Here's another indication of just how tough the news environment is for traditional newspapers: If you read only the print edition of the New York Times, you would still not know anything about the Mark Sanford saga, according to my search of the paper's archives.* Yet, right now it's the lead story on the paper's website, and has been, for better or worse, the dominant news story this week since The State first broke news late Monday afternoon that the governor was missing. Presumably, The Times will have a story in tomorrow's print edition, by which time the story will have bubbled, built, arced, and be on its way to fading out. That's not a criticism per se of The Times' news judgment. By the old standards, the story was arguably too undeveloped to warrant inclusion in The Times. But it points up the difficulty of keeping an old-line newspaper relevant to its better-informed readers.

*Correction: Several readers have emailed to say that in fact posts from the Times blog "The Caucus" did appear as items in the print edition. My error.