News Web Sites Could Not Compete With TV

By: WAYNE ROBINS When the unexpected met the unimaginable in Tuesday morning's terrorist attacks on the East Coast, newspaper Web sites were no match for the numbing live and taped pictures of the catastrophe broadcast on TV. The story, after all, wasn't about a 24-hour news cycle: It was war, an unnatural disaster, with horrific developments overlapping before your eyes with such speed that the brain -- never mind the computer keyboard -- couldn't process the information.

Subscribers to The New York Times Direct, the e-mail headline edition with links to The New York Times on the Web (http://www.nytimes.com), received four news alerts between 10:02 and 10:38 a.m. EDT. The first two were both timed at 10:02: "Plane Crashes Into World Trade Center," followed immediately by "Second Plane Crashes Into World Trade Center."

The first crash was said to have occurred around 8:45 a.m. At 10:12, a news alert gave word of a plane crashing into the Pentagon, while at 10:38 came the alert: "World Trade Tower Collapses."

There is an explanation for those who noticed that the graphics did not load on The New York Times on the Web. "Our first priority is to get the news out. So we stopped serving ads pretty soon after the news broke. We have also suspended registration -- the site is available to all users right now. It is running a bit slower than usual due to the increased traffic, but we are currently reconfiguring additional servers to balance the load," said Christine Mohan, a spokeswoman for The New York Times' online operation.

The main Times story was written by Terence Neilan. Subsequent stories were combination staff and wire reports of The Associated Press, and Reuters. The unprecedented dimensions of the tragedy may have been signified by the fact that an AP reporter interviewed a Reuters reporter in an early report from St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, where many of the burn victims were taken. AP, as is so often the case in times of immediate breaking news, led the way with both speed and thoroughness, though it was impossible to answer the questions journalists must ask: How many dead? How many injured? Even three hours after the attack on the Twin Towers, and reports of another jet crashing south of Pittsburgh, there was admirable restraint on the part of both reporters and government officials in trying to quantify what would most likely be a body count with the potential to boggle the mind and lay third-degree burns on the national psyche.

Washingtonpost.com's home page (http://www.washingtonpost.com) was as spare as the event was profound. "Planes Crash Into World Trade Center; Explosion Rocks Pentagon," was a headline in blue against an almost totally white backdrop, blank except for a live video, provided by Post partner MSNBC, of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The Post, which has been a leader in newspaper Web sites using video camera work, also had a link to a Webcam focused on the Pentagon fire that resulted from another terrorist plane crash. Close to the bottom of the page were two related headlines, and then a long blue line that linked to "The Rest of the washingtonpost.com Home Page."

Among the New York-area tabloid Web sites, only Newsday.com (http://www.newsday.com) carried an early main story by staff writers -- Mae Cheng and Amanda Barrett. They had an eyewitness, Newsday.com's own Diane Goldie, who watched the attack and aftermath from her apartment on Duane Street, near the World Trade Center. After the first plane hit one of the towers, she said, "Part of the building flew through the air. It looked like confetti raining down. ..."

The New York Daily News' online edition carried a dramatic breaking-news head at the top of its site (http://www.nydailynews.com): "Twin Towers Collapse After Terrorist Plane Strike," and "I Just Saw the Top of Trade 2 Come Down." The stories were both by the AP: national writer Jerry Schwartz wrote the first, special correspondent Helen O'Neill the second. Another hed, in smaller type, also informed readers that the long-awaited New York mayoral primary elections had been postponed.

At that same time -- 10:58 a.m. EDT -- the New York Post's Web site (http://www.nypost.com), had a small "This Just In ... Planes Crash Into World Trade Center" on its site, an afterthought to a story on Democratic mayoral candidate Mark Green. A click on the crash link featured a dry, early AP story under a sexy banner ad for MTV Video Music awards' "expanded photo coverage."

Among the national dailies, USAToday.com (http://www.usatoday.com) was crisply laid out, with the hed: "Terror rains down on USA" and subhed "Planes slam into World Trade Center, Pentagon; America shocked by terrorism devastation." The location of USA Today headquarters in Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington, gave it easy access to an NBC helicopter shot of the Pentagon explosion -- below it was a horrifying shot of the smoke and ash billowing from the World Trade Center like Vesuvius erupting: "Nightmare scene unfolds on streets of New York City." It was accurate, it was true, it was compelling, but looking at the site, one could hardly wait to get back not to reality TV but to to the visceral, incomprehensible reality captured by TV. That is, if one could only stand it. "I just watched the World Trade Center tower collapse," said a writer for The Wall Street Journal, whose home office is almost adjacent to the World Trade Center. The writer was home, about a mile north, in Greenwich Village. "Everyone in the streets here -- Washington Square -- came out with cameras but they turned away, a lot of them, in tears."