or University of Oklahoma students and newshounds Mueed Ahmad and Mas'ood Cajee, the time immediately after the Oklahoma bombing was life-changing. "We're both Muslims," explains Mueed. "When we heard the initial news reports pointing at Islamic extremist groups, we began to worry." They had good reason to worry. Immediately following the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 167 people, major news organizations seized on a possible Islamic terrorist connection to the explosion. Right away, the local Arab-American community began feeling the heat.
Meanwhile, The Oklahoma Daily's website, edited by Ahmad and his pal Mas'ood, was first to deliver the real goods. The day after the bombing, they posted a story from the Daily (the University of Oklahoma paper): "Experts Speculate on Suspects, Motivations in Bombing." The article, written by Nicole Koch and Gregory Potts, included a suggestion from Baylor University professor James Breckenridge that the bombing might be related to the anniversary of the Branch Davidian compound conflagration in Waco, Texas. On April 24, the idea was expanded online in "The Waco Connection," also written by Nicole Koch.
The conventional wisdom shifted, and suddenly the world's news-gathering organizations turned to the Daily's web page to tap its constant flow of detailed and accurate information. Three thousand inquiring individuals accessed the page on April 19; and the next day, the page racked up 20,000 hits. "They deserve an electronic Pulitzer for how quickly they got stuff up," says Gian Trotta, an editor at Pathfinder, Time Warner's website.
"I thought back to the Gulf War," Cajee says, "when CNN gained preeminence as an information source. In a small sense, we supplanted them in this incident, going onto the Internet and doing a better job."
