The breathtaking thing about Goldberg's article is that it should have taken less than five minutes to start worrying that something was amiss. The site itself is an unstable mix of headshots of comely lasses with come-hither glances alongside dry text about "6.1 million infertile women in America who are looking for eggs," as if the concerned geneticists running Ron's Angels would be shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that some of the male visitors might be looking for the promised "larger pictures" of the models for reasons other than assessing reproductive fitness. The layers beneath the surface are even richer -- Ron Harris' own homepage includes links to eroticboxoffice.com and the Creative Nude Network; the credit card disclaimer puts the user on notice that the site contains content of a "frankly erotic nature"; the statistics provided for evaluating the genetic fitness of the models' eggs include cup size and marital status; and the User Agreement (which disclaims the ability to assess the legality of transactions and never mentions the word "eggs") says: "We also encourage you to communicate directly with potential trading partners."

The egg auction provides the same indirection used to sell photography magazines with articles like "Guide to Proper Lighting for Nudes." The attitude is "This is a high-class establishment which has to include nude photographs, but only as part of a larger purpose." This is a form of indirection Harris knows well -- in an interview on 4porn.net, he talks about "Pussy In Your Face," an earlier web site of his that mixes Georgia O'Keefe paintings with photos of dialated vaginas.

All the attention has precipitated a flurry of redesign over at Ron's Angels. The day the Times story hit, the home page featured a headshot of a rose-wielding model and eight potential donors. The headshot was just a crop from a soft-core picture of the same model featured on eroticboxoffice. A "Czech" donor who appeared on the site on Saturday appears on eroticboxoffice as "Yana," whose accompanying text by Ron Harris read: "Her hardcore masturbation video has to be seen to be believed." In the last 48 hours, the model with the rose has been removed from both Ron's Angels and eroticboxoffice (though she's still on sweet18.com, another Harris venture), to be replaced by a smiling, wholesome model who bears a passing resemblance to Sara St. James, aka Jackie Pugh. Don't miss her three girl shot on eroticboxoffice. By the way, want some eggs?

Falling for this kind of PR stunt is bad enough, but this is the same paper that spent much of the Year of Matt Drudge hectoring the rest of us on the superior accuracy of traditional news outlets. A Times editorial during Monica-gate derided net journalism as mere entertainment, contrasting the values of the traditional press thusly: "Sound judgment pays homage to speed but reveres accuracy. News judgment can abet courage or invoke caution. News judgment is conscious and conscientious." Oops. What makes this story more than a laugh is that the rest of the press relies on the Times as a gatekeeper -- by Monday morning, less than 48 hours after it hit the Times, the story had made it as far as Denmark in the traditional media, and much further as a "Look at this!" story on mailing lists and bulletin boards worldwide. The real danger here is that if the rest of the press assumes that if you see it in the Times it's legit, then the Times ability to sniff out the real from the bogus on the web assumes a much larger role.

RonsAngels.com is not the first time the Times has been overly trusting -- last fall they had to retract a piece on Chinese translations of film titles when it was revealed that all the "research" for the piece had been done from a single humor web site -- and it won't be the last. Despite the Times' claim that the traditional press prefers accuracy to speed, the Paper of Record will continue to be vulnerable to this kind of manipulation as long as it hires reporters who think of the net as a strange land where the ordinary rules of skepticism don't apply, and where the pressure to get the story trumps the pressure to get it right. The "Ron's Angels" saga will probably not become a Journalism School case study, because in the end its lessons are so prosaic: Not all press releases are 100% truthful. Check your sources. Do a little digging. And, of course, if a story seems too good to be true, take a moment to figure out why.

Clay Shirky is a contributing editor at FEED and Professor of Media Studies at Hunter College.

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