Social, Political, & Economic Recovery After Trade Center Attacks
By Samantha Bong

I am following coverage of social, political and economic recovery after the Trade Center attacks, focusing on New York, but also on the rest of the country.

11/13/01
BBCNews Online & Newsday
- The BBCNews story focused on people coping with the aftermath of September 11, and the Newsday story was "Rockaways victimized again." What was interesting about the BBCNews article was the way they used italics and normal text to differentiate between different elements of the story. The writer used excerpts from a WWII diary in his article, and these appeared in italics, while the rest of the story was in normal text. This provided variety for the reader. The Newsday article used 3D text boxes to provide variety between article and sidebars.

11/14/01
BBCNews Online & Wall Street Journal, print edition
- The BBCNews story was "Tragedy of New Yorkers hit twice", and the WSJ story was "CDC Is Stretched Thin as It Takes a Lead Role Fighting Bioterrorism." The WSJ used a table with colored rows to show the budget breakdown, which made me realize what a luxury color is in print. Having to make thousands of color copies gets expensive very quickly. Online, however, black and white and color make no difference as far as money goes.

11/15/01
Salon.com & NYT, print
- The NYT article focused on the new Toys 'R' Us opening on Times Square, in a post September 11 climate, and the Salon.com article focused on New Yorkers getting used to tragedy. The NYT article had a nice, big picture of the ferris wheel at Toys 'R' Us, spreading across all three columns of the story, making it clear that the columns of text and the picture were all one story. This is something that's less of a problem for online publications. The Salon.com article surprisingly had no graphical elements to break the text into more palatable portions, only their trademark breaking of the story into several pages, with a teaser at the end of the story to lure a reader on to the next section.

11/16/01
Salon.com and Newsweek
- "Out of the Ashes" and "Up From the Ashes". Salon's "Out of the Ashes" was a serious discussion of the global impact of the September 11 attacks, with no pictures. Newsweek's article was a more far-reaching article about the future of the WTC site, with beautiful pictures. What I found interesting was that with these two articles, the usual expectations of online and print journalism were turned on their head. The print publication had a large variety of graphical elements, very large font for the headline, a deck in a different font size, and a pullquote, whereas the Salon article was mostly just plain text.

11/17/01
Salon.com and Time
- Salon's "New York's Ground Zero of Grief" covered Staten Island's community values, and how that was helping them recover emotionally from September 11. Time's "The Mystery Deepens" was a factual and scientific look at the Anthrax scares. Salon had a photo montage of firefighters from Staten Island, and their usual page breakdowns, but not much else to break the monotony. Time, being a news weekly, had lush pictures and a number of color sidebars.

11/18/01
Salon.com & NYT, print
- Salon's "The Way We Thought We Were" was an introspective first person piece focusing on how much (or how little) our world view has changed since September 11, and the NYT's article focused on the monetary losses of Arts groups in Manhattan after September 11. I found the NYT article very distracting, because they had a couple of articles jostling for space, and there was a box in one corner of the article that looked like a sidebar, but turned out to be merely a correction to a previously posted crossword puzzle solution. The Salon article, on the other hand, had too many ads, but also had the advantage of "related stories" links at the bottom.

11/19/01
beliefnet.com & New York Times, print edition
- The NYT article covered lost office space on Wall Street and the Financial District, and how that was affecting morale of workers. The beliefnet article was "How can God Permit Suffering?" I found it interesting that both articles were basically discussing the same topic, that is, the effect of September 11 on the psychology of people, but the beliefnet article had a much narrower scope, targeting a very specific audience. I found the layout of the NYT article confusing, as the article had to share the page with another story of almost the same length and width, column-wise. I'd also followed a jump from the first page, and found it frustrating to have to dig through tons of newsprint to get to page D10.

11/20/01
beliefnet.com & Newsday
- The Newsday article focused on the concerns of bands playing in the Macy's Thanksgiving day Parade, after September 11, and the beliefnet article was written by a mother contemplating the last effects of September 11 on her son. I was particularly impressed with this beliefnet article, as it included a discussion board in a right frame. This did not detract from the article at all, but was there for those who were interested in participating. The Newsday article had an illustrated map of the parade route, which was an effective visual aid, but on the whole, I found that the full page of the Newsday article had much less whitespace than the beliefnet article.

11/21/01
NYTimes.com & Daily News
- NYTimes.com's "Treatment Can Ease Lingering Trauma of Sept. 11" discussed the pros and cons of therapy after September 11, and Daily News' "GOP rep eyes NY's fill 20B" was a more hard news piece about political infighting over the $20 billion budgeted for New York's recovery. Both of these stories had no graphical elements, but I preferred the NYTimes.com article because it broke the story into two pages, which made it easier to digest, overall, and enabled the reader to select topics of interest from a list, and search for related articles. In both publications, there were ads on the page, but those were easily ignored.

11/22/01
BBCNews Online & Newsweek
- The Newsweek article focused on Bloomberg's game plan as newly elected mayor, and the BBCNews article discussed the increased security in New York City. These two articles show a trend I've been noticing among print vs. online coverage of this story. The print coverage tends to be a lot more factual, very detached, whereas online coverage has focused on feelings, thoughts, emotions, and psychological impact.

11/23/01
digitaljournalist.org & Village Voice
- The Voice article discussed renewed terror in New York after the crash of Flight 587, and the digitaljournalist.org article discussed feeling victimized post-September 11th. The strange thing about these two articles was the lack of art of any sort in the online one, and the overwhelming amount of art on the Voice article. Of course, with a subject matter like the plane crash, there's a lot of good photos to be shown. The online article had shorter paragraphs, each graf was basically a sentence. There weren't really any special features about the online article, save an email link at the end of the article.

11/24/01
wired.com News & Daily News
- The Daily News article covered WTC workers having no Thanksgiving break, and the wired.com article covered the needs of the WTC workers. Wired.com had links to other related articles embedded in the article, kind of like a sidebar, but inside the article. Daily News did something similar, by having other related stories on the same page. However, I think this strategy of trying to get a reader to read other stories works better on a print page, since they don't have to do any extra work to get more content, whereas online, the related stories are still one click away. Having each story on a different page online has the advantage of providing more ad space than in print, where the number of ads and number of stories on any page are often equal.

11/25/01
BBCNews Online & Daily News, print
- The Daily News article was "New York Needs a Plan Now" and the BBCNews article covered nervousness in America after September 11. What I found interesting about the Daily News article was the use of a large, illustrated picture of many hands grabbing a spade that dug into soil that had bits of recognizable WTC wreckage. The picture took up as much room as the text, and the text was arranged around the picture attractively. This large amount of whitespace made the article very easy to read. The BBCNews article used pull-quotes to break up their story, but did not break the story up into pages. It also gave readers links to related stories on the right sidebar, a little too easily ignorable.

11/26/01
BBCNews Online & NYT, print edition
- The NYT article was about traveling by air and train over the holiday break, and the BBCNEws story was about patriotism in America over Thanksgiving. I found that the BBCNews story was divided into many portions with headers. Like most other stories in BBCNews, there was a lot of photo art for the article, but all the art was of a standard size (I assume for programming purposes), and the size was small. Whereas in the NYT print, on the same page they had many pictures of differing sizes, which offered a nice graphical element to the page. However, there was still a lot more whitespace online than in print.

Home | First Wave | Undertow | Reflections | Stepping Stones | Weblogs

Contributors | About Us | Archive