I am writing this at 5pm on Thursday in London. According to the wonderful World Time Clock, it is 7am on Thursday in Honolulu and 6am on Friday in Auckland. When the blogpost is launched, at 10am on Friday in the UK, it will be midnight on Thursday in Hawaii and 11pm on Friday in New Zealand.
Perhaps you can see why we have decided to drop most references to "today", "tomorrow", "yesterday", "tonight" and so on from reports on our website.
It used to be quite simple. If you worked for an evening newspaper, you put "today" near the beginning of every story in an attempt to give the impression of being up-to-the-minute – even though many of the stories had been written the day before (as those lovely people who own local newspapers strove to increase their profits by cutting editions and moving deadlines ever earlier in the day). If you worked for a morning newspaper, you put "last night" at the beginning: the assumption was that reading your paper was the first thing that everyone did, the moment they awoke, and you wanted them to think that you had been slaving all night on their behalf to bring them the absolute latest news. A report that might have been written at, say, 3pm the previous day would still start something like this: "The government last night announced ..."
All this has changed. As I wrote last year, we now have many millions of readers around the world, for whom the use of yesterday, today and tomorrow must be at best confusing and at times downright misleading. I don't know how many readers the Guardian has in Hawaii – though I am willing to make a goodwill visit if the managing editor is seeking volunteers – but if I write a story saying something happened "last night", it will not necessarily be clear which "night" I am referring to. Even in the UK, online readers may visit the website at any time, using a variety of devices, as the old, predictable pattern of newspaper readership has changed for ever. A guardian.co.uk story may be read within seconds of publication, or months later – long after the newspaper has been composted.
So our new policy, adopted last week (wherever you are in the world), is to omit time references such as last night, yesterday, today, tonight and tomorrow from guardian.co.uk stories. If a day is relevant (for example, to say when a meeting is going to happen or happened) we will state the actual day – as in "the government will announce its proposals in a white paper on Wednesday [rather than 'tomorrow']" or "the government's proposals, announced on Wednesday [rather than 'yesterday'], have been greeted with a storm of protest".
The BBC website, among others, adopted a similar strategy some time ago and I feel it gives an immediacy to their reports akin to watching or listening to a live news broadcast. So in a sense we are, perhaps belatedly, recognising another way in which a website is different from a newspaper.
We are likely to make much more use of the present tense ("the government is facing a deepening crisis ...") and present perfect tense ("the crisis engulfing the government has intensified ..."); until the change of approach, we would probably have written "the crisis engulfing the government intensified tonight ..."
Another way to do it: a recent story began "Ministers are putting the UK's world-class universities at risk with their plans to cut the number of visas awarded to overseas students, according to higher education leaders." We would previously have written: "... higher education leaders said today").
If you need to know exactly when a story was published, the website will continue to carry the precise day, hour and minute that it was launched ("Friday 18 February 2011 10.00 GMT"), which is much more accurate than any time reference we could insert into a story.
What of stories for the newspaper? In contrast to the web, "today" is highly desirable for newspaper reports, making them sound topical and helping set the day's news agenda. But standard morning paper stories that begin, dispiritingly, "the government last night faced criticism of its NHS reforms ..." or the lumpen "... it emerged last night" date from a time when news was read at the breakfast table and "last night" sounded reasonably current. This is no longer the case. We need to explore new ways of reporting that avoid churning out such cliches.