Some webheads are touting February 28, 1997 -- when The Dallas Morning News broke a big story on the Internet seven hours before the paper hit print -- as a kind of journalistic Bastille Day. Newspapers were liberated from the time constraints of printing-press production, empowered to break news instantly. As reader representative Jean Otto put it, with a hint of glee, in the Rocky Mountain News: "The playing field on which print and electronic journalism have been slugging it out for many decades was suddenly leveled."

But what this supposed liberation may actually do is shackle papers to an exhausting, shallow deadline-every-second treadmill.

Here's the background. The Morning News had dug up the incendiary story that Oklahoma City bombing defendant Timothy McVeigh confessed to his lawyers that he indeed triggered the bomb. But once its staff began seeking reaction just before publication, there was a danger McVeigh's lawyer might try to spin the story in advance, destroying the paper's exclusive in a live press conference. So, with the stroke of a mouse, the editors preempted the risk by launching the story onto the Net. Other news organizations had broken stories online (among them, Time magazine); but this was apparently the first time a major mainstream newspaper had used the web page to uncork such a huge, explosive story.

The trend has continued. Shortly after the Morning News scoop, Time went online with an exclusive on suspected linkages between recent bombings in Atlanta -- a couple of days before the magazine was on the stands. On March 11, Playboy hit the Net with a detailed narrative of McVeigh's movements just before and just after the Oklahoma blast. This story appeared on the Playboy website before the glossy version reached magazine racks.

Until recently, newspapers had avoided breaking stories online to avoid scooping themselves. But now media reporter Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post predicts that breaking stories online will be routine within a couple of years. Today, given the relatively small number of Net users, the main advantages are to ensure getting credit for a perishable exclusive and to have global impact even if one's publication is regional. If Internet readership multiplies and electronic newspapers become profitable, the advantages will proliferate.

Unfortunately, the trend has a dark side. Instant filing may make newspapers more like wire services, and anyone who has worked under deadline-every-minute pressure knows what that means: an emphasis on getting facts to the screens immediately, with little patience for enterprise and investigation. Feed the beast. File. Now. Now. Now! If newspapers switch to a twenty-four-hour cyber-cycle, they may well take on some of the less desirable traits of today's on-screen news services and Net sites, such as:

* Stenography for the status quo. News outlets that are constantly on the clock are inevitably more reactive than those with time to deliberate before publication. The former devote far more energy to reporting what officials say than to assessing the validity of the statements. The officials routinely set the agenda.

* Looser standards. The risk exists that the wild culture of the Web will erode standards of accuracy when papers go online, as media critic Tom Rosenstiel argues in the March 21 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes that, when the San Jose Mercury News put up a website version of its questionable series on what it alleged were possible links between the CIA and cocaine smuggling, the paper went even further than it had in print. The Web version had an incendiary logo overlaying the CIA emblem with pictures of cocaine. And the story's reporter, Gary Webb, participated in Internet "chat room" dialogue in which he made more sweeping claims than he ever had in the paper.

* A focus on the flavor of the minute. Writing in the early 1960s, historian Daniel Boorstin observed that, due to the pace and schedule of news reporting, Americans had come to demand an unrealistic level of novelty: "We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night." That was in the era of morning and evening papers and fifteen-minute nightly news broadcasts. On a twenty-four-hour-a-day news cycle, the public expects a new hero every hour, a dramatic spectacular every ten minutes, a rare sensation every thirty seconds. News organizations on such a cycle -- like CNN -- must devote vast amounts of effort to satisfying the public's appetite for novelty for just the next half hour.

A newspaper that commits itself to the online world is likely to find its resources dissipated in just such a shallow pond, with little energy left over for the good writing, clear explanation, in-depth investigation, and offbeat approaches that have come to mark the' best newspaper journalism.

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