The Ecology of a Column-Inch

10:00 AM Jan 30, 2006

Maybe you saw it briefly this past week, Monday or Tuesday, a smaller story on the inside pages or the unkempt corners of your RSS reader ... a lesser story in the cosmos, to be sure, but a newsworthy one with the hint of broader implications. The sort of story one reads every day, or doesn't quite get to, flashing into sight like a vehicle in the opposite lane, then gone just as quickly -- a random interlocuter bound for points unknown.

It could have been any story. This blog entry happens to be about last Tuesday's breathless headline, "US may use Guantanamo for military executions" -- front-paged on Yahoo! News for a few hours.

How did this vehicle get on the road?

The answer is a microcosm of information flows, in a sense representative of the way the news business has always worked, and in a sense somewhat particular to the netrootsy technological moment -- recorded here as a case study* with no larger meanings express or implied.

January 17 -- The U.S. Army -- which has not executed anyone in nigh half a century -- issues a 16-page update of its execution procedures.

January 19 -- Secrecy News, a longstanding project of the Federation of American Scientists to promote government transparency and citizen oversight which often covers regulatory minutiae, reports the change, speculating that it might indicate an approaching military execution. (The military death penalty process is deeply veiled in secrecy.)

The FAS story is forwarded that same day to the Abolish listserv, a mailing list for death penalty opponents.

January 20 -- My former colleague David Elliot, one of the country's leading death penalty bloggers and a former journalist, picks it up from Abolish and blogs the story ... and, his job description including the charge to drive media attention to the death penalty, also directly tips off a few reporters. David fixes on a policy change now allowing "other locations [than Leavenworth, Ks., formerly the only site in the statute] to be used for executions" and wonders if it isn't meant for the star chamber at Guantanamo Bay.

January 23 -- Reuters moves a story on its national wire covering both Secrecy News' and David's speculations.

Meanwhile, a capital defense attorney working on military cases downplays the likely import of the regulations in conversation on the Abolish list.

January 24 -- NPR covers the story on "Morning Edition." The Washington Post blurbs it. Foreign outlets, often very interested in death penalty stories and especially so in Guantanamo, are calling.

In another blog entry, David reviews the story's development ... and yet another capital litigator's opinion that this looks to be nothing more than "routine updating."

But the story's legs are failing -- it's been built up speculatively; without any other corroboration of the tea-leaf-reading, there's little to report. Producers from Nightline explore doing a segment, but are dissuaded by the lack of firm information.

January 25 -- Following an official military denial that the policy might affect anyone other than U.S. soldiers -- which undermines the sensational Guantanamo angle -- the story has pretty well run its course.

With the "normal" death penalty load of 60-80 state executions likely this year, plus three federal (non-military) executions already scheduled for May, it's back to the grind for death penalty activists.

And on to the next story -- about a condemned man blogging from behind bars -- for scribes.

*Speaking of case studies.

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