just another guy who lives in Greensboro’s Fisher Park area with a family he hopes to keep safe.

But what he did — fight and chase a suspected rapist and later assist police in an investigation — makes him a super citizen if not a super hero.

A 1991 Greensboro News & Record story about Ryan Routh

A lot of people have looked into Routh’s long arrest record in the Greensboro area over the years, and they combed through his now-deleted social media to figure out what may have motivated him more recently. But only a few folks have combed through his fairly extensive past in the News & Record, which has become a shell of what it once was during its heydays in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s. And yet everybody immediately found the 2002 incident. Why?

Well, because the News & Record made that story Googleable, along with a ton of other archived articles.

Back in the day, the only way to find old stuff like this was to go to the library and pore over microfilm for hours and hours. In this case, even if you already had an inkling of what you were looking for, it’s likely that you’d still come up empty. More recently, newspapers.com has done an incredible job of digitizing old newspapers and (even more importantly) making them searchable. It took me only a few minutes to find almost everything that the N&R had written about Ryan Routh (including ads, letters to the editor, and legal notices) since the 1980s. It even turned up the picture at the top of this story, showing him hanging out and reading on a random winter day in 1991.

The fact that I found all of this stuff fairly quickly doesn’t mean I’m some incredible reporter. It means I have a yearly newspapers.com subscription and I know how to use it to do deep searches. I’ve used that site pretty extensively over the years when I look into stories for the Rabbit Hole. I couldn’t do half of the stories I do without it.

But most people do not have a paid subscription to that site, so they start by typing stuff into Google over and over. And when they did so for Ryan Routh, the 2002 sidebar story popped up. Also, it was not paywalled.

This happens a lot for stories on greensboro.com, even with stories that aren’t local. On Twitter last year, someone wanted to point out that Clarence Thomas’s sister didn’t particularly like him very much, and the syndicated column they linked to was posted on greensboro.com. The original publish date was July 24, 1991, a month before the public release of the World Wide Web.

Often, when I Google stuff about the Greensboro area and even beyond, old News & Record stories pop up with ease (you can often tell they’re old because the headlines are all caps). That’s how I discovered a story from 1993 over the dispute over the naming of Brown (or Browns) Summit. More recently, I found this old article about the Carolina Circle Mall from 1996.

This is far from the only newspaper that’s published old stories in the native format of the web. The New York Times has put nearly everything it ever printed online, including this 1865 story about North Carolina’s Battle of Bentonville during the Civil War. I’ve also found old stuff from the 1980s and 1990s on the websites of the Chicago Tribune and several newspapers in Florida.

I don’t know why the News & Record published a lot (but very notably, not all) of its old stories on the web. But I do know a few things. One: This seems to have happened on Berkshire Hathaway’s watch. In 2013 Warren Buffett’s company famously bought up a lot of newspapers, including the News & Record, the Winston-Salem Journal and many others across North Carolina. That experience went very badly for those papers, and Buffett sold them all in 2020. But! In Greensboro, a lot of the old articles have an “updated” date in late January of 2015. Two things about that. First, I’m guessing that’s when they went online. Second, I’m guessing, because greensboro.com itself didn’t become the News & Record’s main website until June 1, 2015. Before that, it published everything to news-record.com which, I’ll note, is still on some News & Record signs inside the Greensboro Coliseum.

Past that, I don’t know who decided to put those stories online, how they chose them, or whether it was a heavy lift to do so. This is the only other clue I have, which came in the form of a Twitter reply last year:

We’re seeing again this week that there is power in the archives. So thank you to all of the rad people out there who work to make them more accessible, whoever you are.