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Josh Crutchmer, the planning editor for the print New York Times, woke up at around 5:30 Saturday morning to an alert on his phone: The United States had attacked Venezuela and captured the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
“I knew that we would be completely scrapping our previous front page plan and starting from scratch,” said Mr. Crutchmer, who has been designing the front page of print editions since 2017.
He emailed 10 editors who work in The Times’s Print Hub, the team of editors and designers who select articles for the daily newspaper, design the layout and get various editions to the printers on time.
“Hello and apologies to anyone in the last days of their vacation,” he wrote around 5:45, “but I think we need a central place to figure out what we need and who we can get working this morning.”
Front pages are capsules of history. But the A1 page for Sunday, Jan. 4, 2026, reflects a rare moment in American presidential history: the capture of a sitting foreign leader.
“I’m thinking about the overall impact of the work and its significance, not only for the present day, but also for the historical context and for readers who will come along later,” said Gina Lamb, a deputy content editor.
There are three editions of the Sunday paper, updated throughout the day on Saturday. The editors would face three deadlines, for the noon, 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. editions of the paper. About 40 percent of readers receive the first edition.
Times reporters had been covering the news since it broke, providing online readers with updates about the strike. In the early morning hours, Anatoly Kurmanaev, who is in Venezuela, messaged a group of journalists that Caracas had been hit. Official confirmation came at 4:21 a.m., when President Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States had captured Mr. Maduro and his wife.
So for the print editors, the first thing to do was rip up the previous front page, which had been partially designed on Friday, before the attack.
Next was determining the headline. The Venezuela news called for a banner headline, or a headline that extends across the entire front page. The Times published 18 in 2025, reserving the style for monumental occasions such as when President Trump was inaugurated in January, Pope Francis died in April and the United States attacked Iran in June.
“We use it to signal that something is elevated beyond what we would consider a normal news day,” Mr. Crutchmer said. “It’s either urgent or otherwise extremely relevant to that day.”
Editors were generally avoiding the word “arrest” because it as a legal term and The Times was still confirming precisely what had occurred. Instead, the team worked with “capture” and “seize.”
The task of writing the first version of the headline fell to two editors, Robb Todd and Todd Gregory. (Editors work in pairs to write each front-page headline, which is then reviewed by another editor, who offers feedback, before it is passed on to Ian Trontz, The Times’s Page One editor, who oversees front-page story updates, and others for sign-off.)
The result: “U.S. Seizes Venezuelan Leader in Commando Raid, Trump Says.”
And with that, just before noon, the first front page was finished.
But a lot could — and did — happen between then and the deadline for the next edition. So The Times did what is known as a postscript, or redoing the front page between editions and getting the updated pages onto presses that were still printing the first edition — in this case, about 70 percent of the papers for that edition. That enabled editors to update the headline and swap in a new photo after President Trump held a news conference in which he said the United States would “run” Venezuela.
“I knew that had to be the headline,” Mr. Trontz said. (The new headline: “After Seizing Maduro, Trump Says U.S. Will ‘Run’ Venezuela.”)
Mr. Trontz continued to work with reporters to fold in updates throughout the day as the story evolved, like adding a second article to the front page about the planning for the raid in which Mr. Maduro was captured for the 4 p.m. edition.
That was what stood for the final edition at 8 p.m., which carried the same headline.
Shortly after 8 p.m., the print team signed off.
“It was exhausting,” Mr. Crutchmer said, “but exhilarating.”
Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.
The post Behind the Scenes of Our Nicolás Maduro Front Page appeared first on New York Times.
