A time-honored Washington practice of trying to extinguish, pre-empt, or redirect news coverage by dumping stacks of previously secret government documents on the press may be in for some changes after a headlong collision with hundreds of liberal Web loggers in the wee hours of yesterday morning.

On Monday night, the Justice Department delivered to Congress more than 3,000 pages of e-mails, memos, and other records about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. The handover came so late that many news organizations had to scramble to try to skim a few headlines from the files before latenight deadlines.

Despite the late hour, readers of a liberal Web site, tpmmuckraker.com, tackled the task with gusto. They quickly began grabbing 50-page chunks of the scanned documents from a House of Representatives Internet server, analyzing them and excerpting them. The first post about the Department of Justice records hit the left-leaning news and commentary site at 1:04 a.m. Within half an hour, there were 50 summaries posted by readers gleaning the documents. By 4:30 a.m., more than 220 postings were up detailing various aspects of the files.

Several early posts seized on one prosecutor, Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich., who was stunned by her firing and scrambled for another appointment in government, citing personal financial issues. Others pointed to records recommending that the attorney firing plan be cleared with “Karl’s shop,” meaning the office of President Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove. Still others noted ambiguities about whether Mr. Bush was personally involved in approving the dismissals.

An attorney who helped President Clinton manage Whitewater and other scandals, Mark Fabiani, said the immediate and intense scrutiny from hundreds of sets of eyes would have experts in crisis communications reconsidering some of their tactics.

“You’re right to regard it as a major development,” Mr. Fabiani told The New York Sun. “It could really change the way things get done.”

Mr. Fabiani cautioned that Monday night’s release was not a great example of a document dump. “It was more of a forced disgorgement by Congress and by public pressure,” he said. “You never want to get into the situation the White House is in now, where the documents they’re putting out just fuel the fire.”

At the Clinton White House, Mr. Fabiani’s preference was to release potentially damaging information right before the weekend. “My friends in the media used to call them Fabiani Fridays. … You had hard-copies of stuff. You’d put them all in a room,” he said. “We would say to people, ‘Here are six stacks. You go on through them.'” The NBC television show “The West Wing” immortalized the practice in an episode titled “Taking Out the Trash.”

Mr. Fabiani said some of that would be less effective in the face of legions of bloggers willing to pool their findings. In the Whitewater era, he said, “There was competition among the reporters.” As a result, individual journalists reviewing the records often never made it through all of them and had to run with the first interesting nugget they came across. “The stories were all over the place,” the attorney said. “No one was going to go back and retrace their steps.”

Efforts similar to the dissection of the U.S. attorneys’ records have been mounted before, but none with the speed and scope of yesterday’s review. Conservative bloggers cast doubt on the documents that CBS News used for a story in 2004 questioning President Bush’s National Guard service, but that story involved the intensive analysis of relatively few documents. In 2005, a conservative radio host, Hugh Hewitt, and his producer, Duane Patterson, organized a so-called blogswarm to “adopt a box” of presidential library materials about then-chief justice nominee, John Roberts, in search of materials Democrats might try to use against Mr. Roberts. However, that work was essentially a second pass at records already sifted by the press.

Some of the bloggers involved in yesterday’s effort showed unusual diligence, such as turning to Photoshop software to enhance hard-to-read handwriting. Others found mistakes where names deleted from some pages could be made out in others.

Still, the undertaking was not without its problems. For one thing, the lack of any central direction or assignments led to a huge duplication of effort, as well as repetitive posts in which bloggers recounted their identical “Eureka!” moments. Early this morning, one sensible poster suggested a Wikipedia-type Web page would be more efficient at organizing information than the comments section of a blog.

Some posters also overreacted to previously published details of the story and tried to divine grand meaning from mundane details, like White House Internet addresses professional Washington reporters would instantly recognize. Some important statements were also misinterpreted, as when a blogger said an e-mail speaking of “de minimis” reasons for Ms. Chiara’s dismissal meant administration officials thought they could easily defend it. Actually, the e-mail said the opposite.

The next major blogswarm is already underway. Citizens Against Government Waste is urging Internet users to take a first-hand look at the Iraq-related appropriations bill and highlight so-called pork spending slipped into the legislation.