[donohoe]

Yes.

NYT homepage editor has flexibility on when they "roll" the date depending on news events (and content can be ranked ahead of time too). But yeah, basically midnight.

Internally I know editorial preserves them on an hourly basis. You might ask current NYT-ers if you could get access to that?

I know I did a scrape every 10 (or 2?) minutes of the Homepage HTML for a couple of years (2007 to 2011?). If I can find that data and its still meaningful I'll get it to you. It was quite a few GB.