Agree in general, but this article seems fine for me. I think the placement might depend on screen width. With a narrow screen, the date is right at the top. Wider, it gets moved below a graphic, but still even with the end of the first paragraph. Maybe there's some other version you are seeing that puts it at the bottom? If by ambiguous you mean it's the same as today's date, yeah, but I'm not sure there's a way to avoid that ambiguity on the day of publication.