For Shaquanda Cotton--Cyberspace Mattered

Tribune reporter Howard Witt hasn't seen a reaction to a story quite like the one he got after writing about a controversy in the small Texas town of Paris.

If you had Googled the black girl's name, Shaquanda Cotton, the day before the story was published on the front page of the March 12 edition of the Tribune, you would have gotten zero results. On Monday afternoon, there were more than 35,000 hits.

The story has been picked up on more than 300 blogs around the country, many of them concerned with African-American affairs. It has generated thousands of postings to Internet message boards.