Daily Briefing: From Blog to Print in 24 Hours

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As evident in yesterday’s afternoon post, deciding how to handle the rapidly spreading assertions about Larry Craig’s sexuality had editors stymied well into the night. “We went round and round on that,” Steve Smith said. “It was not an easy call. I think in the end we decided that, given the political context, we couldn’t ignore it,” he said. One argument against running the story, which I posed yesterday and again this morning, is that it enables unsubstantiated assertions made on blogs and talk radio to become legitimized in the mainstream press. Sports editor Joe Palmquist shared this concern. “I worry about the precedent a little bit,” he said. “There’s crap like this all over the place - it never makes the paper.”