'NY Times': Now With Cliffs Notes

The New York Times has been around for 156 years. For all that time, it has trusted its readers, more or less, to find what they're looking for.

Not anymore. Today saw the introduction of "Inside the Times," a new multi-page index of that day's highlights, in print and online, which runs on pages 2, 3 and 4 of section A. The purpose is "to help readers navigate and mine the paper and its Web site," according to an editor's note.

Newspapers are such instruments of habit that any change at all, no matter how necessary or obvious in retrospect, is likely to encounter knee-jerk opposition. I don't want to give into that impulse...but "Inside the Times feels a bit excessive -- a barrier to reaching the stories rather than a map to finding them. As one close Times reader pointed out to me, it's an odd decision to devote so much prime space to teasers at a time when the news hole is already shrinking -- and when more and more readers aren't bothering with the physical paper in the first place.