newspapers find woes with online editions

Some newspapers needed to look no further than their online editions to find examples of Y2K problems.

The Daily Globe of Worthington and two of its sister papers, The Forum of Fargo, N.D., and The Daily Republic of Mitchell, S.D., were hit by glitches. While news content wasn't affected, the three Internet sites contained date errors.

The homepages of the Globe and the Daily Republic reported the date as ''January 1st, 19100.''

Computer programming experts say the display error results from a function that calculates the year as a number beyond 1900 -- for example, 76 for 1976 and 100 for news.

It was the same problem that tripped up the U.S. Naval Observatory during the early hours of the new year. That affected Web page included software code that had been written with an older version of programming language that was not Y2K-ready.

The Forum's problem was confined to its weather page, where on Sunday afternoon the date read ''January ,(,/),(0(:,( AM.''