Time/date as content

Best practices for giving a sense of place to articles

[lucertola]

We added time/date to our content after we discovered that readers otherwise tended to think we'd just copied & pasted from another source...

The formatting is something we can't agree on, though.
In terms of best practices:
-- Time (24-clock? 15:42, then explain where (GMT+4? Or CST or UTC?) or Internet time -- but how many people have a sense of that)
-- Date (eg Aug. 3, 2004 -- because different countries use month/day in different order)
-- Place (Not sure whether this is worth including, it seems to bring up more complications than clarification.
The stories always explain where the news took place. We're in one city but report about the whole country, so if we put 'whoville' in the tag it might look like we're saying we're located in or went there, when reporting was done by phone.)

[engine]

It's a good idea to add the time and date if you are creating time-critical content, or a reference of some sort. The danger lies in lack of updates. If it looks out of date it may have a negative impact upon the site visitor.
A simple date format to follow is, eg: Friday 6th August 2004
As far as time is concerned, is it that critical? If so, put the local time that you created the document.

[kmander]

One nice tactic is to use javascript to show todays date - 4 days. This will make it look like the site is updated often yet not iffy that it is always todays date.

[maddie]

AP Style Guides can be of help too.

[lucertola]

We've got a today's date on the site but we try to date the stories (and in a way that lets people know they're written in the country we're talking about) because it's original content and we do beat the standard news sources quite often -- so when google news lumps them all together ours is often the first...