Photo by sally henny penny.

The great media redesign movement of 2010 continues unabated — but unlike their competitors at the Washington Post and City Paper, the Washington Times isn’t satisfied with a mere redesign; no, they’re marking the season by actually getting back to being an legitimate newspaper, with sports, arts, and local news sections and home delivery.

Among the highlights of the Times’ new “expanded edition”: the return of the Sports and Life sections, an entirely separate Commentary section (those editorials which suggest the assassination of public figures need a home, after all), plans to upgrade the paper’s website, and a focus on “Washington as our home field.” City Paper’s Jon Fischer has already done a fine job of reviewing the Times’ new Arts section — key excerpt: “So what’s inside? Nothing local, to start.” — and given the talent the paper shelled out for on the sports side (Patrick Stevens, for one) and the recent fine work of its local politics writers on Yvette Alexander’s constituent services fund and the appointment of Cherita Whiting, we’re willing to give those desks a couple of weeks to get settled.

We were curious, though, how the Times stacks up against its local competition when it comes to subscription fees. The Times says that subscriptions to the paper are available at “$5 for four weeks, $30 for 24 weeks or $65 for a year.” Trying to pin down the going rate for a subscription to the Post is never easy, but by poking around, one can pretty easily get 26 weeks of the Post for $38.22, or a full year for $70.20. (Of course, it feels like anyone paying full price to get the Post delivered in hard copy is kind of a sucker.) The difference between the two, at face value, appears negligable — so we have to wonder: for all the Post’s faults, who precisely inside the District is actually going to pay to have the Times delivered to their doorstep?