The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias surveys the black-and-white evidence of how many newspapers got the mine story wrong.

An excerpt:

... Newspapers, already in fear of obsolescence in an era of instant messaging, 24/7 cable news, cell phones, Blackberries, blogs, websites and other new communication technologies, looked really, really bad.

Never mind that the news networks were just as wrong for many of the wee hours yesterday morning. They have the opportunity to update and correct. Besides, their mistakes are not sitting there in black-and-white on the kitchen table in the morning.

Same with newspaper websites.

The irony is, as newspapers with the wrong information were rolling off the presses and out on the trucks, their online operations were posting up-to-the-minute information as it broke, first around midnight when the AP and Reuters good news stories moved and then around 3 a.m. when it was clear the earlier reports were wrong.

But it was too late for most papers.

As most of us no longer have afternoon finals -- the Star killed its edition in the early '90s -- we looked as quaint as a Brownie camera snapshot.

This is a constant problem of course, whenever big sports games go into over-over-overtime or elections get squeaker close. Somehow we manage to hold the presses until the very last second for those stories.

Or sometimes we screw up because the scale of a story is not known right away. For example, on Dec. 26, 2004, the Star ran a front-page pointer to a brief inside-page report headed "150 killed as tsunami hits Sri Lanka."

But the mining tragedy was different. It was not a developing story. It was not a story where all the pieces had yet to be put together from far-flung corners of the earth.

We assumed it was right, or missed our bets, and messed up.

I first heard about the story on CBC Radio right around midnight, and immediately checked the wires.

The initial AP stories had the relatives cheering "they're alive!" -- with the proviso that the governor's office and the company had yet to confirm.

(Note: The story immortalized on the front page of Wednesday's Globe and Mail had the AP reporter quoted a relative as saying they had been told by a mine foreman the men were alive).

About 10 minutes later, the governor's office confirmed. In my mind, that made it official (in retrospect, I should have made more of the fact that the company hadn't also confirmed). Not long after that, I stopped following the story intensively and went to bed around 2 a.m.

As a result, I was flabbergasted when I woke up and heard that 11 out of the 12 were dead.

Here's an excerpt from an NY Times story today:

"I wanted to believe," Mr. Manchin (Joe, governor of W. Va.) said in a news conference Wednesday morning. He left the church to go to the command post to confirm the news. As he was leaving the church, someone asked him whether the report was true. He replied, "Miracles do happen."

That comment was taken by some residents and reporters as confirmation that the miners had survived. But Mr. Manchin said he had not meant to give that impression.

At the command post, Mr. Hatfield said, the rescue managers were trying to organize ambulances, medical care, stretchers and water for what they believed were 12 survivors. But about 12:30 a.m., the rescue team called to say that they were bringing out the sole survivor.

Dumbstruck, Mr. Hatfield (Ben,  said many people in the command post at first refused to believe it. He said he thought it possible that the rescue teams were mistaken and that some of the miners might be alive in carbon-monoxide-induced comas.

I first heard about the story on CBC Radio right around midnight, and immediately checked the wires.

The initial AP stories had the relatives cheering "they're alive!" -- with the proviso that the governor's office and the company had yet to confirm.

(Note: The story immortalized on the front page of Wednesday's Globe and Mail had the AP reporter quoted a relative as saying they had been told by a mine foreman the men were alive).

About 10 minutes later, the governor's office confirmed. In my mind, that made it official (in retrospect, I should have made more of the fact that the company hadn't also confirmed). Not long after that, I stopped following the story intensively and went to bed around 2 a.m.

As a result, I was flabbergasted when I woke up and heard that 11 out of the 12 were dead.

Here's an excerpt from an NY Times story today:

"I wanted to believe," Mr. Manchin (Joe, governor of W. Va.) said in a news conference Wednesday morning. He left the church to go to the command post to confirm the news. As he was leaving the church, someone asked him whether the report was true. He replied, "Miracles do happen."

That comment was taken by some residents and reporters as confirmation that the miners had survived. But Mr. Manchin said he had not meant to give that impression.

At the command post, Mr. Hatfield said, the rescue managers were trying to organize ambulances, medical care, stretchers and water for what they believed were 12 survivors. But about 12:30 a.m., the rescue team called to say that they were bringing out the sole survivor.

Dumbstruck, Mr. Hatfield (Ben,  said many people in the command post at first refused to believe it. He said he thought it possible that the rescue teams were mistaken and that some of the miners might be alive in carbon-monoxide-induced comas.

The news that 11 out of the 12 remaining miners was dead was given to the families sometime after 2:30 a.m.

(Here's video of CNN's Anderson Cooper being told by a witness about the scene in the church after the company broke the news.)

So, to summarize, we've got a church full of people who think their relatives are alive, and we've got a governor who gave a mildly misleading answer -- compounded by reporters at the scene who were perhaps too quick on the draw and didn't ask him any follow-ups -- such as 'who told you they're alive?' In addition, the company, which did know differently, apparently didn't want to give out any more partial information, so it waited until at least 2:30 a.m. to tell people what really happened. As a result, there was mass confusion.

Now, on to newspapers.

To my mind, newspapers start becoming obsolete almost as soon as they roll off the presses, although you can have later editions. While you can hold the presses, maybe -- with the power of hindsight -- it would have been better to not run the story at all if there were serious doubts about its accuracy. However, when you're sitting in a  newsroom hundreds of miles away, and AP says the governor confirms it, maybe an editor could be forgiven if she thought the story was good to go.

Had this story broken at 7 p.m. or 8 p.m., then clarified 2.5 hours later, likely no morning newspaper's first edition would have had the incorrect story in it.

As we move deeper into the electronic era, with basic hard news delivery becoming so instantaneous and ubiquitous, I've always seen newspapers as concentrating on the 'why' of journalism, rather than the breaking news stuff.

If newspapers were designed more as a daily magazine to help you better understand the world, rather than to tell you what just happened (contextpapers, not newspapers, if you will), then that would do much to eliminate the possibility of deadline-driven errors. You wouldn't be trying to cram one more story in at the last minute.

One question I have is whether papers who had their own reporters on scene did a better job on the story than ones relying on the wires -- or was pretty much everyone in eastern North America tripped up by the fact that usually, the presses have to start rolling by midnight?

Personally, I disagree with Zerby: This was a developing story.

And if I had to assess blame, I'd score it 25 per cent industry structure, 25 per cent reporter error, 25 per cent company and governmental communications error and 25 per cent chance.

FWIW, I would also note, for the record, the media didn't add to the families' grief by being the initial conduit for the bad information.