The New York Times Created a Special Print Edition So Regis Philbin Could Read About Notre Dame Football
By Kyle Koster
Regis Philbin was a well-known and passionate supporter of Notre Dame football. That we knew. What we didn't, though, until this afternoon was that this fandom — coupled with celebrity — led to the New York Times creating a special edition of the Sunday paper to cater to his needs.
Times print editor Tom Jolly told the story over a series of tweets and it's a good one.
Fun little side story on Regis Philbin, who, as his obituary noted, was a Notre Dame football fanatic and a loyal reader of the @nytimes print edition ...
— Tom Jolly (@TomJolly) July 28, 2020
As it happened, that 3:45 paper was the edition Regis received at his home in Connecticut - and he wasn’t at all happy that his version of The Times was bereft of news about his beloved Fighting Irish.
— Tom Jolly (@TomJolly) July 28, 2020
After a couple of weeks of this, he brought it up on “Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee,” complaining that something was wrong with The Times if it couldn’t find a way to get Notre Dame football in the Sunday Paper.
— Tom Jolly (@TomJolly) July 28, 2020
That week, The Times created an evening “postscript,” sending updated versions of the sports pages to the press room at 6 p.m. in order to get Notre Dame game stories into the papers that went to Connecticut.
— Tom Jolly (@TomJolly) July 28, 2020
We called it the Regis edition and we never heard another word of complaint.
— Tom Jolly (@TomJolly) July 28, 2020
This is one of the most powerful of all the powerful moves a person could possibly pull. And it's made even more powerful because he didn't explicitly ask for it. Philbin just used his leverage to air a grievance and the situation got sorted out in a way that pleased him. A lot like what happened to Tony Soprano.
It's tough to imagine the pressure Fighting Irish scribes must have felt knowing that they were covering arguably the most popular team for the world's most prestigious paper — and also that they had a very tight Regis deadline they had to hit in addition to the paper's.
Even though I try to be an optimist about the future of journalism, it's tough to imagine another talk-show host having this much control over a print product's printing schedule. But we'd love to be proven wrong.