It had all the trappings of a hot story: A highly visible high-tech gossip columnist gets sent to newspaper Gulag after using her friendship with a .com Silicon Valley executive to buy stock at insider prices, sell them at a profit and write about her adventure.

Yet Mercury Center, the Web site of the San Jose Mercury News, was strangely quiet in the days and weeks after the paper's executive editor suspended columnist Chris Nolan for what he considered to be a clear transgression of conflict-of-interest codes and principles.

Elsewhere on the Web, Nolan's admirers slapped up a "Friends Supporting Chris Nolan" site urging readers to write to the Mercury News "if you agree that... [it] has unfairly persecuted a writer." One widely read journalism discussion group buzzed with debate over whether the punishment fit the crime -- and whether Nolan's editor, whom she had consulted, had gotten off too easily.

A spate of articles followed close behind -- in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired and elsewhere. Some articles chastised Mercury News Executive Editor David Yarnold for being too harsh in his penalty. Others questioned whether the conflict-of-interest rules for business journalists needed an overhaul.

The debate was lively, if not always well-reasoned or balanced. But then, such is life on the Internet.

And if readers sought a discussion of the controversy on Mercury Center, they didn't find a way to interact with the Web site. This seemed surprising, considering that the Mercury News has sought a national following for its coverage of high technology. In some respects, the newspaper also set a standard of online openness when the work of one of its reporters came under fire three years ago.

Mercury Center posted two staff-written articles chronicling Nolan's suspension and subsequent reassignment. Ten days and lots of angry letters later, it posted a column Yarnold penned to explain his decision. Readers also could review the Mercury News' ethics policy, written in 1984. But no links were provided to the journalistic debate raging online, nor to Nolan's Fortune article, nor to the letter she wrote defending her actions.

"It really came down to a matter of time and resources," Mercury Center Managing Editor Bruce Koon says of the extent to which his Web staff followed the Nolan flap. No one, he added, applied pressure from above to limit the scope of coverage.

Patricia Sullivan, the Mercury Center editor who handled the story, says the decision was hers alone.

"In the end Bruce said to me, 'Your call.' … My philosophy tends to be, when possible, link. I guess I am suggesting that maybe I should have made a different decision."

The handling of Nolan's story stands in sharp contrast to Mercury Center's decision, three years earlier, to publicly air the controversy over reporter Gary Webb's investigative series, "Dark Alliance." The series suggested a clear tie between the drug trading of CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contra operatives and the onset of the crack-cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles in the 1980s. No sooner had it stirred sharp reaction across the country than several major newspapers, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times among them, wrote articles highly critical of Webb's reporting and the story's conclusions.

Webb's series and supporting documents remained online. But they were linked to the articles critical of the series. Mercury Center also ran a spirited forum in which readers expressed a wide range of views, Koon says.

In the end, the paper's openness drew praise even as the Webb series drew withering criticism.

"I think we handled it the right way," says projects reporter Peter Carey, who drew the unenviable assignment of investigating Webb's conclusions. "I don't know why we're not linking to criticism [in the Nolan case]. It's a hot little story. It's news. People want to know about it."

Jerry Ceppos, then executive editor of the Mercury News and now vice president of the newspaper division for parent company Knight Ridder, declined to comment on his decisions during "Dark Alliance."

Yarnold, who replaced Ceppos earlier this year, also declined comment, saying he felt uncomfortable being interviewed while the Nolan case is in arbitration.

Choosing her words carefully, Sullivan seemed to suggest publicly what several reporters voiced privately: That management, while stopping short of trying to censor in-house disagreement, wasn't keen on encouraging robust debate over the Nolan case.

"There had been a lot of coverage and I think the sense in the newsroom was that [Yarnold's] column should be the official version," Sullivan said. "Maybe our responsibility on the Web is to go further because we are an interactive medium. Maybe we should have pushed the parameters further. We didn't and maybe we need to learn from that."

(Note: On Sept. 4, 1999, seven weeks after the Chris Nolan controversy broke, the San Jose Mercury News posted readers' letters about the controversy on its Web site.)