Readers responded passionately, and in large numbers, to my post last week about The Times’s decision not to publish the now-famous Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. (In fact, I’ve never had more comments on a post or column.)

A vast majority of readers were critical of The Times’s decision, feeling strongly that both because of news value and in order to reinforce free speech and show solidarity with a publication under attack, The Times should have published them.

Just Monday, a new decision came along and The Times stayed with its earlier determination, showing no image of the new cover of Charlie Hebdo, which features a tearful Muhammad, holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign, with a tagline that says “All is forgiven.” Instead, a Times article described the cover image and linked to an article that showed the cover illustration.

But that’s of little help to the print readers, who — if their only news source was The Times — could have gone through this whole tumultuous week without much sense of what the offending cartoons look like. That does them a disservice.

I can understand why The Times would not have published “the most incendiary images,” as the executive editor, Dean Baquet, described them last week. He felt those extreme cartoons would not have been necessary to illustrate the story about the terrorist attack that killed eight members of the satirical newspaper’s staff. (The Times did publish a number of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but none that pictured Muhammad; in addition, a short documentary video, published by the opinion side in The Times last week, showed the cartoons.)

Mr. Baquet made a tough call, which included safety concerns for Times staff, especially those in international posts. (Those concerns are far from frivolous; just days ago, a German newspaper’s office was firebombed after it published the cartoons following the attack, and now new concerns have arisen about reprisals.)

I certainly don’t think that decision was “cowardly,” as many have charged. Mr. Baquet told me repeatedly in recent days that he was paying attention to reader comments on last week’s blog post, and that he found them thoughtful and, in many cases, eloquent. He also passed along to me examples of correspondence from readers who thanked him for The Times’s restraint and sensitivity last week.

In my post last week, I called for a review of The Times’s standards, which Mr. Baquet told me were the basis for not publishing any examples of the Muhammad cartoons. One question, surely, is whether guidelines on offensive images are applied rigorously across the board; many readers have doubted this. Another is at what point news judgment ought to trump the likelihood of offending some readers.

I asked Mr. Baquet on Tuesday if he had considered changing course — as some media organizations did, including The Wall Street Journal and the news pages of the The Washington Post — in order to publish the image of the new edition’s cover. He told me that he had thought about it but decided against it, in keeping with his original thinking.

Here’s my take: The new cover image of Charlie Hebdo is an important part of a story that has gripped the world’s attention over the past week.

The cartoon itself, while it may disturb the sensibilities of a small percentage of Times readers, is neither shocking nor gratuitously offensive. And it has, undoubtedly, significant news value.

With Charlie Hebdo’s expanded press run of millions of copies for this post-attack edition, and a great deal of global coverage, the image is being seen, judged and commented on all over the world. Times readers should not have had to go elsewhere to find it.