'NYT': Tape Delay Be Damned

Clark Hoyt, the NYT public editor, out with an entertaining blog piece on how and why the paper is reporting Olympics results as they happen even if some readers may be wanting to look away and wait for Bob Costas in prime time. He also takes up questions of spoiler alerts or hiding winners a click away from home page. Excerpt:

The Times has no intention of changing its approach: report results as soon as it can, as prominently as they deserve. “Our job is to report the news,” said Tom Jolly, the sports editor. He said NBC “has made a business decision to show the highlights on a taped basis. We’re not beholden to presenting the news the way NBC does.”

That means that when Lindsey Vonn goes for gold in the women’s downhill this afternoon, The Times will report what happens immediately, no spoiler alert, no tape delay.

I was leaning toward recommending putting Olympics results a click away from the home page, so that readers like Waters and Gooch wouldn’t have their fun spoiled when they came to the paper’s site for other news. But after I talked more with Jolly and read some comments from other readers on the Web site, I changed my mind.