What was missing is a sense that this coverage is actually important. After The Washington Post broke the story that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, The Times came back with its own solid piece, but it didn’t crack the front page and it earned only a modest mention on the home page. A piece laying out evidence that the Russians may be trying to falsify voting results in state databases ran on A15 and got minimal play digitally. Another on Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signaling that the White House was prepared to order a rare covert cyberattack against Russian found a home on page A19.

What’s more, while several reporters have periodically contributed to the coverage, no one was dedicated to it full time. That’s too bad. In my view, The Times should have assembled a strike force and given it a mandate to make this story its top priority. You can tell from the outside when the newsroom is turbocharged by a story. The latest coverage of the F.B.I. director, James Comey, is one example. Industrial-scale cybercrime, it appears, is not.

Turbocharged coverage might have led readers inside the cloak-and-dagger underworld of the hackers and the hacked. It might have more fully explored the government lapses in protecting information systems. And it could have told readers more about the effort to uncoil Trump’s involvement, if any, in the hacking. When you think about it, there are few more crucial assertions than whether a possible occupant of the White House participated in an act of espionage against his country.

Many readers have raised concerns. Jack Archer, a resident of Oakland, Calif., asks: “If reports of ties between Trump and the Russians are accurate, and several of them are, as we now know, why is The Times ignoring what is potentially the most important story about presidential politics in how long? In your and my lifetime, at least.”

The Times finally weighed in on this question last week, concluding that there is no compelling evidence linking Trump to the hackers. The piece, which ran on A21 and down page on the website, appeared to have been in the works for some time. Yet it was published just seven days before the election, and was unsatisfying in exploring the back story that led to its conclusions.

I asked Sanger, a highly knowledgeable and seasoned hand on matters of cyberwarfare, about the challenges in covering information hacks. “American drone strikes and Russians bombing a hospital in Syria are immediate, gripping, tragic human stories,” he said. “A cyberstrike, by nature, is subtle, its effects often hidden for months, its importance usually a mystery. The bigger story here is that a foreign power has inserted itself in the fundamental underpinnings of American democracy using cybertechniques. We’ve never seen that before.”

That sounds like a pretty powerful argument for all-hands-on-deck coverage. After all, Trump’s treatment of women, Clinton’s email servers, the foundations of each candidate — all of it will soon fade out. The cyberwar, on the other hand, is only getting started.