There was some misunderstanding about a recent item that caused me to re-think a lot of what I'd considered standards in publishing items on a blog. (A reader writes that this picture was originally published in The New York Times, and I apologize for not acknowledging it earlier (but I didn't know)).

The standard used here is to write an item, bring it to its own inside page, and then write another item. I was convinced this was right by Nick Denton (left), who found that Google Ad revenue jumped on inside pages, because high CPM ads were brought to more specific content.

Not everyone works that way.

• Many publications use multiple pages, so they can put many sets of ads before the readers of a story.
  
• Some blogs place multiple news stories under the same item, so readers get a full day's worth of news at once.
  

What brought these thoughts to a head?

Apparently many readers came to my item After The Fall through links. The page they saw contained only that story, and they didn't know that the item written just before it was a sincere, if poorly-written, apology. So the responses they wrote were angry. As one wrote, "I don't see an apology here," and the writer was right. The apology was elsewhere.

This realization caused one of those "D'oh!" moments in me. (Homer Simpson from Simpsoncrazy.com.) A decade ago I was arguing with the art director of Interactive Age, who was upset that readers were bookmarking my Daily news and skipping her lovely mock-ups of the magazine's cover on our home page. Expecting the reader to see the apology when they'd only been linked to the story put me in the position of the art director.

So here's the deal. We'll still go inside, we'll still have separate items, but if there's a change, a mistake, an apology, or new information on the day of publication, I'm putting it right back on the item. At the top. And if sometimes it doesn't look cute at the end of the day, too bad. I'll just have to repeat what I said 10 years ago.

We're doing this for readers, not the art department.