NY Times at night

I used to work in the "online" division of a daily newspaper, so I know how it goes.

"Must put something new on the front page, even if it's not 'new.'"

"Must put something up that gets a lot of clicks, even if it isn't worth printing on paper."

So I've had a lot of free time the past week or so, and have closely monitored the NY Times. They don't update as often as I'd like, but that's largely because they simply do not have the content; There isn't groundbreaking news every two hours.

But they do put up new main stories at least four times per day - regardless of whether or not there's news value there.

Anyway, this post was largely inspired by the fact that this story is front-and-center on NYTimes.com.

It's basically a description of a Youtube video. Some kids rap about Vermont. White rappers, so hilarious.

It only had 55,000 views at the time the story was written, not many by Youtube standards.

I know "news" standards are relaxed on news websites in the evenings; hard news goes up in the morning, and it gets softer as the day goes on.

But come on.

Can the NY Times have a semi-serious story as its main front-page story?