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recently the new york times began displaying the date and page number for articles which they post online. since noticing this, i’ve been playing with why such a strategy would be employed and what it hopes to accomplish.

the simplest explanation is reconciling the dates for which an article was published online and when it appeared in the physical paper; yet, because many online articles appear before their print versions, the explanation is dissatisfying to me. i’ll explain.

published date: august 8

in the cases i saw today, the published date is “August 8″, while the date it appears in the physical paper is “August 10″. i may be picking nits, but the wording at the bottom of the article reads “appeared in print”, past-tense, so therefore it is somewhat misleading if i read the article online on august 8, or august 9 to then read at the conclusion of the article that it appeared in print on “August 10″. what’s worse, in my eyes, is that in showing the published date versus the publication date, the irrelevance of the printed media is revealed. why would i ever read the physical paper when in fact by its website’s own admission it is printing old news?

the second case i see for displaying when the article appeared in print is to give the online article credibility. in a case where ideas are being teased out online and the printed form represents the culmination of the “winning” ideas strung together as a complete thought, this makes perfect sense. this is what some book authors and bloggers do; they throw ideas out in public, get a community reaction, mull them over, and refine them over time. for someone reading old posts, it might be useful to know that the idea they were reading was incorporated into a book or article published on x date. but clearly the times is not doing this either, as the online text is an exact match of the printed article. moreover, the times has blogs where presumably this floating ideas exercise takes place. (coincidentally, the philadelphia inquirer has recently frowned on this practice.)

the last use case i can think of involves two people reading the times together, where one person stands firmly in the analog realm and the other individual is in the digital realm. such a case happened to me last sunday when my girlfriend and i got coffee and read the “paper” together outside. kate picked up a physical paper, while i read from my iphone. in such a scenario, the digital person can turn to their analog partner and say, “hey, did you see the piece on internet trolls? no? you should read it, it’s on c4.” as more individuals read media in digital form, this scenario may increase over the near term, but it sure seems like a loser in the long run.

those are the scenarios i come up with quickly on a sunday morning. what am i missing?

UPDATE: just to belabor my point, here’s an article available online today (August 10, 2008 at 5:39 pm), to be printed tomorrow. “who cares?”, i ask.

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