Online sports editors wrestled with a dilemma last month when Owen Hart, a professional wrestler, tragically lost his life in Kansas City during a World Wrestling Federation promotion called 'Over the Edge.'

Hart, who was 34, was making an entrance to the ring like a superhero from the ceiling. But when the cable he was connected to either broke or became disconnected, he fell 50 feet and hit his head on a turnbuckle. He died shortly thereafter at a hospital due to cardiac arrest.

With more than 20,000 passionate pro wrestling fans in Kemper Arena for the WWF production, the story was most certainly news. But was it a sports story or an entertainment story?

In the good-vs.-evil universe of the WWF, plot lines are scripted by impresario Vince McMahon and repeated from one sold-out arena to another night after night. So online sports editors had to decide: sports front or entertainment front?

If it's the unknown outcome of an athletic competition that makes an event sports, does a story about a staged enactment qualify for a sports Web site or the sports section of a news site? Because it involves wrestling, that's where an online sports fan might expect to find it.

The real question, however, is this: How much credibility are online sports editors willing to trade off for the all-but-certain accompanying traffic? If Media Metrix is to be believed, professional wrestling means big, big online numbers: Both the WWF and World Championship Wrestling (WCW) sites are consistently in the top 10 when counted among establishment sports sites like ESPN.com, SportsLine.com, NFL.com and NBA.com.

For the better part of a week following Hart's death, online sports editors traded body slams over the problem on the listserv for SportsEditor.com, the organization for online sports journalists that I founded with Mike Emmett of Total Sports.

No single subject has dominated the forum like this one has in the little more than a year SportsEditor.com has existed -- ironically, over an event that many of the nearly 200 members of the organization weren't even sure was sports!

Newspapers generally approach professional wrestling as entertainment news, in part because disdaining sports editors are jealous of every column inch. There are notable exceptions, like M.L. Curly's weekly column in the Detroit News.

The day after the accident, the Washington Post ran about two grafs on A7 in a news roundup while the Web site ran it midway down the home page. At no time did the story appear in the online sports section, according to Kevin Maguire, an online sports producer with WashingtonPost.com.

'While it was a tragic circumstance, it certainly was not a sports story,' Maguire wrote on the SportsEditor.com forum. Maguire said he and the Web site's home page editor discussed the story and came to the same conclusion: newsworthy, but not a sports story.

Most online sports sites, however, went with the story.

CBS SportsLine made it the lead package with photos and links to additional coverage on their WrestleLine section front. ESPN.com ran reports (as did Sportscenter); so did CNN/SI.com, FOXSports.com and USATODAY.com.

'We had no problem running the story as a headline news item toward the bottom since it's clearly a news story, sport or not,' wrote John Marvel, executive editor of ESPN.com, on the SportsEditor.com forum. 'In fact, because of pro wrestling's acting and scripts, it's probably that much more of a news story when real life interrupts the fantasy.'

Tim Harvey, who has reported on professional wrestling for both the print and online versions of USA TODAY, suggested a compromise for the conflicted.

'Why not simply set up a sports/entertainment page with links from the fronts of both the sports and entertainment sections?' he asked on the listserv. 'Or, if you're a sports-only site, why not create something similar to the 'news of the weird' for the lighter side of sports?

'I applaud CBS Sportsline for being the first to respond to the wants and needs of its users. I hope we all won't carry a taboo from the days of print into the information age.'

Chuck Bednar of About.com's Guide to Baseball came to the defense of pro wrestling fans who expected to look to a sports site for news of the Hart story.

'Wrestling may not be sporting competition, but I think there's little question that the performers are athletes,' he wrote. 'Perhaps the motives for running it on the sports front aren't the purest in the world, but there are a lot of sports fans out there who wanted more information about this accident.

'My point is that sports fans are quite often wrestling fans (and vice versa), and that innate link is why WWF and WCW stories like this belong on a sports page. Where else would you look?'

Several sports editors saw the debate as one between those who still think like print journalists and those who understand the Internet.

'Let's not think like a newspaper, let's think like an Internet site,' wrote Chuck Grimes of the Dallas Morning News Web site. 'Too many of us still think like we work at newspapers and think in terms of space (newshole).

'This being the Internet, we should welcome the opportunity to run all kinds of sports items, regardless of whether we feel they are sports or not. Isn't our objective to create traffic on our site without grossly compromising our credibility?'

As a former print sports editor, where circulation figures reflect the overall number of papers sold rather than how many people read the sports section, I always left the professional wrestling news to the entertainment section. For credibility's sake, it seemed to me, it was a no-brainer.

As the former sports editor of USATODAY.com, however, where page view figures demonstrate which online pages drive the bus, the traffic from professional wrestling is awfully difficult to ignore.

In the online world, it's better to be on the bus than get run over by it, even when Vince McMahon is doing the driving.