Web users are hungry for the latest news. How newspaper sites will satisfy that appetite raises some tough economic and editorial questions.

When Michael Jordan talks about his future with the Bulls, the Web servers at the Chicago Tribune can hardly keep up with the increased traffic. And when former Governor William Weld of Massachusetts gives up the fight to become ambassador to Mexico, readers of the Boston Globe Online hit the site immediately.

"Every time an event happens in town that's of major significance, our traffic peaks," says Scott Cohen, the Globe Online's content manager. "The Internet community is clearly responding to the most dynamic information on the site, and coming back again and again to get updates."

As more readers get connected to the Web at work and at home, newspapers are beginning to feel the constraints of publishing just once a day. "The nature of the beast is that these people expect news as it happens, not several hours later," says Bernard Gwertzman, editor in chief of The New York Times on the Web and a former chief diplomatic correspondent and foreign-news editor at the paper. The demand for round-the-clock coverage presents online newspapers with a dilemma that has potentially huge editorial and economic implications: Will they rely on wire services for Web updates between issues of the paper, as most now do, or will they develop their own resources, at considerable cost and with no guarantee of return?

 The vast majority of Web publishers - the Newspaper Association of America estimates that 900 papers will have Web sites by the end of the year - rely heavily on The Associated Press and Reuters for coverage of breaking news. While this approach is less expensive than hiring reporters to write especially for the online edition - as the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal have done - it alters the publication's online editorial composition. A print issue of the The Washington Post or The New York Times containing more than 10 percent wire material would be an anomaly, but on the Web it's standard operating procedure for a site to contain more than 50 percent. And when big stories break in mid-morning, the AP inevitably beats Post and Times reporters to the front page of their own Web sites.

Using an AP feed is the low-cost, low-maintenance solution that most newspapers have settled upon, and for nonlocal coverage most find AP perfectly adequate. They may opt to choose from the preprocessed, Web-ready text feed of AP Online, or take the Web-based package called The Wire, which leaves AP in control of what turns up on their sites, or simply reprocess what they like from the regular AP wire.

 "Newspapers on the Web are using the wires very much the same way that I think radio and television have used the wires to handle breaking news - kind of rip-and-read," says Chip Scanlan, director of writing programs at the Poynter Institute. The result is that when breaking stories occur, most of the nation's most prominent papers often put the same AP story on their Web sites.

"Ifind that unacceptable," says the Times's Gwertzman. "As a reporter or editor, it used to kill me to have to use a wire story in The New York Times. It was like admitting defeat. Now, it really bugs me that we use so much AP copy on our Web site." The Times, along with the San Jose Mercury News, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune, is beginning to experiment with original reporting on breaking stories. Some have simply had their print reporters do extra, earlier work, although reporters sometimes chafe at it. Others have augmented their staffs. Several are hiring free-lancers and even full-timers for Web work only, which, of course, costs money. The Times's Gwertzman says maintaining his paper's standards on the Web will almost definitely require more reporters and editors. "I want to be distinctive," he says. "We might have to pay extra" - for more people and for added work by the present staff - "but for better or for worse, The New York Times on the Web represents The New York Times."

Is the expense of delivering original breaking news coverage on the Web justified? After all, as Jim Bettinger, deputy director of the Knight fellowships at Stanford University, points out, "Nobody's crowing about making lots of money yet." Some editors question whether users even draw a distinction between wire stories and staff-written pieces. But others argue that users are becoming connoisseurs of solid reporting on breaking stories.

 If so, then staff-written stories about breaking events may become a key differentiator, and potential competitive advantage, for online newspapers. As papers enter a medium where they're competing directly with television and radio stations, as well as new media juggernauts like Microsoft and America Online, the quality of breaking news coverage may prove a significant selling point.

Neil Skene, editor-in-chief at the personalized online news service Individual Inc., stresses that for most newspapers, the goal should be to defend their local news franchise. "If I were a local paper," he says, "I would just say, 'All politics is local,' and what differentiates us is local news, and news that we have a specialty in, like San Jose doing technology news."

Jack Fuller, president of the Tribune Publishing Company, says that being back in the game of breaking news - whether local or national - will give rise to new organizational models and reporting methods. In the process, it will force papers to decide how committed they are to the Web, what resources they intend to dedicate, and what return they expect. Most important, according to Fuller, the breaking-news phenomenon has the potential to reinvigorate newsrooms.

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