Ink-stained solace. (NYTimes.com)

It did not take long for me to turn off Twitter, to shut down Facebook, to ignore NYTimes.com. The Internet can be marvelous—for real-time presidential debate snark or instant updates on the latest Lindsay Lohan trainwreck—but for tragedy, it is entirely too small. I could not bear to watch the reported death toll rise, to see the hand-wringing that came when the press realized it had misidentified the shooter, or to wade through the now-predictable howls for stricter gun control. So I did the natural thing. I turned off my computer, and started watching movies.

I watched Harper, a middling Paul Newman P.I. flick, the ever-delightful Shop Around The Corner and, at my girlfriend's stern insistence, Love Actually. During the intermissions, I glanced at Twitter for news of the impending R.A. Dickey trade, taking pains to avoid reading about anything of actual importance. For seven or eight hours, Paul Newman chewed gum, Jimmy Stewart sold music boxes, Hugh Grant made puppy dog eyes. And the outside world stayed far outside.

A hot bath might do the trick, but it lacks the escapism and entertainment value of my preferred preferred prescription: Turner Classic Movies, a 24-hour, commercial-free hot water bottle. At moments of crisis, how nice to slip into a perfectly-crafted Hollywood picture, where The End only means I'm seven or eight minutes away from another round of opening credits? Spy novels, adventure stories and Horatio Hornblower books can all serve the same purpose, but nothing seizes your attention like the well-mannered bray of Katherine Hepburn. If the afterlife is TCM, well, I could imagine worse.

I hadn't forgotten what happened in Connecticut, but I was waiting for the next day's Times to learn the details. As a gauge of a tragedy's importance, the front page of the paper of record is hard to beat. How many inches did they give it? Does the headline stretch the whole page? How many days does it stay above the fold? When the unfathomable happens, this is my coping mechanism, and it's one of the best of my ever-dwindling arsenal of answers to the question, "Why do you still subscribe to a daily paper?"

Any newspaper works. Glancing at the covers of the Post and the Daily News each morning is a marvelous way to close the book on whatever troubled the world the day before. On Saturday, I saw a man searching a USA Today for their write-up of the shooting, growing increasingly confused until he realized that they publish their weekend edition on Friday morning—making for a front page that was hopelessly out of date just a few hours later. Print still has its drawbacks

Information blackout, movies, the morning paper. This is my three step routine, my palliative care. After the Javon Belcher shooting. After Aurora. After Tucson. After Malmö. After Virginia Tech, and all the unfortunate others in between. I felt guilty for avoiding the onslaught of real-time truth until I realized that, as a coping mechanism, waiting 24 hours is healthier, or at least more dignified, than taking to the Internet and screaming inanities about gun control, mental illness, even who the real killer was.

It only takes a few minutes for a national news event, good or bad, to turn social media into an echo chamber. Internet discourse is like a dorm room bull session, which gets louder and dumber with each new person who squeezes in. There is a conversation to be had in this country about guns, about mental health issues, about media malpractice, but the hour after a massacre is not the time to do it, and Twitter is not the place.

Reasonable people understand this, but when confronted with this sort of horror, they retreat the same way I do—taking shelter not with Jimmy Stewart, but in the well-worn rut of liberal indignation. Thinking that gun violence could be solved if the Republicans had the balls to tell the NRA to take a hike is comforting, because it creates a fantasy where violence can be solved. Pretending that the solution to this epidemic of mass murder can be summed up in 140 characters is as absurd as thinking Love Actually is a good movie.

Right now, some pissed-off puzzle-solving New York Times home subscribers are probably answering that with R-I-P-O-F-F-S. In an email sent out yesterday by the Times, they let home subscribers know that their Premium Crosswords feature—formerly content that was part of a digital subscription to the paper, which comes with a home subscription—is now going to be a money-making endeavor unto its own. In other words, something else Times subscribers would have to pay for, outside of their subscription.

The regular rate for a Premium Crosswords subscription is $6.95 a month or $39.95 year. As a peace offering of sorts, current Times subscribers are being given a discount on that rate ($3.47/$19.97). What will they lose without it?

By subscribing, you will continue to enjoy online access to the daily crossword puzzle on your computer, or as a PDF, as well as more than 5,000 archival puzzles and solutions, including acrostics, cryptics and other specialty puzzles.

New York Times' puzzlemaster Will Shortz, what hath you wrought? Are we paying for your new Maybach, homie? Full letter from the Times to subscribers, below:

Dear Home Delivery Subscriber,

This is to inform you of a change to one of the benefits associated with your home delivery subscription.

Starting July 9, Home Delivery Subscribers will no longer have free access to NYTimes.com Premium Crosswords. You can, however, continue to access Premium Crosswords by subscribing at a special low rate being offered only to Times subscribers.

Click here to save 50% on an annual or monthly subscription to Premium Crosswords for as long as you remain a Times subscriber. By subscribing, you will continue to enjoy online access to the daily crossword puzzle on your computer, or as a PDF, as well as more than 5,000 archival puzzles and solutions, including acrostics, cryptics and other specialty puzzles.

Of course, if you choose not to subscribe to Premium Crosswords, you will continue to receive free All Digital Access, which includes full access to the rest of NYTimes.com, as well as NYTimes smartphone and tablet apps. You will also still be able to enjoy free access to one Classic Puzzle each week from The New York Times archive, plus other games such as KenKen, Sudoku and Set, on NYTimes.com/crosswords.

Thank you for reading The New York Times.

Sincerely,

Customer Care
The New York Times

We can think of another seven-letter, two-word expression that could have also worked in the email's place.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The internal memo announcing the hires was written by the Times' Deputy Editor of Interactive News, Sasha Koren:

We’re thrilled to announce two additions to the social media and community team: Michael Roston and Daniel Victor.

Michael Roston, who has deftly operated the home page on the overnight shift for the last year and a half, will join us as a social media producer. Michael came to our attention last year with his smart, clever Twitter feed, then impressed us with his in-depth knowledge of Reddit, which he generously shared, encouraging us to do more to speak to that platform’s quirky user base.

Of his time on news presentation, Patrick Laforge notes: "Not many people could walk into the overnight home page job with as little time in the producer's chair as Michael did. He became an obsessive student of the stylebook and headline writing, and a pioneer in using his down time from the job to embed himself in rewrite, copy editing, social media and other opportunities. He was always a cheerful presence on the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, greeting his Twitter followers in the wee hours with witty remarks from the 'Tower of News.' If you're not following him, you should be."

From his work keeping @nytimes relevant with breaking news during the wee hours, we suspected he had an appetite for making more use of social media tools and thinking in the service of Times journalism. He’ll bring that appetite and a knowledge of homepage operations to the job, along with a deep experience in online news from previous positions at True/Slant, the New York Sun and the Huffington Post. He’ll move to daytime hours on June 11.

A brief interlude: Somehow, Roston's witty Twitter acumen and familiarity with Reddit came before the fact that the guy was pretty much the last person out the door at both the New York Sun and True/Slant, the pay-writers-what-they-earn project that he basically helped give unlikely life to—and preserve said unlikely life—before it was gobbled up by Forbes (in one of the more depressing content model about-face moves in recent media history).

Onward:

Also joining our team as a social media producer will be Daniel Victor, who comes to us from ProPublica, where he has been the social media editor. There and in earlier positions at Philly.com and TBD.com, he has conceived of and run successful and innovative projects making use of social media and other tools to thoughtfully engage readers. He was a reporter at the Patriot News of Harrisburg, Pa., and holds a B.A. in journalism from Penn State. He’ll join us at the end of June.

Please join me in congratulating Michael and welcoming Daniel.

— Sasha Koren

ProPublica's social media presence is one of the few from media properties that actually deserves distinguishment beyond being mere promotional tools: Take, for example, their Officials Say The Darndest Things blog hosted on Tumblr, or the way they started a Patent Harm Facebook Group off of their stories about the health care industry, or the way they're crowd-sourcing research on campaign finance. Also not a bad guy to bring on board, especially if the Times wants to do more with their social media than, say, the NYT Fridge.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

By the time she got to the web newsroom, then housed a few blocks from the paper’s historic home on West 43rd Street, it was evident that news was breaking. But the overnight editor and the business editor, the only others in the office, were in a state of confusion. They were seeing things on television, but the reports were unconfirmed, and they conflicted.

“At one point, we thought two planes had collided with each other,” she remembered.

As more editors and producers trickled into the newsroom, Ms. Spruill exchanged calls with the continuous news editor, Terence Neilan, who rushed to confirm the reports and get a story back to her.

The rest of the world wondered what was happening too. The morning papers said nothing of the World Trade Center, so from their cubicles people checked nytimes.com, causing an unprecedented surge in traffic—190 percent more visitors than the average Tuesday in 2001—that the site could not support.

Once Ms. Spruill received the story from the 43rd Street newsroom, she hit publish, but it took excruciating minutes for the clogged site to update. By the time the story went live, the story had changed. A career’s worth of news happened between 8:46 and 10:28.

On a day of uncertainty, 1.9 million people looked to paper of record for answers. The digital staff performed technological triage, stripping any content unrelated to the attacks of its multimedia components to lighten the site’s load and keep it nimble enough to accommodate the breaking news and incoming images. Though many news websites crashed, nytimes.com stayed “live” all day.

“It made it abundantly clear that people don’t think of us as a newspaper that publishes once a day,” Ms. Spruill said. “September 11 was just the start. It became a new kind of normal.”

The Times created an emergency plan for simple web publishing during catastrophic events, and put plans in motion to eliminate the physical and psychological gap between the traditional newsroom and the digital one.

“It quashed any thought that the Internet was a threat to The New York Times,” said CNN.com managing editor Meredith Artley, who was associate editor of nytimes.com at the time. “It was a tool they could use to get the story out. Sept. 11 brought the organization together.”

After her performance on Sept. 11, Ms. Spruill helped lead the digital newsroom to the integration while quickly ascending its ranks. By 2006, she was its top web editor and is now the editor for emerging platforms.

“It was another three-plus years before we committed to fully integrating the print and digital newsrooms, but I expect Fiona got there ahead of us,” former executive editor Bill Keller said.

Sept.11 also made it clear that breaking news events had enormous business potential for the Times’s digital operations. If the paper could capture the attention of casual online news readers on important news days, it had an opportunity to make regular readers out of them. The Sept. 11 traffic quickly dropped, but it never went below pre-9/11 levels. Anxiety was heightened, two wars were on the horizon, and the global appetite for constant news did not recede. Monthly traffic to The New York Times increased 60 percent nationally. The pattern recurred on subsequent major news events, most recently the death of Osama bin Laden.

kstoeffel@observer.com

An Observation: Aunt Mabel really couldn't care less about Iran. If you click on The Times' top 10 most blogged stories, you'll find five stories on the Iranian election. But in the most-emailed list, no trace of it at all. We have a feeling she wouldn't care for Bill Keller's decison to travel to Tehran, either (he probably should have been doing a Travel story instead). So with that, here's Tuesday's top 10:

1. Frank Rich shows remarkable stamina—holds the top spot two days in a row.

2. A new story, this one on a funky Web site (and iPhone app) that cuts through market-talk and gives us a straight answer about what to buy. 

3. Welcome, Paul Krugman, to the center of Aunt Mabel's heart! Mr. Nobel Prize gives us a history lesson why we shouldn't abandon Obama's rescue efforts for the economy.

4. There's our first credit card story. Last night, this wasn't in the top 10; six hours later, it's moving toward the top spot. 

5. As we mentioned yesterday, we were shocked that Gout-plagues-the-middle-class didn't do better than No. 5. Holds steady for a second straight day, but still surprised that Mabel's favorite topics—money, drugs, class, disease—can't produce a higher ranking.

6. When we saw that Pat Kiernan loved Sam Roberts' Monday A1 story on how some Asian-American parents show a preference for baby boys on NY1's In the Papers, we instantly knew Aunt Mabel would be a fan.

7. Race and America.

8. Barbara Ehrenreich joins Frank Rich in making the Top 10 two days in a row, though she drops four slots.

9. Joe Nocera's one-year-later French Riviera story still has legs.

10. Aunt Mabel loves southern-charm and urban-cool Research Triangle piece.

Final Tally:
Columnists: 2
Editorials: 1
Op-Ed Contibutors: 1
(4 for Op-Ed Pages)
Travel: 2
Technology: 1
Health: 1
Money: 1
New York: 1
Iran, foreign unrest: 0

Two Day Total:
Columnists: 6
Editorials: 1
Op-Ed Contributors: 3
(10 for Op-Ed Pages)
Travel: 4
Health: 2
Technology: 1
Money: 1
Investigative Journalism: 1
New York: 1
Iran, foreign unrest: 0

Ms. Lakshmi's video is one of several celebrity testimonials for the paper's Web site included in a new nytimes.com campaign called Conversations, which a press release put out today announces as:

If the sight of Ms. Lakshmi reclining in her purple dress and bangles doesn't make you want to click on The Times' site over and over again, how about... Economist-turned-personality Ben Stein and a gorgeous Weimaraner?

In addition, publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. announced today that there would be some reshuffling at The Times' Web page that will allow for "even faster" growth.

First, here's the announcement for Ms. Warren written by Times Company executive Martin Nisenholtz:

And here is Mr. Sulzberger's on the new look staff for nytimes.com:

That represents another single-day record.

Today's day-after the election issue of The New York Times—the one with the OBAMA banner headline that the paper's masthead decided on after consulting some of its readers—is selling out fast. (Need proof: Check out this photo from Gawker.)

The paper's spokeswman, Catherine Mathis, has told us that the paper is printing an extra 50,000 copies for the afternoon rush at transit-hubs like Grand Central, Penn Station, and Port Authority. It's a veritable P.M. editition of The Times!

"We had increased our print run for single copy sales today by about 35%," she writes. "In 2004 we saw an increase in sales of around 50,000 copies the day after the election and based on what we've seen today, we expect to significantly surpass those sales."

NYTimes.com—which has been shattering traffic records for over a month now—once again set another record yesterday, said Ms. Mathis. "There were 55.1 million page views, shattering the previous record by 29%," she writes.

Likewise, down in D.C., copies off The Washington Post seem to be flying off the newsstands. "The Washington Post increased copies available today for sale at retail locations and in newsboxes by 30%, but sold out within hours," writes a spokeswoman. More anecodotal, yes, but still.

She said that "in coming months" the Web site will continue to expand the personal technology, your money and small business sections channels, which it launched on nytimes.com in September.

She also said that The Times would "introduce more journalists" to the business section (something they've already started).

Because the financial world went on fire, page views for the business section have been up 66 percent year over year in September and the newly launched economy section had 4 million page views in September.

Internet businesses at the company accounted for 12.4 percent of its revenue this quarter versus 10.6 percent in the third quarter last year.