Last February, Jacquee Petchel, head of the investigative unit of Minneapolis's WCCO-TV, was working on a story about dangerous doctors. One source she sought out was a woman in Kankakee, Illinois, who had brought a malpractice suit against a Minnesota doctor in connection with the death of her husband. But Petchel never got the interview. The woman told Petchel she would not discuss the lawsuit without getting paid.

"I've been a reporter fifteen years," says Petchel, who came to WCCO from The Miami Herald, "and this was my first time encountering this. Is this happening a lot?"

Well, perhaps not enough to get us all invited to Oprah to complain about it, but more than most reporters probably imagine.

* Two years ago, Pete Noyes, a veteran Los Angeles television reporter, was doing a story for a KNBC-TV program called Murder One, which investigated unsolved homicides. "A girl, twenty-one, had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by a Los Angeles gang member," Noyes recalls, "and the sheriff's department had asked us for help in solving the case, so I went out and interviewed the mother and the grandmother [of the slain woman], and, after the interview, they asked, 'How much are we going to get paid?'

"It hit me like a thunderbolt," Noyes says. "I thought we were doing them a favor."

* After the second Rodney King trial, Los Angeles Times reporters found themselves excluded from post-trial interviews with certain jurors because they weren't willing to pay for them. "We went to one juror's house in Orange County, knocked on the door, and were promptly asked, 'What are you paying?'" recalls Times city editor Joel Sappell. "It's a reality. You have to deal with it."

* During the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, reporter Robert Riggs of WFAA-TV in Dallas approached a family member when "suddenly an Australian TV crew member steps in front of the camera and says, 'We have exclusive rights! We have exclusive rights!'"

Riggs says he was repeatedly approached by fringe figures willing to sell him cult-related tapes; one even offered, for a price, to carry a tape recorder into the county jail to record a Davidian confession. "Her eyes had dollar signs in them," Riggs says. "Of course we didn't pay. I think you just have to admit that sometimes you're going to get beaten."

Paying sources to talk is hardly a new phenomenon. Nearly twenty years have passed since 60 Minutes paid Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman $ 25,000 and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy $ 15,000 for interviews. But the practice has escalated recently, and people in the farthest reaches of our wired nation have heard about payments for tales of Tonya and the Bobbitts, among others. As a result, more sources want money.

Nowadays, tabloid TV shows routinely pay for interviews, while mainstream magazines as disparate as Sports Illustrated and Redbook have paid for news exclusives. Prime-time newsmagazines have devised a way of paying for news without exactly owning up to doing so. Recently, a network TV producer -- angry, depressed, fearing for his job, and insisting on anonymity -- called me from the New York offices of a respected TV newsmagazine. "We're buying news," he said. "We're paying people who are players in the story and calling them consultants. We're buying off local reporters to get their sources. We're acting like the tabloid shows. And what's really distressing is that no one feels bad about it."

John Bobbitt's media lawyer, Paul Erickson, told The Washington Post about other ways network shows were skirting the rules: paying "for weekends in New York, first-class air travel, a new coat. They give you $ 500 a day for 'food' and they don't care what you do with the money."

So how can enterprising reporters who don't pay for news compete against those who do? Several journalists suggest that the issue be made part of the story. "Raise the question of how much money the sources have received," says Robert Riggs of WFAA.

"By all means, tell the readers you don't pay," says San Antonio Express-News state editor Fred Bonavita, whose reporters went head to head against the tabs on the Branch Davidian siege and trial. "You need to get the word out that your story is not tainted by the exchange of money."

Many police officers and prosecutors now tell their key witnesses not to accept money for their testimony before trial for fear that their carefully prepared cases may implode as a result of tabloid taint -- as happened in the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, in which prosecution witness Anne Mercer was savaged by defense attorneys after she admitted taking $ 40,000 to appear on A Current Affair.

Riggs draws the obvious newsroom corollary: "If you think attorneys will tear apart witnesses who have taken money, imagine what they would do in a libel case to the reporters who were doing the paying."

Meanwhile, some reporters suggest that, if the source is determined to sing only for the highest bidder, there is no alternative but to concede defeat on the scoop and negotiate to get a more thorough follow-up. "Sometimes," says a former print reporter now with a network television show, "after these people have told their story and gotten their money, they have a bitter taste in their mouth about how they were treated or about how little of the story they actually got out. A good reporter should capitalize on that."

Off the record, some heretical reporters wonder why some sources, especially those who risk retribution for providing help, shouldn't be paid, much like some police informants. Some even argue that information is simply a commodity, along the lines of other commodities that news operations pay for, such as legal advice and circulation figures.

Predictably, Inside Edition anchorman Bill O'Reilly defends the tabloid show's payment policies: "The networks are making millions off news programs. Why shouldn't the common man participate in that? It's capitalism at its finest."

Even as mainstream a journalist as Newsweek contributing editor Gregg Easterbrook sees this as an intellectualproperty issue. "I don't see why professional reporters should be the only ones to profit from producing news," he says. "We in the press seem to think [people] should surrender their privacy and submit to our embarrassing questions so that we can make money off it."

Most reporters have little patience with such contrarian logic. "We never did it at The New York Times," says investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "We used to fly people in and put them up at a good hotel and feed them, give them a free phone and all that. But just paying someone for information is a rational no-no."

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