Every newspaper is published with the day’s date on it. Without the date the news may be yesterday’s information and of no use.

A date on a newspaper is often more useful long after it was originally printed. Researchers can use newspapers as reference material to study past events. You may have seen newspapers recorded on microfiche in your local library.

Births, deaths and marriages can be announced in a newspaper. Years later, the dates are important to people researching their family tree. Kidnappers sometimes take photographs of their hostages holding a newspaper, to prove the hostage was still alive on that date.

On a lighter note, curators sometimes find objects packaged in newspapers giving us a date for when the item was collected. Have a look at the sea floor sediments in this case. Some were wrapped in newspaper advertising a new book by somebody called Charles Dickens! We think the newspaper is more interesting than the sediments…

Stop the press!

With the increasing popularity of the internet, news sent to mobile phones and 24-hour news channels newspapers may no longer be so important.