I’ll say it one more time, the only way to scoop yourself is to sit on a story and allow someone else to break it.

In no way, shape or form can holding a story off the Web so you won’t “scoop” your print edition be a good idea for your company. And I have some first-hand proof of this.

I was looking over the Stars and Stripes traffic stats last week and I noticed a huge spike in traffic over two days. Each day was more than four times the average amount of traffic we had averaged per day in the past week. I looked around and realized that a story we broke was being linked to all over the Web: Sanchez, former U.S. commander in Iraq, calls war ‘a nightmare with no end in sight.’

Would you sit on a story like this?

The former top commander of U.S. troops in Iraq slammed the handling of the war and gave a bleak assessment of the current situation in Iraq.

“There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight,” retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told a convention of military journalists on Friday.

Sanchez commanded U.S. troops in Iraq from June 2003 to July 2004. His controversial tenure saw the capture of Saddam Hussein and the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi government, but also the rise of the insurgency and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Of course not. Any real journalist would want to get a story like that out as soon as possible. We beat the Associated Press and everyone else to the punch, which led to the story being linked on The Drudge Report, Talking Points Memo, The Huffington Post, etc.

We could have waited and just placed it online once it was in our print editions, but that would have wasted a golden opportunity. Stripes is only printed abroad, and our main audience has always been overseas military personal. We have found, however, that our Web audience is increasingly becoming U.S. based, and about two-thirds of our traffic comes from the U.S.

Our visibility in the U.S., however, is still quite low because we don’t print in the U.S. Having a story linked on Drudge is a great way to expand our audience. If 1 percent of the people Drudge linked to come back to our site weekly, it will be a big boon for us. I guarantee you that the majority of people who read that story never even heard of Stripes before or realized that we are one of the best sources for up-to-date Department of Defense information.

The Web is all about being a conversation where people organically link to one another and discuss content and stories. Stories are disseminated by new and foreign means, especially in the eyes of many print journalists. Embrace the Web and your audience and cachet will grow.

Fear the Web and your readers will go elsewhere.

And many of them have.