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How do you judge a news site on a day like today? Breaking news tucked inside a pre-baked shell layered on top of a year’s worth of information. An anniversary commemorating what is still a running news story. A memorial that isn’t an ending. Today was not a milestone for the Internet. It was not a day of overwhelming traffic -- as far as I can tell -- or of making it up on the fly. It was, in many respects, the antithesis of the same date for most of us a year ago -- choreographed within an inch. It was an ordinary workday carrying extraordinary baggage. Some critics point to the coverage permeating the airwaves and sucking up server space and bandwidth as just another way to make money or brand a news outlet. To them, it’s a made-by-the-media event that didn’t have to be this big, this grandiose, this encompassing, this draining. I see news organizations giving a massive event the kind of coverage it deserves. I see viewers and users who have a choice.
They can let the coverage manage them or they can manage the coverage.They can, as we did out of mental self-defense last night, switch to a baseball game and then another re-run of Saturday Night Live, after checking TV news to make sure we were all still here. They can turn to the Internet instead of the TV and choose their paths or they can leave them both off. Did the news organizations have a choice? I think of them pulling punches, cutting back the coverage today and I then think of the complaints that still roll in when World War II anniversaries aren’t observed on the front page. I don’t know of any news organizations making money from this coverage, especially without advertisers. (One caveat: this would have been a good day for those with premium paid content to follow TheStreet.com’s move and go free, especially with live news video.) I’ve read many of the comments at Kuro5hin and others. I know people would like to move on, like to forget or like to think they can remember without being reminded. My DNA doesn’t work like that, perhaps because I have heard it before about the Holocaust. Why show the pictures? Why tell the stories? Why look for the truth? Why remember? Because not knowing and not remembering is oh, so dangerous. You don’t have to be whomped upside the head with it every day, and I understand why people might feel like that’s exactly what’s happening just now. But it takes time for journalists to find a middle ground. Is the coverage today too much? Taken as a whole, yes. So is a whole pie if you try to eat it at one sitting. It’s possible to pick and choose. This is not the one-size-fits-all coverage of the 1960s. Some elements online, on the air and in print I can live without but I saw very little at online journalism sites that pushed the boundaries of taste or news. For a moment, maybe two, I was tempted to leave the TV off and rely only on the Internet. Online, I could choose how many times the towers should fall or whether I would even have to look at pictures at all. Conversely, I could skip the words and look only at pictures by flitting from photo pages to slide shows. It would have been easier to work without the roll call of names being read at Ground Zero, the bell being tolled in Shanksville, Penn., or the sound of Taps. Still, without high-speed Internet access, leaving the TV on made much more sense. When I did try to use streaming TV feeds to fill a particular need, I ran into roadblocks. I was listening to the roll of names in New York when the TV feed switched to the Pentagon. I switched channels but, despite the plethora of options on my satellite dish, couldn’t find another New York feed. I subscribe to Real Network’s RealOne SuperPass, but that didn’t do me much good this morning. I was able to bring up the CNN video stream of the Pennsylvania ceremony, but when I clicked a button to enlarge the image, my screen went black. Restarting the video was unsuccessful. Unwilling to stop long enough to reboot, I started to look for another source. Do you want to watch video at ABCnews.com? Make sure you bring your credit card to sign up for ABCnews On Demand or RealOne SuperPass. (It’s no small irony that Merrill Brown, who spoke of the need to provide free video when he was at MSNBC.com, is now responsible for subscription services at RealOne.) WashingtonPost.com provided an “aha” moment with its promise of live feeds from New York, the Pentagon, and all events. I chose New York and I got President Bush speaking at the Pentagon. No offense, but that’s not what I wanted. I tried “all events” at wp.com, which was relying on the Associated Press. Still, the president. I tried the TV again and finally found the roll call on CNBC. So much for substituting online for TV. As I found when I first reviewed 9/11 coverage last fall, the Internet shines as a display case for photography. I saw several examples of then-and-now packaging. One of the most thoughtful was at SunSpot.net, which showcases Baltimore Sun photographer John Makely’s 2001 photos with 2002 updates of some of the people in those photos. The device can be overused, yet it also meets a need for those who wonder what happened to the people in the pictures. Context matters so much. In today’s print edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the recipes for flourless chocolate cake are sections away from 9/11 coverage. On the front page of STLtoday.com, “Let’s Eat” is in bolder, larger type than the news headlines to the right. It’s just one example of many scattered across the Web where headlines about 9/11 or other major events mix with the trivial and the arcane. Sites also mixed their own promotions with news. Why shouldn’t CBSnews.com’s 9/11 timeline be anchored by an ad for CBS’ own book and its DVD? It just doesn’t feel right. The NYTimes.com monthly newsletter did the same, mixing in news about the site’s coverage and archives with word of a “special collection of books.” I was so eager to see the “collection,” I failed to realize the goal literally was to sell books, especially books from The Times. Shame on me -- and shame on The Times, for blurring the lines that way. Then again, without much or any advertising from outside, it makes sense to use advertising space for what would be called “house ads” in print or, as MSNBC.com did, for a public service ad of sorts promoting post-9/11 resources. It has to be done without confusing users, or worse, making it seem as though the content is secondary to the items for sale. Sometime Tuesday night I realized I could spend all day and all night online and still not make it through half of the material so many spent so much time and energy on to mark the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. Even worse, spending too much time looking through their efforts could make it harder to gauge any single feature. There could be dozens of amazing sites that I missed. I asked for suggestions (thank you to list respondents) and I went with my instincts, trying to mix international, national and local, general and special, large and small. What follows are just a few of the items that caught my attention as I moved from site to site. Please share your own observations and links via our discussion board or the Forum option on the left of this story.
FoxNews.com’s Project Remembrance mixes photos and text -- poems, quotes, comments from “real” people -- in a combination of memorial scrapbook and time capsule. The well-meaning effort makes good use of the medium, but Fox just can’t resist showing its allegiance to the Murdoch empire. The scrapbook includes a comment from Theresa in New Braunfels suggesting the inclusion of an issue of The New York Times “to show what our main concerns were BEFORE Sept. 11 and to illustrate how our lives have changed since then …" In place of The Times, though, Fox offers the front page from Murdoch’s New York Post.Carrying through on an interactive feature from last year, the Online Journal provides a relocation map to go with the floor-by-floor tenant list?-- along with a full survey that can be downloaded as an Excel file. Another interactive feature takes the “what’s news” columns from last Sept. 11 and allows users to click on a highlighted headline for a capsule look at the story, a brief update and links to current and original stories. If you cared about any of the stories, odds are you have been following them all along. Still, it’s a good addition to an already comprehensive package.
TheStreet.com opened its premium sites for free during the day. Admirable, as was the effort that went into its coverage. But the site took an unnecessary, almost unseemly step when it patted itself on the back for its performance during last year’s crisis. The comment: “… We did some extraordinary work after the attacks, not the least of which was that we continued to publish.” The lively financial site did do some extraordinary work under extraordinary conditions, including the loss of a columnist, a staffer’s sibling and their offices?-- facts that come across clearly just in the telling of the story of that week.
BBC.com provided live feeds, regular text reports and a variety of features including online chats from New York and a message forum. Some of the messages served up a vivid reminder of how much some people resent the attention being paid to 9/11. And others offered messages of such sweet peace from around the world that it made them all worth reading. Still, jumbled together, they were an emotional seesaw.AJC.com replaced its front page with a memorial of white names on a bright blue background home-page memorial, as the first official moment of silence began in New York. That memorial was fleeting.
But the Los Angeles Daily News took in a different approach. Plugging in the usual front page URL brought up a darkish page with a slow scroll of those killed in the attacks and a small “enter the Daily News” button in the lower right. DailyNews.com is among those that make good use of membership in the AP cooperative. Not every wheel has to be reinvented. It might help if the AP did a little reinventing of its own -- the screen for the search engine for victims is so cold I thought for a second it was an error message.
Also of note: Jonathan Dube’s well-organized CyberJournalist.net guide to coverage (now housed by the American Press Institute), the Online Journal’s guide to coverage, the Poynter Institute’s 9/11 blog and Interactive Publishing’s invaluable snapshot of the Web’s news coverage.If you’ve made it this far it’s time for a break. Walk away from the computer. Take a deep breath. The Internet will still be here when you get back.
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