Peace plan posted: Once obtained, the Dayton newspaper posted the peace plan on its web site within hours.

Dateline Dayton: On the Web, sometimes the little guy wins

(This article ran as a column in the Dayton Daily News on Dec. 3, 1995, and is reprinted here with permission.)

The story of how a midsize Midwestern daily scooped the world begins on the blustery night of Nov. 22, the day the historic Bosnia peace plan was signed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio.

Most of the stories had been written and edited at the Dayton Daily News when a couple of editors who rarely get to leave the office decided to go to the base and have a look-see themselves.

John Thomson, the assistant managing editor, and Kevin Riley, a news manager, decided this night that there might be some map information they could get their hands on that could be used in our package on the complex agreement.

As they drove toward the base, their conversation turned philosophical. Thomson, who has been in the business for more than 20 years and therefore should know better, turned to Riley and said something to the effect that "the only difference between the New York Times and us is our heads."

"We can do anything they can do," Thomson said, "if we just get our minds right."

In that frame of mind, the pair sauntered into the press center, where a three-star general was briefing a cluster of tired reporters.

During the briefing, they noticed a couple of out-of-town journalists had a phone book-sized document no one else seemed to have. Thomson and Riley set out to get their own copy, which they did. (How, dear reader, is a professional secret.)

Closer inspection revealed that the document was, in fact, the complete 156-page version of the peace agreement.

The highly technical, precise language spelling out the details of the land division was not grist for the local Ohio paper, but it certainly would be fascinating stuff to the residents of the former Yugoslavia and their neighbors, as well as to academics and other experts from around the world.

"What if," Riley asked Thomson, "we went back right now and scanned this into our web site? Hey, we could scoop the world."

They headed back at flank speed to the office while alerting Newsroom Systems Manager Jeff Adams that he had work to do. By 2 a.m., most of the pages had been scanned in to the newspaper's Access Dayton web site on the Internet (http://www.access-dayton.com).

Our web site had been the primary creation of another newsroom computer enthusiast, Joe Cunningham. He set it up soon after the announcement that the historic peace talks would be at Wright-Pat. Every bit of reporting we did on the subject went onto the site, along with our photos, cartoons and the content of a special 12-page section we produced on the opening day.

As was appropriate, our coverage was more comprehensive and detailed than anyone else's we saw, and even before the latest caper with the final agreement, the web site had become known to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people all over the world.

The technology allows easy tracking of how many hits a site gets, and from where; in the first few hours, 525 people requested information from our Bosnian web site.

We were astonished at what we had wrought. We had our data accessed and downloaded from all over Eastern Europe, Russia, Canada, a dozen countries in Latin America, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Sweden, Singapore, Australia -- every point of the globe.

We also found our reporting subjected to international review and criticism.

Vladimir Vuksan from Sarajevo sent a scathing e-mail to us that began: "I was thoroughly disgusted to read the article (from the Dayton Daily News) in regard to the rescue of an American airman by Serbian Chetniks. In those two pieces, Serbian Chetniks are glorified as if they were the freedom fighters fighting on the side of the Allies.

"Nothing could be more false. Serbian Chetniks were on the side of the Axis through the most of the World War II and have done horrendous crimes against Croatian and Muslim populations."

The next day, I received a personal e-mail from another unexpected source. It began, "I read your column in Sunday's paper on all of the troubles you have had telling foreign media representatives that Dayton is a place with qualities not to be missed and to be taken into account.

"As one of those most deeply involved in all of these negotiation issues during the past months, I can confess to having been somewhat surprised and even skeptical when Wright-Pat and Dayton emerged as one of the alternatives.

"But that is now past us. After close to a week here, I can assure you that we all feel that the choice of location was a good one. ... I can assure you that we have all found Dayton much more to our liking than I believe any one of us expected would be the case. And we appreciate seeing the world through the prism of the Dayton Daily News!"

It was signed by Carl Bildt, who identified himself as co-chairman of the Proximity Peace Talks, European Union special representative. To my knowledge, Bildt was unavailable to the hordes of journalists covering the talks, yet here he was writing me like an old school chum.

It's amazing stuff, this Internet. Which brings me to the conclusion of our worldwide-scoop story.

The world knows now that a little paper in the middle of the United States is the repository of the complete peace agreement. Accesses in early December hit 7000 in one day, again from every point of the globe, especially central Europe.

And our list of admirers continues to grow. Our latest e-mail was from none other than the U.S. State Department itself, which acknowledged it was the Dayton Daily News -- not the federal government -- that disseminated the information first.

Debi Guido-O'Grady, from the State Department's bureau of public affairs, wrote: "Congratulations on an excellent site on the peace talks. You certainly beat us in getting the full text of the agreement up on the Web.

"How long do you expect to keep the Dayton site active? While we are not supposed to link to nonofficial sites, I was thinking of bringing up a 'reading room' for other great resources for information (like yours) on Bosnia, on the U.S. Department of State's official home page (http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/dosfan.HTML)."

Thank you, State Department. It just shows you what can happen when you come up against some of us Midwestern hayseeds.

-- Max Jennings

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.