When the New Orleans Saints got through to the Super Bowl, the Monday edition of their hometown paper still had queues of buyers on the Wednesday. Now that they've won it, the Times-Picayune could probably go on printing the same front page for a month. It was certainly still printing a couple of hours ago, at 11am CST. And it's a really lovely front page, complete with some of the largest headline type you've ever seen: I had to break our standard picture format just to fit it in.
Jon Slattery sees this as evidence that great front pages still sell newspapers. Not sure about that. Great, historic stories certainly do – and if your local team has won your nation's greatest sporting event for the first time in its troubled history, even a barely adequate front page would be liable to sell out. This one, however, will give its very many buyers a souvenir worth keeping.
Update, 9 February: Yesterday at 5pm CST, they'd gone through half a million – the most the paper has ever sold, and three times its normal Monday sale. And that was just day one...
