The 7th edition of the MLA Handbook includes this example:
“Hourly News Summary.” National Public Radio. Natl. Public Radio, 20 July 2007. Web. 20 July 2007.
In general, I agree with the 7th edition’s position that URLs are not all that useful in Works Cited lists, since people tend to search rather than type URLs. Nevertheless, you would think that, because an hourly news summary changes every hour, that the date of access is not specific enough to help a reader find the source being cited. So it would seem that a compete citation would need the time.
NPR does distribute its programming as podcasts, and it does sell transcripts and CDs of its archives. In 2 or 3 minutes of Googling, I found the audio for “NPR News: 07-20-2007 11PM ET.”
The news on that day included
I’m sure that every one of these news items also appeared in some other form, whether as a web page or separate audio file on the NPR site, or in some other news publication. Rather than citing an hourly summary, it might be better to cite a more credible, more in-depth full-length treatment of your chosen subject. (Of course, that depends entirely on what you are researching.)
So it would seem that adding the time would make the citation more accurate.
“Hourly News Summary [11pm].” National Public Radio. Natl. Public Radio, 20 July 2007. Web. 20 July 2007.
Post was last modified on 1 Aug 2011 3:09 pm
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Thank you! I'm sitting here with my new MLA 7th ed. book and searching online for this exact citation so I can mimic it for an NPR.org citation in my own bibliography. It was so difficult to find the source for the mysterious 20 July 2007 News Summary that I gave up and googled it, and came to your site. I'm glad I'm not alone in noting the vagary of that particular citation example.
I'm glad to know this was helpful.