Thomson: Readers Dig 'WSJ' Sports Page. Do you?

It's been two weeks and change now since The Wall Street Journal introduced a daily sports page. It's a distinctly odd creation -- heavy on statistical breakdowns and curious factoids but devoid of the usual sports-section trimmings like player profiles, trade stories and game recaps. In a way, it's philosophically more in tune with the pre-Rupert Murdoch Journal, which always had an eye for the quirky, offbeat story, than with the new Journal, which aspires to be a first read.

I asked managing editor Robert Thomson what kind of reception it's gotten from readers. "Overwhelmingly positive," he says. "It's intended to be counter-intuitive and our readers have instinctively understood the complementarity to existing sports coverage. [It] makes more sense to focus on the probability of that night's outcomes, which are a talking point, than to replicate results which are available on the web immediately."

Traffic to the Journal's online sports home, he says, has quadrupled since the page launch, running at 120,000 on peak days. Another indication that the page is finding an audience: "We have had applied mathematicians applying for sports stats assignments."

I'll never been a terribly regular sports-section reader, so I'd be curious to hear from those of you who are: Does the Journal's approach to sports work for you? Or is it too cerebral and over-clever? Email me or post a comment.