On the Web page of the New York Times Magazine this weekend, up in the top left hand corner was an extra box with a bit of content not in the week’s print version.
The piece, “Hezbollah’s Other War” by Michael Young, opinion editor of the English-language Beirut newspaper the Daily Star, is actually set to appear in next week’s issue of the magazine, but the editors obviously thought that the content was so newsworthy — or so susceptible to being overtaken by events — that to sit on it for another week wasn’t worth it.
The piece is an excellent (if necessarily thumbnail) sketch of the complicated machinations of Lebanese politics from the beginning of the country’s civil war through the present, and stands as a sad lament on the current war, which seems destined to yield no clear victor — only more violence, and more distrust.
But the Times‘ decision to run the story a week early is noteworthy, and offers a silent nod to the importance of publishing on the Web, even for huge, national news organizations. Back in April, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a poll that found that a full 73 percent of respondents are currently online. Obviously, not all of them are reading NYTimes.com, but it’s clear the Web site has a reach that far exceeds the number of people in the Times print base.
In a separate study in March of this year, Pew also reported that among the subset of broadband users (who comprise 44 percent of all Internet users), 71 percent “get news online on the average day,” compared to 43 percent who get news from their local paper and 21 percent who get news from a national newspaper.
We’ve seen these numbers and numbers like them before, and they’re only going to grow as time goes on. And while the Times hasn’t exactly kicked off a revolution by posting content online before publishing it in a print version (the Sunday magazine goes online on Fridays, and the paper publishes its next-day stories online the night before), we applaud the editors’ nod toward the ability of their Internet brand to get a timely story out there front-and-center, instead of waiting for the printing presses creak and groan into action.
