The Day The Web Exploded
Video: And we all know what happened after that.
What's interesting for our purposes, of course, is the media frenzy (of pretty much epic proportions) that followed. If you're not familiar with all the dirty details, take a look at a piece yesterday by David Rapp of American Heritage magazine. Rapp takes a look back on the genesis of the scoop that would take "news reporting out of the confines of the newsroom and blast it into cyberspace."
After all, this marked the first time that a major news story was breaking on the still-young Internet.
In that vein, we dug up another little piece of news history. Former CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg (who has appeared here on Public Eye before) did a story for the "Evening News" a few days after the Drudge story broke back in January 1998. He examined how the media was handling a huge story that was emerging in an entirely different fashion than they'd dealt with before.
As Engberg explains in the piece, the unfolding of this story was a case in which "technology may have overrun old-fashioned editorial caution. Newsweek magazine, which had the Lewinsky story first, decided to withhold it to do more checking. But the magazine's hand was forced when scandal monger Matt Drudge outed the story on his computer Web site."
You can click on the video player above to watch the piece, which aired on the "Evening News" Jan. 24, 1998.