A week before, Ken Starr had finally released his long-awaited report to an expectant word. This looks behind the scenes at what happened at a national newspaper as they waited the words...

	Starr promised the first big test of the Internet as a global news medium.	The publication of the Starr report last weekend - at 7pm on a Friday night - could not have been worse timed for Britain's national newspapers. Friday night deadlines are the tightest of the week, brought forward so that presses can manage the biggest print run of the week. So first-edition front pages have to be ready by 8pm, and much earlier for inside pages. The Starr report was a genuinely sensational story that would boost sales on Saturday morning, certainly for the broadsheets. Yet all that editors knew was that it might be published at about 7pm British time. No press conference was planned, no inside briefings promised. Every newspaper in the world had to rely on the release of the report on the Internet and editors feared that demand on the four official Starr sites would be so great that they would become frozen. So Starr promised the first big test of the Internet as a global news medium. Editors knew they would have an hour or two at most to hunt the report, transfer it to newspaper editorial systems and edit thousands of words - and they did not even know that until Thursday night, when many of the pages of Saturday papers had already been planned. Those plans were instantly dumped. At The Times the main news section was cleared, leaving nine pages open for the Starr report. At The Guardian, Editor Alan Rusbridger decided to convert the Sport section into a 12-page Starr report. There was yet another difficulty. With the report not due on the Internet until at least 7pm, all those newly cleared pages had to be filled for the first edition, lest the report was published later than expected or the Internet got clogged. So several reporters on both papers had the thankless job of writing copy which was eventually destined for the spike. Martin Fletcher wrote 3,500 words for The Times that made only one edition, a vivid demonstration of just how ephemeral some journalism can be.
	Martin Fletcher wrote 3,500 words for The Times that made only one edition	So the atmosphere in Fleet Street newsrooms was tense at 6pm last Friday. A team of four Times staff, one for each official site, were detailed to the hunt, with another ready to transfer captured copy to the editorial system. America's Fox TV was first with the news shortly after 7pm, offering a 7,500 gut of the report from Associated Press - but that could be accessed only with a secret password. It was when CNN showed the report as seen on Congress's own Intranet that the bright idea occurred of calling CNN.com. With a few clicks, reporter Stephen Farrell suddenly had the report on his screen. The first 1,107 words were ready for editing at 7.46pm, by which time another sleuth had got the report from America Online. The first edition deadline was extended to 8.30pm. Another 2,004 words followed at 8.04pm, which meant that a good chunk of the report made the first edition, a feat that no other rival matched. By 9pm all 41,717 words had been collected in 12 takes. The full report with commentary was on the presses at midnight. Journalists will have to get used to the Internet, so it is worth noting how The Times and The Guardian, the two newspapers that devoted most space to Starr (rivalled, it should be noted, only by The Mirror and Sun), coped with such a sudden volume of copy. It was only because The Times now works on Windows that the report could be transferred so quickly from the Net to the editorial Atex system. Reporters used the Windows clipboard to cut and paste the text from the Internet to the editorial system - a process impossible only six months ago. At The Guardian, four subs put the captured report on a Mac, after which it was transferred to Atex, when another four subs handled two files per page. Several lessons were learnt during a night when 34 million of CNN's Starr pages were downloaded across the world. Editing was certainly made quicker by not amending the text, but one subsequent anxiety of Graham Duffil, Times news editor, was whether the copy was read carefully enough. (Only two papers, The Daily Telegraph, and Daily Mail, had censored the cigar sex play). Yet the case for publishing the full, unedited text and allowing readers to make their own judgments was surely overwhelming.
	related... clinton: liar, liar, liar those fibs in full	Mike Murphy, managing editor of The Times Internet edition, acknowledged ruefully that he was beaten by the newsroom nerds: he failed to reach any of the official Starr sites. Four Internet sites were not enough, he says. Access was too difficult. There will have to be more "mirror" sites on similar occasions in the future if the Internet is to realise its potential for journalism. All the journalists involved in the editorial operation last Friday recognise that it marked a significant journalistic landmark, especially for an older generation reared on typewriters, telephones, Reuter and cuttings libraries. An old-fashioned news operation was hitched to 21st-century hi-tech and suits uttering death threats if copy was lost worked alongside anoraks with the new skill of surfing the net. Journalism, as Duffil recognised, moved into an area where it had never ventured before. Starr also showed that news still sells newspapers. Saturday sales of The Times rose by 65,000 to 903,000 and The Guardian, in spite of one of the worst production nights in its history, also got a boost.