When Is A Newspaper Story Not a Newspaper Story

Answer: When it doesn't appear in the newspaper.

This brilliant observation comes to mind looking at Michelle Malkin's Saturday item Air Enron: The Dam Bursts, which in Malkin's telling lists "dozens of MSM papers" carrying an AP story by David Caruso on the Air America funding scandal. But as my massive output over the weekend indicated, that has yet to appear in the hard-copy edition of the Post, at least the one delivered to my door, including today's edition. The David Caruso stories listed in a site search this morning are available at washingtonpost.com, not in the paper, and it's not clear to me if they were ever highlighted on the home page (could have been, I just didn't see it). The first story on that list has an Air America reference unrelated to the funding scandal.

You could say that this cuts both ways because washingtonpost.com has a huge eyeball count--it's one of most popular news sites on the web and top-of-my-head must dwarf the Washington Post's circulation. But what if those eyeballs never saw that story--as they didn't during the times I checked in over the weekend, unless they--um, they eyeballs--did a manual search for it. There must be hundreds of wire stories available at the website that you can find with a search but otherwise are quite invisible.  On an important issue like this, I just don't think post.com has the same influence as the paper. It's also helpful to keep in mind that the newspaper and the online operation are in most ways entirely separate--they're run by different people located in physically separate  buildings.

In any case Howard Kurtz is back from vacation and has his usual Monday live chat scheduled at noon. I expect he'll address the Air America story and I'll be live blogging it.

One other notion: I wonder how many other newspapers on Malkin's list "covered" Air America by running a wire story somewhere in their web site feed. I expect most, simply because they don't have the resouces to run separate operations as the Post does.

UPDATE: Typos fixed and one snarky comment added.

UPDATE II: Link added--I hope--to James Joyner's "Beltway Traffic Jam" linkfest at Outside the Beltway.

UPDATE III: Welcome, Radio Equalizer readers! Much thanks to Brian for the link. To be crystal-clear: I don't have any data on how many papers ran the AP story by Caruso in their print editions as well as on their websites.  What I'm saying is that the Washington Post hasn't, nor has it run any story on the scandal in the print edition I receive or in search-engine results for the newspaper.

And here's a  point that the time-space continuum didn't allow me to make at the time: Much to my surprise, media reporter Howard Kurtz didn't say anything in his live chat today about the issue (live blogged here and another comment here. ). I'm guessing he got a lot of questions on it, and I know he got one because I submitted it.  Perhaps by this time the Post has an auto-delete feature for questions submitted from my home in Manassas, Va.

Sorry Manassas!

Note for postwatchers: When conducting searches, stories tagged as "The Washington Post" have appeared in the newspaper and have a page number listed when you access the full story; "washingtonpost.com" items run on the website. Sometimes that includes extended and revised versions of hard-copy stories.

Comments

[David C]

Maybe the distinction is that they realize a good percentage of .com readers will know about the story already, but print readers won't. And, thus, it can safely be hidden from the print viewers who won't know any better, but to online readers, it will appear that the Post is acknowledging the story.