Tuesday, I suggested that Parade magazine’s slip up with a Benazir Bhutto interview might be permissible since the magazine is printed so far in advance of its distribution to readers.

The magazine’s publisher, Randy Siegel, said he let an interview with Bhutto go out without an update because the issue had already been printed before her death and the interview would still be relevant to readers. So it arrived at millions of doorsteps as if Bhutto was alive and (correctly) still fearing for her life.

“Fair enough,” I wrote, responding to Publisher Randy Siegel’s explanation.

Later that day, Poynter Online’s Amy Gahran used the exact phrase I did in response to Siegel’s defense. Then she did a great job aggregating the backlash to Parade’s press-time faux pas.

And apparently, “fair enough” was not what some readers were thinking.

If you judge from her post, there’s plenty of discontent over Bhutto’s posthumous appearance in some of America’s most hallowed newspapers. As you might have read in my earlier entry, The Washington Post was among the many that issued editors’ notes addressing the confusion.

Much of the debate over the interview surrounds whether news organizations should print material so long before they reach readers (in Parade’s case, about two weeks) — and whether they should reprint material, even at great cost, in light of significant news developments.

The questions are prescient. Have cost cuts in print media set a new and higher bar for stopping the presses? Exactly how late, or how wrong, must a story be to merit an update?

If you read your Sunday paper, you might have noticed the posthumous interview with Benazir Bhutto that that ran in Parade. The magazine’s publisher, Randy Siegel, said it went to press before the former Pakistani prime minister was killed, too late to avoid a litany of editor’s notes.

Fair enough. But what if a piece of news came too early for publication? That’s the dilemma Bhutto posed to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

On Oct. 26, Bhutto spokesman Mark Siegel sent Blitzer an e-mail from Bhutto on the condition that it would not be published unless Bhutto was assassinated. Blitzer, who revealed the message hours after her death, said he agreed not to publish the material before he received the e-mail.

A key point in Bhutto’s letter was that if anything happened to her, she would hold Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf responsible. (An excerpt from her note, in which she uses the letter U to address Blitzer, gives her writing an informal air.)

In defending his actions, Blitzer noted that Bhutto previously wrote about her security concerns for CNN.com. “I didn’t really think that it was a story we were missing out on,” he said. “I don’t think the viewers were done any disservice by my trying to hold on to this.”

I share this story from the Ithaca Journal in upstate New York (http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071229/NEWS01/712290341/1002) not because I’m quoted in it, but because it’s a well-executed examination of the newspaper’s decision to let people post anonymous comments after stories at its web site. Newspaper editors and ombudsmen often explain editorial decisions in columns, but you rarely see stories and reporting like this. I think it serves readers well.