I try to follow some crime cases as they wind their way through the legal system. It often takes several years before there’s resolution.
The Google filter, Past Month is all that’s available. The next filter is past year, that pretty useless. It’s extremely frustrating that the date filters are so broad. I used to have access to LexisNexis (university library access) and you could filter a specific date range.
This little Gem, CONSTANTLY gets updated as a new article. I first read it right after the theatre shooting in 2014. It mysteriously pops up in every search for the past three years. It’s the zombie article that never dies.
I think it may be even worse than that. Web sites often build their pages with PHP scripts, which means that the page is generated on-the-fly every time anyone requests it. I think that is why so many pages always show the current date (the day you viewed it) as the date of the page. Yes, it’s annoying.
Pages really need to have a static header record in them giving the correct date for pages like this. (Is there such a record that can be used?)
A related problem, for the human readers of the pages, is that a lot of news pages I see don’t have the date of the article at the beginning of the article nor elsewhere that I can find, in any normal human-readable way. Now that is just plain incompetent journalism.
While we’re there, another quibble: We all know that articles get linked to, from all over the place. A great many on-line news sources don’t put the name of their newspaper, let alone the city at the top of each page! The often have some sort of masthead at the top of each page, but it often doesn’t mention the name of the newspaper or city.
When I come to an article by way of a link that I clicked somewhere else (as opposed to coming from the newspaper’s home page), I’ll often find myself reading an article and not know what publication I’m reading nor where it is. It may be an article full of local references to local names and places that I don’t know. (ETA: Sometime the article or the sidebars will be full of local references that are clearly far away, like full of Indian names.)
I sometimes look at the page source to try to get a clue what paper I’m reading, where it is, and when. This is where I’ll often find the current date scattered all over in places where the original date really ought to be.
From the publisher’s perspective this is a feature not a bug.
The article exists for one reason and one reason only. To be bait for the advertising delivered alongside it. Just as it was back in the heyday of print. As long as the article appears fresh, and is accompanied by fresh advertising, people will keep reading it.
If the article was prominently labeled “obsolete from 2003” alongside 2003 advertising for defunct companies and products that would be bad. For the publisher.
We get the journalism we pay for. When society decided 150 years ago that journalism was to be paid for by ads, we stopped being their customers and became their product.
Wait, that doesn’t exactly follow. I can bring up any old article with any old date (whether the page shows that date or not) and it will have current advertising on it. The pages aren’t static (ads included) as of the original publication date.
IIRC, on-line articles in the Washington Post used to not have the date shown, so I would follow links from one article to another, and end up seeing a whole series of articles of all different dates, new and old, and not know it. They seem to not do that anymore. Articles have the actual article date next to the author right there on the By-Line. ¡Bravo WaPo!
To be sure, each website is free to be real overt about dates or to be coy about them. And obviously there’s no advantage in serving old ads. If nothing else, they’d need special tech to capture the ads as they were and show them later, often much later.
My point was simply that from a pure revenue-generating POV, publishers have zero incentive to be upfront and truthful about the date of older articles. And every incentive to be coy about them.
It’s a shame really. It’s valuable to historians and nostalgia buffs alike to look through a newspaper or magazine archive and see the period ads. The ads say almost as much about the period culture as the articles do. All of that is lost in the pastless perpetual now of the internet.