The Laboratorium: A Version of This Article Appeared

James Grimmelmann
8:44 PM
August 5, 2008

When did this happen? The New York Times’s online site now includes captions noting when and where each article appeared in the printed edition. For example, this article on the Army’s new surgery textbook includes the caption:

A version of this article appeared in print on August 5, 2008, on page F1 of the New York edition.

Speaking purely as a legal academic here, this now means I can produce proper Bluebook citations from the Time’s web site, rather than needing to pull the article up in Nexis to check the page number. More generally, I’ve always been surprised that more online newspapers don’t link their articles to the printed edition. If they’re going to make a big deal out of being print-based papers, it seems an awful waste for the online edition not to take such an obvious, basic step to remind readers of the print edition.

Well done, Grey Lady!

greglas
10:18 PM
August 5, 2008

I think they’ve been doing it for awhile, but yes, it’s very cool. Tho I must admit that when I’m doing a cite, I always feel like I’m cheating a bit — how can I trust them that the article really was on page F1? Luckily, law review editors like to double check these kinds of things!

Adam Kessel
11:00 PM
August 5, 2008

I too recall this feature has been around for a long time. I was going to check in the Wayback Machine, but unfortunately NYT seems to have blocked a lot of (but not all?) archiving.

Steve Laniel
9:41 PM
August 6, 2008

I see that the SF Chronicle does something similar, e.g., http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/06/FD78112OHN.DTL&hw=marion+nestle&sn=001&sc=1000

It says “This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle,” though not the date. They probably assume that you’ll just pick the date off the top of the article (or for that matter the URL).

Mike Sances
5:41 PM
August 7, 2008

I just noticed this on August 5th as well.

The Washington Post has always put the page number at the top of their online articles, and I’ve always wished the Times (and everyone else) would do the same.

It’s about time!