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."