SELLING THE NEWS.(The Talk of the Town)

It is sometimes said that the best way to read the Times is to start by skimming the Post, as though it were a cheat sheet for deciphering the paper of record's impassive headlines and byzantine constructions. Then, there is the current Presidential approach, which is to skip the Times and other papers altogether, in favor of a news precis compiled by one's staff--a personalized answer key.

For those without a staff, and without the time or the patience to muddle through more than one paper, there is Carlos, a young man of indeterminate origin and background ("I'm from everywhere and nowhere," he says), who, for the past several months, has stood at the southwest corner of Forty-second and Eighth, by the entrance to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, greeting evening commuters with a simple one-line digest of the latest in world affairs: "Bush nominates a lady with zero experience to the highest court in the land!" or, "Archeologists find proof that Jews existed!" Carlos is one of about two dozen men stationed in the area each afternoon who offer morning newspapers at half price, but he seems to be alone among the venders in his old-fashioned conviction that the news must be sold rather than simply bought.

Unlike his forebears, the old barking newsboys with their evening editions, Carlos, who wears a fedora and a neatly trimmed mustache, has no "Extra!" for anyone to read all about. He relies on his ability to cut through the blather, pinpointing essential truths that busy nine-to-fivers may have missed over their morning coffee. "Most regular people are at least as smart as the media, so I tell them something that compliments their intelligence," he says. As often as not, that something comes from the inner reaches of the paper--from Op-Ed or the Science Times--not A-1 above the fold. ("I call these the fluff stories," he said recently, looking at a midweek front page.)

The other day, just after 3 P.M., Carlos arrived at his spot, at the junction of two planters, pushing a hand truck stacked with about a hundred copies of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, each bearing an official pink stamp with the words "Afternoon Copy." He was wearing a fur coat, cinched at the waist with a sash, and leather sandals. A man in a baseball cap that read "Shady" stood fifteen feet away, next to a stack of the News, glumly holding up a copy with the headline "A-Rod's Grief."

Carlos picked up the A section of the Times and scanned the headlines: an update on the Iraqi constitution ("Boring"), a report on stem-cell research ("That clicks, because you got two ...