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At 11:43 this morning, I received an email message with this subject line: "CBSNews.com News Alert! Edwards To Suspend Campaign Due To Wife's Cancer."

The body of the email sourced the claim to CBS News partner The Politico. In addition to sending the email alert, CBS News made the news the lead story on the Web site, where it was also sourced to The Politico.

We now know that the report was wrong: John Edwards is staying in the presidential race despite the fact that his wife's cancer has reemerged. The Politico's Ben Smith first claimed that Edwards would drop out in a blog post at 11:06. He has now posted an apology.

According to Smith, a single, anonymous source, whom Smith has known for years and whom he trusts, told him that Edwards was "suspending his campaign" this morning.

"…with less than an hour before Edwards was to announce, I unwisely wrote the item without getting a second source," wrote Smith. "When the campaign pushed back harder than I'd expected, I added that information to the original item, but that doesn't undo the damage. My apologies to our readers for passing on bad information."

I asked CBSNews.com Senior Political Editor (and former Public Eye editor) Vaughn Ververs about CBS News' handling of the story.

"We sourced the story correctly to Politico reporting," said Ververs. "But, while The Politico is an editorial partner of CBSNews.com, we should not have run breaking news of this nature that had not been independently verified by CBS News and will be careful not do so in the future."

The larger question here is this: Why rush out a story like this at all, especially as the press conference was less than an hour away? Is the bump in traffic really worth risking not getting it right?

"Something that's so basic but is often forgotten in the rush of working on a story - journalists often feel like 'I've gotta go with what I've got,'" Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, told me in an earlier interview. "But no one ever benefited themselves by going with something that turned out to be wrong."

You Go, Politico: Much has been made of the inauguration of the new online political news venture, The Politico (which has a partnership with CBS News). The American Journalism Review profiles the new mag this month, revealing why so many journalists at big-name outlets decided to join the start up.

John Harris, formerly of the Washington Post and the publication's editor in chief told AJR of the advantages of the Politico's non-traditional approach to writing: "The austere, voice-of-God detachment which is the classic newspaper style can be an impediment to engagement with the reader and a genuine understanding of what's going on with a story." However, some have their doubts about the potential for Politico's success: "I still don't know if there are enough people who will go to a politically focused Web site day in and day out and year in and year out and whether advertisers will want to advertise to them," Evans Witt, a former AP reporter who was the editor of PoliticsNow, told AJR.

I Love The Smell Of Advertising In The Morning: Changes at the Wall Street Journal have also been making news lately, and the latest is surely a welcome one -- for those who like to "scratch and sniff" their advertising. "The Wall Street Journal is on the verge of offering scented print-ad units that will appear on the regular pages of the paper," writes AdAge. L. Gordon Crovitz, publisher of the The Wall Street Journal told AdAge that readers should feel free to "'suggest scents that might be appropriate. One of my colleagues suggested new money.'"

To Be Continued…: The hoopla over a huge news story -- the NSA's domestic wiretapping program -- is not over yet...

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