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The January 9, 2009 edition of WNYC’s On the Media featured a segment titled “The Evolution of A1″. In this part of the show, host Brooke Gladstone interviews James Barron, a New York Times reporter about a book to which he contributed, The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages.

One particular part of the interview really bothered me, so my apologies in advance for the lengthy quote:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was a Pew study recently, and it found that for the first time more people are getting their news online, something like 45 percent compared to newspapers, which is apparently 35 percent. I’m surprised it’s that high.

If people are getting their news from, say, The New York Times website, they don’t get the full benefit, I guess, of the editor’s notion of what ought to be front page news because they aren’t seeing the front page. They’re seeing something else.

JAMES BARRON: Well, they get a different sense of it. Newspapers, if you think about it, are about setting priorities. That’s what editors do by organizing the front page. That’s a snapshot of a day.

If you go to the home page of Nytimes.com, it’s a snapshot of a much shorter period, but it’s still determined by editors who go to the same meetings during the day as the editors who determine what goes on the front page of the print version. So what you get at the top of the home page may be two or three stories at two minutes of 3 o’clock or something. That’s what’s important at that point. It’s a smaller window.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I see what you’re saying, that there still is, you know, very strict editorial supervision of what goes on the home page. But I have to say as a reader, I read it differently. I don’t pay as much attention to those stories that are being featured. I tend to go down to the sections that I want to more quickly, and I don’t get to have the accidental encounter with those other stories that I might see if I were turning physical pages.

So my experience of the paper is very different online, and the importance of those editorial decisions about what comes first is much diminished.

JAMES BARRON: And I think that’s one of the things that journalism is going to have to grapple with if the shift continues that the Pew study found.

Barron does a fairly decent job of sidestepping Gladstone’s rather boneheaded line of questioning. I’m curious to know what she thinks happens to generate the layout of the main page of nytimes.com. That it’s randomly generated? That some know-nothing webadmin throws whatever s/he happens to come across at the top of page and picks a font-size?

Honestly, I do not know what process the Times uses to lay out its web content. However, I’d be willing to bet that a good deal of thought and planning goes into it. Gladstone’s explanation that she doesn’t “get to have the accidental encounter with those other stories that I might see if I were turning physical pages” makes no sense, other than as a cover for “I like print newspapers, not this new-fangled online stuff.”