Heaviest fallout came 7 to 8 days after Lott spoke.

Editorials denouncing Senator Trent Lott's December 5, 2002, remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday party began appearing in Nexis-linked newspapers five days later and reached a crescendo December 12-13.

Timing of the event and news coverage of it seemed to influence the speed of editorial response, a small sampling of online archives and of editorial page editors found.

The party was on a Thursday night. It was reported routinely Friday, Saturday, and even Sunday in some newspapers whose files are in Nexis. Those stories focused on Thurmond's seniority and generally did not mention the controversial Loft remarks. It later came out that he said he was among those proud of Thurmond's 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat campaign and speculated that America might be better off if Thurmond had won that election. It took a while for that part of the story to circulate.

The first major newspaper report in Nexis to mention it apparently was in a Saturday edition of The Washington Post.

Over the weekend the outrage began to spread, and, in a manner reminiscent of Newsweek's spiking of the Monica Lewinsky story, surfaced in the nation's capital over a weekend. That Sunday, a call by the Reverend Jesse Jackson to a TV talk-show anchor got references to the tale onto national television.

Several participants in the NCEW e-mail discussion list said they learned of Lott's remarks by various media, usually on Monday. Two mentioned specifically hearing of it on National Public Radio. Some saw news reports in national media or wire copy in their own papers.

Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News said she learned of it early from a weblog, Instapundit, hosted by blogger Glenn Reynolds.

At least a couple of dailies had editors or editorial boards who learned of Lott's words on Monday and published editorials about them on Tuesday Others mentioned needing more time. Some needed to find the space, confirm the quotes, or distill the issue into a piece suitable for their own pages. Of the approximately 50 pieces examined, all but one openly condemned the remarks, but they varied widely in positions taken about Lott's future, for example.

The Rocky Mountain News repeatedly and vigorously urged an end to Lott's Senate leadership. Seebach said in an e-mail that the paper felt obliged to decry the damage Lott's words and his subsequent conduct had done to the conservative cause.

One editor recalled knowing of the remarks on Monday or Tuesday but being unable to publish quickly for various unrelated reasons. What would have been a mild or moderate tsk-tsk early in the week became clear condemnation by the time the piece appeared.

Linda Brinson of the Winston-Salem Journal had such an experience. She heard the story while driving, probably on Monday But, she recalled in an e-mail: "We were running a major series on eugenics in news side and we were focusing our editorials on commenting on that. We were using some op-ed pieces on Lott, so at first I thought that might take care of it. But as the week wore on and our own Jesse Helms defended Lott, I decided to go ahead with an editorial. It ran on Friday the 13th."

John McClelland teaches journalism at Roosevelt University in Chicago and Schaumburg, Illinois. E-mail [e-mail]