Working on the Times media desk has for the last few years seemed like a rough and thankless job, and certainly the last few people there reporting on print media seemed like they were more than a bit unhappy. (Or were at least phoning it in.) Which is to say, we are not here to express rancor about today's media desk report: "In the six months ended Sept. 30, The Times had the second-largest paid subscription Web site among newspapers behind The Wall Street Journal’s 537,469 subscribers, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations."

Ooh, second-best newspaper! Great! So… how many paid digital subscribers does the paper have? [...]