In this paper we describe a novel task, namely the Diachronic Text Evaluation task. A corpus of snippets which contain relevant information for the time when the text was created is extracted from a large collection of newspapers published between 1700 and 2010. The task, subdivided in three subtasks, requires the automatic system to identify the time interval when the piece of news was written. The subtasks concern specific type of information that might be available in news. The intervals come in three grades: fine, medium and coarse according to their length. The systems participating in the tasks have proved that this a doable task with very interesting possible continuations.