After the Sept. 11 attacks 10 years ago, CyberJournalist.net covered the online coverage and shared some of the best online journalism done at the time. Unfortunately due to the ephemeral nature of the web most of that coverage is long gone. With the anniversary nearing, we’ve combed through scores of the links from that era, and have gathered here the major online journalism packages done at the time that still survive online.
They reveal a fascinating glimpse at how online journalism has evolved in the past 10 years. At the time, this was considered some of the best online journalism ever done, and many of these examples won major awards. While the interactivity, multimedia and design elements look rudimentary by today’s standards, the journalism itself remains remarkable to this day.
Here is some of the original coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks from 10 years ago:
Collections of complete coverage of the attacks
- USA Today: The newspaper’s site has preserved a nice archive. The “America on Alert” index includes related graphics and multimedia and even links to all the “key stories” from Sept. 11 and since then, broken down by day.
- The New York Times: Unfortunately The Times no longer has a complete Sept. 11 archive online in one place, although most of the stories still live on. It’s original “A Nation Challenged” page is mostly a shell, but the powerful “Portraits of Grief” section remains live and searchable. The front page of it is mostly blank, but click on the navigation and the full content is there.
- CNN.com: Complete coverage of the war on terror, plus day-by-day archived coverage of the week of the attacks.
- BBC: A nice package on “America’s Day of Terror,” plus complete coverage of the war on terror in the months afterward.
Interesting examples of online storytelling
- Washington Post: Virtual flyover of ground zero
- Washington Post: Panoramic photos of ground zero
- CNN Damage Report Maps
- USA Today graphics
- GeoEye: Images before and after of the World Trade Center
- GeoEye: Images before and after of the Pentagon
- CNN.com: American’s New War flash presentation
- El Mundo: Spanish flash presentation
- BBC: Chronology of Events on September 11
Screenshots of online coverage
Here are the home pages of CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times — note that they had to strip the homepages bare in order to handle the record traffic load — something that presumably wouldn’t happen today.
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- msnbc.com home page on Sept. 11, 2001
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- cnn.com home page on Sept. 11, 2001
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- nytimes.com home page on Sept. 11, 2001
More screenshots of coverage
- Interactive Publishing’s Digital Archive: A collection of screen shots from 230 news Web sites around the world on Sep 11 and 12.
- More Screen Shots: More screen shots of online news sites covering the attacks (Compiled by Craig Saila)
Newspaper front pages
- The best collection of newspaper front pages from the attacks has been published in this beautiful book, titled simply “September 11, 2001.” You can get it for less than $10 on Amazon via this link now, and it’s a great coffee table book. If nothing else, you may want to click on the link and go to the Search Inside this Book feature to browse some of the front pages for free.
- For those interesting in television coverage, the Internet Archive has put together an amazing archive of TV coverage of the attacks. More than 20 channels were recorded with more than 3,000 hours of television. Besides major U.S. networks like ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, the Internet Archive has posted online TV recordings from Moscow, Paris, London, Baghdad, Tokyo, Ottawa and elsewhere. The site is available at http://www.archive.org/details/911/day
Even more online coverage
Archive-It and the National September 11 Memorial Museum has collected thousands of more links related to the attacks here. If you find anything particularly noteworthy among these links, please post about it in the comments and include the link.
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