Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot about capturing the zeitgeist from a 1920s Chicago journalist

Social media give us the power to create a real-time portrait of our age, just as pioneering journalist Ben Hecht documented his own eraChicago, late afternoon in 1921. Outside, the pavements are slick with rain and in the newsroom, amid cigar smoke, they can feel the rumble as the Chicago Daily News rolls off the press. Enter reporter Ben Hecht, with a new idea. He will write a daily sketch of the city’s life, modelled on the stories of Scheherazade and entitled 1001 Afternoons in Chicago. He