Media weirdness

[vettecat]

Now that I'm taking the T, I've been reading the Metro. (Which is fairly decent, for what it is.) So, I was wondering: Did anyone else notice that they had 2 different front pages today? (Different headlines, different lead articles... not repeated in the opposite editions.) I brought one of each home for sdavido, who was equally intrigued, but I'm curious as to whether anyone might know why they did it...

Edit: The two versions were interleaved and being handed out alternately, A B A B, so I got A, the next person got B, etc. ... I noticed and stopped to watch so I could be sure I wasn't imagining things. The papers being read on the platform and train were about evenly distributed between the two versions.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for the Metro, but newspapers routinely used to put out more than one edition over the course of the day. I'm not sure how often they do this anymore, though.

I have fond memories of hanging out with my half-brother Danny once and picking up the bulldog editions of the NYC papers at around 1:30 AM. A few hours later, the next editions would be delivered to the newsstands, and the old ones would be taken away.

You can generally find some sort of code on the front of the paper to tell you which edition you're reading. For example, the NY Times has a row of (I think) three dots between the volume and issue number of every paper. If they had to issue a new edition during the day, they would remove one of the dots. If they had to go further, they would start inserting dashes.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Reasonable but not the case here... see edited entry above.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Is there any difference at all in the interior? Ads and the like? They may be doing a marketing experiment on the different covers.

And here's a slightly radical notion: have you thought of emailing or calling them and asking them?

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

The interiors were identical. I did ask the vendor (who didn't know), but I was mainly curious as to whether anyone else had noticed.