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

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

The Boston Globe used to have multiple editions. The only way you could tell which edition you had by looking at the front page was to count the stars in the banner at the top of the page.

Perhaps the Metro does something similar?

I'm amazed I found confirmation of what I remembered.

http://squaringtheglobe.blogspot.com/2006/06/in-belly-of-whale-conservative-blogger.html

[...]

The Liturgy of the Hours

The most persistent impression to a new visitor is of the cavernous newsroom, which is on the 2nd floor and runs at least half the length of the building. When you see pictures of the room, it looks light and airy, but my recollection is of a very well-worn interior environment. The wear comes from almost continuous occupation. Each day a newspaper goes through a complete cycle as the product is produced. My visit was at the very beginning of the Globe’s daily cycle, starting at around 10AM.

The content creation process continues for each day’s Globe until the ‘first edition’ of the day’s paper is released to the building’s press plant at about 10PM. The paper goes through 3 more editions each day. The 2nd edition has updates of financial information and minor changes. The third edition has late sports stories and other content changes, especially updates to page 1 for late news. The 3rd edition is what most subscribers living near Boston’s Route 128 beltway receive. Finally the 4th edition is usually not a big change over the 3rd, but it is released later and is targeted for distribution by newsstands within the city of Boston.

How do you tell which edition you are reading? The 1st edition gets 4 tiny stars in the margin at the upper left of page 1. For each succeeding edition one star is removed. For you algorithmic types, that means the edition you are reading is expressed as 5 – S, where ‘S” is the number of stars you see in the margin.

[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.

[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.