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The word raced around the newsroom like wildfire. First we heard about the Phoenix article with more bad news for Barnicle. Then in the afternoon, the curtain finally came down.

Matt Storin called an impromptu meeting over at the city desk. I left my unfinished technology column and rushed over to listen. People were running across the newsroom to hear the news--you'd have thought Clinton had come in to announce he was quitting.

Storin told us the story of Barnicle's 1995 column, which Readers Digest wanted to reprint. But when their fact-checkers couldn't verify anything in it, they set it aside and forgot about it. Then, after the recent national furor, a RD editor remembered the 1995 column and wrote to the Globe about it. Storin and Walter Robinson, assistant ME, got the word on Tuesday and began their own fact-checking process. They were taken unawares, because they'd already conducted a review of Barnicle's columns going back to the beginning of 1996. This one fell on the other side of the line and so was not scrutinized.

Sure enough, Robinson couldn't find a trace of evidence that the events described in the column had ever happened. He confronted Barnicle, who said somebody had told him the story (about two children with cancer and their families) and he'd written it up. Without checking? Yep. And all those moving quotes from the family, where did they come from? Errr.....

And that was that. A resignation was demanded and proffered.

Storin said that the whole thing had been extremely painful and embarassing, but "at least we're all now on the same ethical page.'' The assembled newsies roared with laughter and cheered Storin. All of us--well, most of us, anyway--feel that while he may have blundered in his handling of the matter, the poor guy was whipsawed by the stress of dealing with ethical betrayals from not one but two of the paper's most prominent writers.

Indeed, the mood in the newsroom was one of relief and even a certain satisfaction. We are now free from the shadow of Barnicle once and for all. It'll take time to repair the damage, but the repairs will be made.

Let the REAL journalism begin!

Hiawatha Bray
Technology reporter
Boston Globe--and again proud of it.