This just in. Today's news is... today's news 

By Chris Gulker 

A tremor ran through American media on Friday, February 28th.

The Dallas Morning News went public with information that Timothy
McVeigh, a suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing that shocked the world,
had confessed to the crime.

The Morning News reported that the information came from documents
prepared by McVeigh's defense attornies, which the paper had obtained.

Big story.

But the story got bigger. The Morning News released the story on Friday
afternoon, a full day before it appeared in print, on their web site,
www.dallasnews.com. Friday, incidentally, was the deadline for 1000
potential jurors to respond to a court questionnaire. 

Stop press. 

The big story had suddenly become very, very big. Every U.S. network
news program mentioned that the story had been broken on the Internet
first.

John Cranfill, managing editor of dallasnews.com, the Morning News web
site, posted this note on an impromptu mailing list that sprung up: 

"I guess by now the whole world knows we posted the Timothy McVeigh
story to the web deliberately on Friday, Feb. 28, at 3:15 p.m. CST...The AP
story about this journalistic move calls it 'unprecedented' and "The New
York Times" says this was the biggest story ever broken on the Internet.
The story and side bar about putting the story on Internet is up now on web
sites for CNN, Chicago Tribune and AP."

Less than 72 hours later, there was an after shock. "The Dallas Morning
News will ... publish no new articles based on confidential defense
documents" said the Morning News on its Web site Sunday.

Monday morning, McVeigh's lead attorney, Stephen Jones, accused the news
of stealing computer files from the defense team. "Hacking for headlines"
reported MSNBC.

Later Monday, McVeigh's defense team issued a statement saying the
"confession" was a fake, cooked up to convince a witness and possible
co-conspirator to talk to defense investigators. NBC broke that story in its
morning broadcast and on its MSNBC Web site.

Initially, the big story was that an American newspaper had decided to
report today's news today. Some claimed Dallas had "scooped themselves". 

Later, as the story unfolded there were cries that the rush to publish on the
Net had compromised standards, mostly from practitioners of print
journalism.

Television and Radio stations have reported same-day news for decades. 

More than 500 newspapers around the world have Web sites, meaning they,
too have the technical means to publish today's news today.

But visit those sites, and you'll quickly find that they are mainly full of
yesterday's news. The major exceptions are the few afternoon dailies - San
Francisco and Detroit are two - that publish news as soon as it hits their
afternoon print editions. While some dailies offer constantly updating news
(and Raleigh's Nando.net even offers a desktop JAVA applet for updates)
these mainly offer wire-service headlines.

Debate has raged in the newspaper community: why not use the medium to
fulfill the promise of timely news delivery?

Even as their circulation and ad linage has been ravaged by electronic
competition, print journalists have sniffed at electronic "sound-byte
journalism", saying it was too shallow and favored immediacy over ethical
judgment.

The University of Wisconsin's Kurt Foss has been near the center of
electronic publishing since its inception. He quickly fired off congratulatory
email to Cranfill, then scheduled the event as the topic of his afternoon class.

Foss sums it up, ever so eloquently: "I'm a bit surprised by the repeated use
of the phrase that the Dallas Morning News "scooped itself" by publishing
the McVeigh exclusive on line before the story went public via the
traditional ink, tree and truck method. Even the Associated Press' used that
expression. One would think that a global communications service might
have a better appreciation for the importance of distributing news of
national significance in the most timely manner available.

"Can a media organization truly 'scoop itself?' Or are its web version and its
printed version all part of the same news gathering operation, and thus
working in tandem rather than in competition with each other? Would the
story have somehow been more "legitimate" if it appeared first on paper? I
think not.

"I hope this proves to be a new high-water mark for web-based journalism.
If print media are going to adapt to the realities of the newer and faster
competition, some not burdened by the time lag of the printing process, such
notions of a news organization 'scooping itself' by breaking important news
stories on line will soon fade away."
