It isn’t often the Freeman beats The New York Times -- especially on a breaking story in New York City -- so when it happens, it’s worth noting. (“Beats” is newspaperspeak for “We had the story first.”)

The story was the arrest on Saturday of David Tarloff in the brutal killing of New York City therapist Kathryn Faughey.

Now, in fairness, we didn’t get the story on our own. (There’s no way we could have, given that we don’t have a reporting staff in the Big Apple.) What happened was The Associated Press, the worldwide wire service from which we get our out-of-town news, produced a story Saturday afternoon announcing that Tarloff was being held for Faughey’s death. All we did was grab the story off the wire and post it on our Web site -- not exactly heavy lifting. But I was quite amused when, simply out of curiosity, I went to the Times’ Web site to see what kind of detail they had on the arrest and found they had nothing at all. In fact, it wasn’t until about 30 minutes later that a story turned up on the Times’ site.

The Times wrote its own story, of course – and a thorough one, at that -- while we merely carried the AP report. But no matter. The reality remains that the news of David Tarloff’s arrest was available online on the Freeman's Web site about half an hour before it was on the Times' site. Pretty cool.

And we beat them on the picture, too. We posted an AP photo of Tarloff on our Web site around 9 p.m. Saturday. There was no picture of him on the Times’ site until after midnight.