The paper edition of the News-Press continued to publish stories on the utility expansion multiple times per week. Editors meanwhile emphasized transparency on news-press.com, urging reporters to post facts as soon as they uncovered them, in updates of perhaps a few sentences. Managing Editor McCurry-Ross found that the idea of total transparency, and the speed with which the News-Press published new facts, challenged the way she was accustomed to doing journalism.

We’ve been doing our business the same way for so long that it’s easy to spring back to original form. And so we had to keep coaching each other... because our natural inclination would be to... get some new information... [and] say, “That would be a great story for two weeks from Sunday” [allowing time for additional reporting].

Ruane recalls:

We were encouraged... to post things online as quick as we can, even if we don’t have a lot of solid details. An example might be that emails showed a utilities manager for the city played a lot of golf with the construction managers. We would post something like that and then go back to work on it to fill in details of who played and when and whether that created any favoritism or softened the results of hard decisions because of the relationships established on the golf course.

Ruane was uneasy about this method, however. “It can create the appearance of a cozy city-contractor relationship,” he notes. “I’d like to at least have a comment from the city or the contractor.” ^[4]