Today's NYTimes sports front

ringer, i'm sorry you feel you're not getting your money's worth, but you keep ignoring the fact that the overlap of print and online readership is very low. the story wound up being the most-read on the entire site the day it was published. then it was in the sunday print edition, the one with the biggest circulation. don't know what the current number is, but i'll guess maybe 10-12 percent of readers saw it twice.

and the difference between when it was published online and in print was three days. not six. not four. three.

yes, i know, you think that's still an eternal shelf life online. but the fact is, for reasons that i won't discuss here, we are required to publish anything that appears in print a day earlier online. while i don't think the idea of the print layout was to "create buzz," but rather to give what we thought was a special story special play, we did want to create buzz online, where you really can do that. and anyone in the audience development biz will tell you that the time to do that is within hours of the initial publishing. so, unless we wanted to try to create buzz on a saturday -- again, the day with the lowest traffic -- the best choice is to go a day or two earlier.

hope that all makes sense and that you still found something of value in your print edition. i certainly appreciate your subscription.

as for the layout of the type, there was a discussion about running it left to right. it was very brief. short answer, we thought very few people would consume the whole thing with both pages open and that it would be WAY more confusing to have the jump on the dress page.

cheers,
JJL

 

Fair enough. I could see it going either way. But I guess I'd err on starting the type on the cover too. Not that tough to figure out.