I didn’t sleep much last Wednesday night, February 21. Earlier that day I had researched, reported, and written a 1750-word column on the Globe’s extraordinary page-one statement in that morning’s editions regarding a story it had published on February 16. That front-page exclusive, reporting that investigators believed the murders of Dartmouth College professors Half and Susanne Zantop were connected to an extramarital affair involving Half Zantop, had fallen apart within hours of publication, when authorities identified 17-year-old Robert Tulloch as one of the suspects. On February 20, Tulloch and James Parker, 16, both of Chelsea, Vermont, were arrested at an Indiana truck stop and charged with first-degree murder.

In last week’s column I blasted the Globe for running the love-affair story in the first place, while giving a full airing to the views of editor Matt Storin, deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr., and staff writer Mitch Zuckoff, who was the lead reporter on the piece. And, believing the Herald had gotten away with its own overzealous reporting, I took the paper to task for pursuing Stanley Williams, an Arizona State University professor and acquaintance of the Zantops whose car had been impounded in New Hampshire and who had been questioned by authorities, but who had never been identified as a suspect; I also quoted editor Andy Costello, who defended the Herald’s coverage.

By mid-afternoon, my column was linked from Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews.org Web site, the go-to spot for media junkies across the country. By the end of the day, the printed version arrived in the Phoenix newsroom. The headline: IN COLD TYPE, with a subhead of BEHIND THE GLOBE’S MEA CULPA; THE HERALD OVERHYPES A THEORY. A job well done? I thought so. I hoped so.

Within a few hours, I learned otherwise. In talking with colleagues and sources, and in continuing to think through the rather astounding events of the previous week, I concluded that I had misunderstood the chain of events at the Globe; that, in some respects, I had been too easy on the Globe, especially regarding the defensive tone of Storin’s statement; and that I had unintentionally left the impression with some readers that I considered the Herald’s misstep equal to the Globe’s, which I certainly do not. Worst of all, I used an unattributed comment from a background conversation with Herald staffer Tom Mashberg without getting clearance from him first. I protect my sources; the only reason I’m mentioning this is that Mashberg has already posted a letter about it on MediaNews.org. (His letter also appears in this week’s Phoenix.)

Much of my column holds up. Some of it doesn’t. But I didn’t get the context and nuance right, and in a case where the facts were already known (that is, the facts about what’s been reported and by whom; the really important facts about this case remain a mystery), context and nuance were everything.

For instance, it was only after I had filed that I learned what a landmark the Globe’s front-page statement/apology/correction/what-have-you really was. It turns out that the last time the Globe ran a page-one correction was in 1987, when it had to retract a story claiming that George Keverian, then the Speaker of the Massachusetts House, was aware of accusations that some of his male staff members were harassing female aides. Thus, the February 21 statement was even bigger news than many readers might have realized.

Who watches the watchdog? Though someone may take me to task publicly, there is no one in Boston whose job it is to keep the same sort of eye on me that I try to keep on the Globe and the Herald. Rather than an exercise in self-flagellation, I would prefer to think of this as self-ombudsmanship. (This column is actually an updated version of a piece posted on BostonPhoenix.com last Friday morning, February 23.) So here it goes.

• The Globe. On the February 21 Greater Boston (WGBH-TV, Channel 2), Emily Rooney hosted three commentators — Bob Zelnick, a Boston University journalism professor and former network-news reporter; Jerry Lanson, an Emerson College journalism professor; and Marshall Ingwerson, managing editor of the Christian Science Monitor. (Disclosure: I’m a semi-regular paid guest on Greater Boston.) Lanson faulted the Globe for running the story in the first place, and told me in a follow-up e-mail, “Editors need to say, ‘Now wait a minute. Is it worth trashing someone’s life on a speculative story based on anonymous sources?’” Lanson makes an important distinction between the role of reporters, whose job it is to dig up whatever information they can, and editors, who must decide whether such information meets their standards for publication.

The panelists also made an excellent point I wish I’d made: the Globe should not have waited until February 21 to issue its page-one statement, because it was perfectly clear by the night of February 16, when Tulloch was identified as a suspect, that its story had fallen apart. Storin and other Globe sources have said they waited as long as they did because their sources were still standing behind the love-triangle theory. But wasn’t it obvious that the sources were wrong?

Rooney, in a reported segment that preceded the discussion, also asked Storin a question I wish I’d asked him: were the three anonymous law-enforcement officials the Globe had cited truly independent, or was one feeding information to the other two? Storin answered that two of the sources may have been connected, but that the third was not. Well, that’s approximately one short of three independent sources.

There is also the whole matter of the tone of Storin’s page-one statement, headlined TO OUR READERS. Though he was forthright in admitting that “the extramarital affair theory is not correct,” and in expressing “regret for the pain our story undoubtedly caused,” he never came out and said what I think he should have said: that the original story should not have asserted so boldly — right in the lead — that the killings “were crimes of passion, most likely resulting from an adulterous love affair involving Half Zantop, according to authorities close to the case.” At the very least, the story shouldn’t have led the paper. And, in my view, it shouldn’t have run at all.

Which brings me to the story’s essential flaw. I have no doubt that the Globe’s story was accurate in the sense that three sources (or two independent sources) believed an affair involving Half Zantop was the most likely motive. But the story gave no sense of why the sources believed that. Was there unambiguous evidence? Did investigators have any possible suspects? Or had a love affair simply emerged as the leading theory in the absence of any other evidence? The story itself stated that investigators “remained open to other possibilities,” but that caution was obliterated by the bold lead and the headline, LOVE AFFAIR EYED IN N.H. KILLINGS.

Yes, Storin, Bradlee, and Zuckoff insist that if only they could reveal their sources and what information they provided, we would all agree that the article was solid, and that the Globe was simply the victim of a rapidly shifting investigation. And yes, Zuckoff and Shelley Murphy, whose byline also appeared on the story, are veteran reporters, highly respected by their peers. But strictly from a reader’s point of view, the piece looks to be entirely speculative. In any murder of this nature, a love triangle is one of the first theories investigators consider. The Globe would like us to believe that the information it had added up to a lot more than mere speculation, but the paper, understandably, can’t reveal its sources — and, thus, can’t convince us. Storin, in his statement, should have explained under what circumstances he thinks it’s proper to go with what was never more than speculation — well-informed speculation though it may have been. In the end, it comes down to standards, and we still don’t know what the standards are.

Finally, I reported that Bradlee had told me the story was originally supposed to run on Sunday, February 18, but was moved up two days because of fear that the Globe might get beaten. In fact, the Globe had been working on an in-depth profile of the Zantops for the Sunday paper, but when the love-affair angle emerged, that story and the profile were moved up two days. A small point, perhaps, but the way I had originally worded it made it look as if the Globe’s editors had considered sitting on the story of the alleged love affair. They should have; but they didn’t.

• The Herald. Early in the investigation, the New Hampshire attorney general’s office announced that it was questioning an Arizona man who had some connection to the Zantops. It soon emerged that the man was Stanley Williams, an Arizona State University volcano expert who knew the Zantops and who was an occasional visitor at their home. In a case in which authorities were leaking very little, and in which there appeared to be no leads, the Williams angle was intriguing. He was visiting Dartmouth around the time of the murders, and his car was impounded at the Manchester Airport and examined by investigators (a fact I should have noted in my column). Authorities also traveled to Arizona to question him. But he was never at any time identified as a suspect.

The Herald pursued the Williams angle hard — too hard, in my view. The most egregious example was a February 14 piece by Herald staffer Franci Richardson, revealing that a forthcoming book claimed that Williams, in 1993, had “allegedly failed to heed scientific data that warned of the January 1993 eruption of the Galera Volcano in Colombia,” which resulted in the deaths of six people who were with him, “and then falsely claimed to be the only survivor.” Even though the story ran on page 16, to me — and to other people whom I asked to read the article — the clear impression was that Williams was being portrayed as a very odd character who still might make it onto the list of suspects. Having been identified by law enforcement, Williams was then victimized by the press. Williams’s wife, Lynda Williams, is circulating a letter alleging harassment by the media, including the Globe but especially the Herald. It’s not fair, but it’s hardly unusual; just ask Richard Jewell. (An edited version of Williams’s letter was published by the Dartmouth, the college’s student newspaper. That letter, as well as others pertaining to the media’s coverage — including one by Matt Storin — can be found at www.thedartmouth.com.)

Trouble is, in last week’s column I failed to put the Williams angle in the proper context — something the Herald’s managing editor for news, Andrew Gully, expressed to me with, uh, great force and conviction after he’d read last week’s column. On reflection, I think he’s right, at least on that point. There is no question that New Hampshire authorities, in their dealings with Williams, gave all the appearance of having a lead, and they spoke publicly about it. That’s a very different situation from that of the Globe story. Richardson’s story shouldn’t have run, but it was a lapse; the Globe’s, by contrast, was a monumental error, as the paper itself acknowledged by correcting it on page one.

If I had summarized the Herald’s Williams coverage in a paragraph or two to illustrate the competitive pressures all news organizations were under, I would have made my point. Instead, I made it look as if the Globe’s and the Herald’s misjudgments were somehow equivalent — something I never believed and did not intend to do.

• The competitive chase. The final bit of context, which I barely touched on in last week’s column, was a reference to how much more aggressively the Herald has been working the story than the Globe. That was true before the “love triangle” story, but it’s been even more obvious since. Simply put, the Globe, reeling from its discredited exclusive, seems unable to keep up.

Nearly every day, the Herald offers more detail, more color, and more insight into the lives of the victims and the suspects — not to mention more stories, sidebars, and columns, while the Globe has on some days been content to run just one piece.

My objection to her Stanley Williams story aside, Franci Richardson and her colleagues have been producing a prodigious quantity of first-rate reporting. Perhaps the most striking example was on February 19. On the same day the Globe was reporting that authorities still hadn’t found the murder weapon, the Herald — in a five-reporter effort — revealed that the suspects had allegedly purchased the knife on the Internet, that a sheath for the knife was found on the scene, and that a fingerprint on the sheath had been traced to one of the suspects. The Herald even had a sidebar on how easy it is to buy knives online.

It’s not that the Globe’s coverage has been uniformly awful. There have been a few high points, such as a February 20 feature, with a striking page-one photo, of the truck driver who gave Tulloch and Parker a ride to Indiana and was fired for his kindness. The Globe also has understandably seemed ambivalent about how hard to cover the case, on the one hand being loath to emulate the Herald’s clear-out-the-newsroom style to cover what is, after all, just another tragic murder, but on the other hand not wanting to get beaten. But on more days than not, the first read is the Herald, not the Globe.

Pointing this out wouldn’t have changed the overall thrust of my first column; it would, however, have established the backdrop against which the events of the past week have played out.

One point I did make in last week’s column, and which bears repeating, is the unusual nature of the investigation. New Hampshire law-enforcement officials are doing something that most reporters find rare: they’re not talking much, and they’re leaking even less. Hanover isn’t Greater Boston; it’s a small-town environment where everyone knows everyone else, and reporters are seen as outsiders not to be trusted. Authorities must also take care not to release information that would bias the jury pool, which is also a harder trick in New Hampshire. Grafton County, where the trial would presumably take place, has a population of just 78,570, according to Census figures. By contrast, in Greater Boston, Suffolk County’s population is 641,695; Middlesex County’s, 1.43 million. In other words, it’s a lot easier to find suitably unprejudiced jurors in Massachusetts than in New Hampshire. In covering the Zantop murders, the media have been operating in an information vacuum. That vacuum has led, inevitably, to missteps. Now ABC News and the Globe have been leading the charge in reporting that authorities are trying to determine whether one or both suspects were attracted to neo-Nazi hate literature; time will tell whether that angle will pan out.

They say confession is good for the soul. I don’t know. I do know that I believe this column will hold up better than last week’s. I think of it as a combination of the second draft I never got to write and an assessment of what I should have done differently.

Perhaps what I find most frustrating is that, in the course of criticizing the Globe (and, yes, to a lesser extent the Herald) for making misjudgments in the face of deadline pressure and competitive worries, I ended up doing the same thing myself. I think the way I closed last week’s column works just fine for this one, too: it’s not pretty. It never is.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.