The Waco watch.

Bob Lott, the fifty-one-year-old editor of the Waco Dibune-He|'aM, was settling into his chair for yet another interview with an out-of-town journalist when a voice over the newsroom loudspeaker announced that the water in the Tribune-Herald building would be off for an hour. On the street below

"CIA or FBI?" the editor wondered aloud, chuckling.

Lott had reason to feel besieged. Since the last weekend in February, when the Tribune-Herald launched its extraordinary seven-part series about a secretive, little-known religious cult that calls itself Branch Davidian, he and his colleagues have been burfeted by an avalanche of letters, faxes, phone calls, and around-the-world requests for interviews and information. Suddenly, they found themselves in the uncomfortable glare of publicity and public scrutiny that comes with being caught up in a major news story.

It was an unfamiliar role for what Lott calls "a small-town paper" in an unprepossessing Texas town whose chief claims to fame had been as the home of Baylor University and as the birthplace of Dr Pepper and Steve Martin. In the 100-year history of the Tribune-Herald, only a 1953 tornado that swept away Waco's downtown and claimed 114 lives rivals the impact of the Branch Davidian story.

Like that powerful tornado, the story spiraled outward, drawing the Tribune-Herald and other media outlets into ethical and legal turmoil that will last far longer than the standoff between cult members and law-enforcement authorities. Nearly three weeks into the siege, the Tribune-Herald and its parent companies, Cox Enterprises and Cox Texas Publications, were sued by John T. Risenhoover, one of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents wounded in the February 28 raid on Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidian compound. And the Texas Rangers, the investigative arm of the Texas Department of Public Safety, acknowledged an ongoing investigation into whether employees of the Tribune-Herald or of KWTX-TV, Waco's CBS affiliate, tipped off cult members that a raid was imminent. For her part, a cult member who decided to leave the compound says the tip came, not from the media, but from another cult member who called in from outside.

The legal challenges and the saturation coverage of the Branch Davidian standoff raised fundamental questions about the way journalists do their jobs. The questions center on the responsibilities that come into play as a result of the instantaneous nature of contemporary news coverage and of what seems to be an increasing tendency for reporters and broadcasters to become, however inadvertently, part of the stories they cover. It happened almost immediately in Waco: