Daniel Okrent, the NYT's public editor, looks at the kerfuffle raised by a Jan. 10 story (see Your daily newspaper, courtesy of a sponsor) and finds the NYT itself could have been more self-disclosing.

An excerpt:

Some people in the newspaper business - including, I suspect, a few sitting upstairs from me, in the New York Times Company's corporate offices - were displeased by a story that ran on Jan. 10, "Your Daily Paper, Courtesy of a Sponsor." The article, by Jacques Steinberg and Tom Torok, was a pretty sharp pin stuck into the circulation numbers of many American newspapers, revealing how subscriptions paid for by advertisers are delivered to readers who haven't asked for them.

I fielded a couple of days' worth of objections from the newspaper industry, and while I concluded that the piece was largely fair and entirely accurate (if somewhat overstated), I do think it could have been more candid about The Times's own practices. Readers who wanted to know how The Times fitted into this story didn't find out until (more likely, "unless") they made it to the 30th paragraph; the practices at The Boston Globe, owned by The New York Times Company, were unveiled in Paragraph 27. Even then the article was slightly less than forthcoming. By studying circulation patterns of Sunday papers, the article made The Times appear less reliant on these advertiser-subsidized subscriptions than it would have if the comparisons had been based on weekday circulation.

In fact, one could say there's a stark difference: according to the most recent available numbers, the quantity of the paper's third-party-paid subscriptions on a given weekday is 79 percent higher than the comparable Sunday number.

This sounds very ominous. It sounds somewhat less ominous when you realize that these same third-party-paid subscriptions account for 1.4 percent of Sunday circulation, and 2.5 percent of weekday circulation. And it sounds not even worth noting (take a deep breath here) if you consider that the difference between the number of weekday subsidized copies and Sunday subsidized copies is 0.4 percent of weekday circulation, and 0.27 percent of Sunday circulation.

Set aside the question of whether The Times should have stated its figures higher and more completely in the piece. (No, let's not set it aside: Caesar's wife should speak early and loudly.) There's another issue rolling around all these numbers - namely, numbers. Do you have any idea which of the figures I've cited, all of them accurate, are meaningful?

Neither do I.