How an edition is made

Any date in history, typeset as a front page. This page sets out how we make one and what we check before it prints.

What we check

1. Every date is curated. We select and rank fifteen events for each of the 366 days in the calendar before any writing begins. The edition leads with what mattered most that day.
2. Every article starts from a source record. Each event we publish traces to a verified record, and the writer works only from that record. The AI puts those facts into period newspaper prose.
3. Every photograph is checked against its event. Each picture that reaches a page has been examined and matched to the event it illustrates. Where no verifiable picture exists, the story runs without one. About a third of our stories carry no picture for that reason.
4. The AI fits the copy to the page. Each slot on the page has a fixed shape. Articles are lengthened or shortened to fill it, captions are written to the space available, and photographs are sized and cropped to their box.
5. What an edition is. A keepsake recreation built from real events. It is not an archival scan, and it carries no affiliation with any newspaper. It can still contain mistakes. If a date, fact or photo is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

What is on the page

An edition opens with a masthead and the dateline for the day you chose, then a lead story and a set of shorter reports, each with its own desk kicker. Photographs carry captions describing what they show. Around the news sit the smaller fixtures a paper of the period carried: a weather line, market prices, the number one film at the box office, and, where the year is known, the records and books people were buying that year.

Most editions also carry a puzzle. Depending on the layout you may get a crossword, a cryptoquote, a word search, or a set of trivia questions drawn from the same day in history.

What you can do with an edition

Read it in the browser at full page size, or switch to the stacked reading view on a phone. Download it as a PNG image or a PDF. Share a link so someone else can read the same page without an account.

Every day of the year

We keep a finished edition for all 366 days of the calendar. You can read any of them from the On This Day archive without typing a date at all.

Corrections

We would rather hear about an error than leave it standing. If a date is wrong, a fact does not match the record, or a photograph does not show what the caption claims, send it to us and we will correct the page.