Was the item (the article) ever in print, or just on the website - can the API tell me this?

[Helgosam]

Hi

I'm trying to find out whether an article on the website was ever in the print version of the newspaper as well, or just online.

Can the API tell me this?

The article in question is this one (but it would also be useful if the API could do this for any article)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/31/britain-disabled-paralympics-cuts

Many thanks

[Michael Brunton-Spall]

Heya,

So, the question is in two parts, the easy one first.

That article in particular wasn't in the paper in that form.  I can tell because if I go to the article on the website itself and click the "article history" link to the right, it tells me 

"This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 16.51 GMT on Monday 31 December 2012. It was last modified at 16.52 GMT on Monday 31 December 2012."

This article however (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/29/public-debate-sexual-abuse-overdue) will be in tomorrows guardian and the same action tells me

"This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 13.59 GMT on Tuesday 29 January 2013. A version appeared on p34 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Wednesday 30 January 2013. It was last modified at 13.59 GMT on Tuesday 29 January 2013."

There's a few more complex bits however before I can answer your second question about whether you can tell this from the API.

Firstly, article that appear in print are sometimes rewritten to appear on the web.  Due to the format, and process this sometimes breaks the link between the web and print article, and the web article won't know that it appeared in print.  There are also some oddities about how we model certain bits of text that appear in the newspaper, in a large spread, that may or may not appear as a separate article, or may appear at the foot of another article.  

That aside, the API has some inkling of content that was in the paper as a side effect of our publication processes.  Comparing the tags on those two articles in the API, 

http://content.guardianapis.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/31/britain-disabled-paralympics-cuts.json?show-tags=all

and 

http://content.guardianapis.com/society/2013/jan/29/public-debate-sexual-abuse-overdue.json?show-tags=all

You should notice that the article that appeared in print is given a special set of tags, a newspaper-book, newpaper-book-section and a publication.

The newspaper-book and newspaper-book-section tags indicate what physical printed bit of the paper the article appeared in, so in the "Main section" (i.e. the main portion of the paper), in the "Society" section of the paper.

The publication will almost always be "The Guardian" for articles that appeared in the newspaper, although there could be some very odd edge cases there as well.

Finally, we also provide some special fields for articles that appeared in the paper:

http://content.guardianapis.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/31/britain-disabled-paralympics-cuts.json?show-fields=newspaperPageNumber,newspaperEditionDate

and

http://content.guardianapis.com/society/2013/jan/29/public-debate-sexual-abuse-overdue.json?show-fields=newspaperPageNumber,newspaperEditionDate

These fields, newspaperPageNumber and newspaperEditionDate should let you know exactly where and when the article appeared.

Finally it is possible to search on newspaper edition date as a field, so finding all articles that will appear in a future paper can be done with:

http://content.guardianapis.com/search.json?from-date=2013-01-30&use-date=newspaper-edition&show-fields=newspaperEditionDate

I hope that helps

Michael Brunton-Spall
Developer Advocate
guardian.co.uk

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[Sam Jewell]

Thanks very much Michael - that has helped a lot.

Thanks for the speedy reply too.  S

--

Sam Jewell
Research Associate 
The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design

Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU
hhc.rca.ac.uk
sam.j...@cantab.net
07932 761772

[Helgosam]

Thanks Michael - that's a great help, cheers

Thanks for the speedy reply too.

Not sure if this will post twice, sorry if it does.  I hit reply in my email client the first time around, but it didn't seem to work.