I felt a little like a traitor this morning, criticizing story decisions I would have made exactly the same way a month ago.

Editor Steve Smith asked me to attend this morning's news meeting to talk about the paper's coverage of the Joseph Duncan plea agreement.

I haven't been attending the morning meetings since starting this "Newsroom of the Future" project. Our thinking was that I could be more valuable to editors here if I came at the news "cold," without the benefit of advance knowledge.

So, like most of our readers and Web users, I've been waiting for the news like everyone else.

But this morning I sat 'at the table' to talk about our Duncan coverage, which felt frankly pretty old by the time I read it this (Tuesday) morning in my newspaper. And that's because we had done such great 'breaking news' coverage of the story yesterday morning (Monday) on our Web site.

I watched our Web site all day yesterday. We posted the news about the plea agreement very quickly. We had a fresh photo of Duncan up on the site before the TV stations. In short, we exploited the Web exactly the way we should have.

So, 24 hours later, in this morning's paper, I expected to see a different kind of story, one that elevated the "what's next" aspects of the case, and one that sought to answer questions like, "how did this happen?" and "what does it mean?"

Instead, our bold headline across the top of A1 read, "Duncan admits guilt," as if that was the first time we were reporting the news. It felt old to me. We needed a different kind of headline, a different kind of display treatment, a different kind of second-day lead on the stories.

And so I said that at the morning meeting, knowing full well that before I started this project and started exposing my traditional notions to new ways of thinking, I would have made the same decisions.

I'm waiting for the internal hate mail to start rolling in.

The good news (and there IS good news) is that our stories had all the key information. This would be a much bigger issue if we didn't have the reporting or editing talent to ask and answer those contextual questions. We have that talent in here. A lot of talent.

If you read this morning's stories all the way to the end, you'll find answers to those contextual questions.

My gripe is that we shouldn't make readers wait that long on a story that is 24 hours old by the time it hits their doorstep. We "broke" the story of the plea deal online Monday morning. In fact, we hinted it was coming in Sunday's paper.

Duncan is such a big community story here that I can't imagine there were but three people in our region who didn't know on Monday what happened.

So, why duplicate that information in the next day's paper? Why not use your resources in a different way?

This is one of the most vexing issues facing newsrooms right now: how to use the Web and the newspaper effectively - and uniquely.

My trip to Bakersfield ended up being very timely because their editors and reporters are wrestling with the same question.

Bakersfield has made a big commitment to 24-hour news on the Web. They use a lot of reporter and editor resources to update Web stories around-the-clock because they've decided (as many papers have) that the best use for the Web is to 'break news.'

But what they haven't mastered yet is a way to create a different role for their newspaper.

Bakersfield News Editor Christine Peterson talked to me candidly about her frustration. She intuitively understands that she needs to get breaking news up on the Web, so she coaches and cajoles her reporters to do just that.

She also understands that she needs to drive good enterprise, investigative and contextual stories into the newspaper.

But what she can't figure out how to do is add time to a 24-hour day. Her reporters simply don't have time to aggressively write for both the Web and the newspaper.

In time, I'm guessing they'll find a balance as they recalibrate their priorities. But for now, the Web is Job 1.

They don't have any kind of protocol that helps guide their decisionmaking; no protocol that suggests what kind of stories belong in the newspaper versus on the Web, or suggests how many times stories should be updated online.

After observing their operation, I think they could use some good guidelines. As we wrestle with the same kinds of questions here, I'll definitely be arguing for protocols (although by nature I'm no fan of them.) Until newsrooms master the full potential of the Web and really understand how to use its power to do good journalism, a little guidance can't hurt.

It's easier than making up rules on the fly.

Change is difficult. As a self-described newsroom traditionalist, it's still hard for me to let go of the notion that we're not the paper of record anymore. There are too many other information channels now, and so many stories that we don't even have the resources to report the way we once did.

So to remain relevant we need to accept the inevitable and work with what we've got. The change won't (and can't) happen overnight, but we've got to start talking about it.

Today's Duncan coverage was exceptional. And our A1 treatment was textbook for a major community story. Faced with the same story, dozens of regional newspapers would have done it the same way.

But our practices ARE going to have to change.

Who will go first?

For readers of your blog who don't work at our paper: I'm the Idaho bureau editor. I posted the breaking news on the Duncan plea yesterday, taking updates from Bill Morlin over the phone, then worked with Taryn Brodwater and Bill on our coverage for print.

I agree that we have to confront the competition of online, TV and radio news with fresh content, even with breaking news like we had Monday in the Duncan case. It's easy to talk about doing that; it's not so easy to do.

It's also important to get the story right and to provide some depth and color and context, and the stories Taryn and Bill wrote for today's edition do that. Not all of the details of the plea agreement were reported on our Web site Monday, and there were some complicated points that we needed time to clarify. At least two of the local TV news stations had serious errors in what they reported on this deal. For us, it was time well spent to make sure we got our stories right, and I'd rather be right than fresh.

Bill's story looks ahead at what's likely to happen now in the ongoing investigation of Duncan's crimes and the coming federal indictments. That is stuff you couldn't get online yesterday or on TV last night. AP has virtually the same story on its budget for tomorrow. So we were certainly ahead of the curve there.

I'm not sure what a second-day lead would have looked like for Taryn's story on the front page today. We still needed to report the details of this plea agreement for our subscribers, and we did that. And there was drama to report as well – the reactions of family members and the lawyers who were silenced by a gag order last week. Their voices were the human side of this story, and it was appropriate to have that front and center.

If we had bumped Bill's story to a lead position and written a headline like "Duncan still has secrets," perhaps that would have been enough to scrape the mold off this one. And I'll take responsibility for it not happening that way; I suggested Taryn's story was our lead and Bill's was secondary.

One other thought: The hectic day, compounded by the early deadline for our supersized press run, underscores how we need to be willing to throw more resources at stories that end up monopolizing our front page. In hindsight we should have had a reporter there early just to file for the Web throughout the Monday news cycle, freeing up Taryn and Bill to concentrate on writing first for the 3 p.m. print deadline, then updating our stories for the 6 p.m. print deadline. And we (editors, reporters, the copy desk) failed to talk in the afternoon about how we could make the front page Tuesday morning reflect this need for something fresh and different.

I don’t feel our Page 1 today merely duplicated what was out there Monday. It was superior to what had been reported previously. Yes, it covered some of the same ground, but it also went deeper, clarified and looked ahead, and all that is a great service to the people who buy our newspaper.