It was a short-lived scoop by any standards. The Dallas Morning News posted a breaking story to its Web site last night alleging that a Secret Service agent was prepared to testify that he had witnessed a liaison between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Three hours later, the story was gone. But not before ABC's Nightline and several other television programs ran with it.
The reason for the disappearing scoop? According to a message posted to the Dallas site at 2 a.m. EST on Tuesday, "The source for the story, a longtime Washington lawyer familiar with the case, later said the information provided for that report was inaccurate." The News was able to zap the story off the paper's Web server, but it did slip into the earliest printed edition late Monday night.
While the story itself may have evaporated, questions remain about how news organizations handle such exclusives on the Web. Do the round-the-clock deadlines of Internet publishing cause reporters and editors to lower their standards? Would the paper have spent more time investigating the anonymous source if not racing to get the story on the Web? And after this misstep by the News, which broke an important story online last year about the Timothy McVeigh trial, will it and other papers be more reluctant to put news on the Web before the morning paper hits the front lawn?
Dale Peskin, the News' assistant managing editor for new media, says that Web publishing is not very different from traditional publishing: "There are risks here just as there are risks in print."
But he denies that standards are sinking as traditional publishers compete with Web-only outlets like The Drudge Report, which first broke news of the Lewinsky allegations after Newsweek had held the story.
"The standards that we apply to news are no different online - we have the same editing guidelines about sources and information," Peskin says.
But others day the immediacy of the Web is adding inexorably to the pressure to be first with a story. Newspapers are now able to compete with radio, television, and wire services, notes Carole Rich, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas, and that has the potential to make them work faster and less carefully.
"The Internet has added incredible pressure, and that's often being translated into inaccuracy," Rich says. "I'm sure the Dallas Morning News is still applying its journalistic values, but this medium makes us a little bit more careless, a little bit more competitive. There's a need to be first."
Another factor that motivates regional newspapers like the News to break stories on the Web is that, while the reach of their printed product isn't wide, online they can compete with the big boys of journalism - papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times.
"Regional papers are kind of the also-rans of Washington journalism," says Neil Skene, the editor-in-chief at Individual Inc. and a former editor of Congressional Quarterly. "They have to scream louder for the attention. If you're Dallas or Chicago or LA, you have to go extra steps to get a little attention."
The News' Peskin argues that he's setting the standard for Web newspapers, not vying for attention - though the News site did garner plenty of extra traffic from its scoop. Today, Peskin was forced to ask his techies to put another server in service to handle the extra load.
But Peskin won't say the story was retracted - the official term used when a newspaper admits a mistake. Instead, he says the story was simply withdrawn after a phone call from the source because the story no longer met the News' standard: all stories based on anonymous sources must come from at least two independent individuals.
"What occurred here is that the story was based on more than one source, and after the distribution of the news [on the Web], the source changed his mind, and the story no longer met the standard," Peskin said.
But he is adamant that the scenario won�t prevent the News from breaking stories on its Web site.
"This doesn't change anything," he says. "A lot of people will be saying, `You see, [the Web isn't a reliable news outlet].' But this is about a source who flipped."
Still, newspapers are carving out a reputation on the Web one scoop at a time. And Bob Steele, the director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute in Florida, a journalism think tank, says that's proving a tough balancing act.
"Using the Web is a double-edged sword for newspapers," Steele says. "It can enhance their reputation or damage it." Newspapers believe that breaking a story on the Web carries additional weight, given the medium's wide reach and relative novelty, adds Steele. But when stories must be withdrawn - as happened with the News - it has the potential to be more embarrassing.
Print media are also finding Web content hard to control, Steele says. Newspapers closely oversee the distribution of their printed product, but on the Web, anyone may copy stories, e-mail URLs, or link to any article they like.
"When something goes wrong, it's harder to fix the mistake," he says.
Rich at the University of Kansas shares that concern.
"Are people going to see the correction on [the News'] site?" she asks. "They'll probably still be talking about what they saw there last night."
But Individual Inc.'s Skene believes the News did everything it could to minimize the damage from last night's story.
"The fact that they took it down and described what happened is the kind of thing an honorable news organization ought to do," he says.
Others say that in the long term, competition between news organizations on the Net will result in the same balance that exists in the offline world: great stories side by side with dreck.
"Intense competition among journalists can produce important, high-quality journalism," says Steele. "But it can also produce misjudgment and diminished quality."
