Reading and Reacting Across the United States

By: Joe Strupp From readers scalping copies of extra editions in Arizona to a moment of silence in an Illinois newsroom to a photographer in New Jersey hitching a tugboat ride to reach ground zero, newspapers and their readers reacted to Tuesday's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in a way never before seen on a national scale.

Within hours of the hijacked-plane crashes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, scores of newspapers across the country hit the streets with extras that chronicled the attacks and provided personal accounts of the tragedy, while reporters and photographers sought to give readers a perspective and emotion not found in the nonstop broadcast coverage.

At least 116 daily newspapers printed extras the day of the attacks, according to Poynter.org, which monitors news coverage. At the La Crosse (Wis.) Tribune, circulation 30,936, to The Washington Post, circulation 802,594, the story not only dominated entire news sections but also spilled over into the sports, feature, and business wells, while sparking pumped-up press runs rivaling those of World War II.

In Washington, both major dailies put out extras Tuesday, efforts that were but a prelude to big moves made for the Wednesday morning papers. The Washington Post on Wednesday carried a triple-bank headline over a shot of the second jet approaching the World Trade Center. Its front page alone carried eight staff bylines -- 45 more appeared inside the "A" section.

The story also prompted several unusual events at papers outside the targeted cities.

For The Record in Hackensack, N.J., photographer Thomas E. Franklin shot what many are calling the symbol of the tragedy. Reminiscent of the famed picture of Marines propping up the American flag at Iwo Jima in World War II, the photo shows three firefighters doing the same thing with a flag in the midst of the World Trade Center ruins. "It told of more than just death and destruction," Franklin, who hopped a tugboat to get to the scene, wrote in a personal account Thursday.

At The Detroit News, features reporter Michael Hodges was dispatched to New York Tuesday evening to report from the scene. Unable to catch a flight due to the grounding of all airliners, he drove more than 20 hours to get to the action.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's fashion writer, in New York to cover Fashion Week, found herself working in the unfamiliar territory of breaking news, while a business reporter in Washington for training pitched in to help the paper's capital bureau.

At the same time, two Indianapolis Star staffers on vacation in New York when the attack occurred contributed eyewitness accounts to their paper's coverage.

Chicago Sun-Times Vice President for Editorial John Cruickshank assembled reporters and editors shortly after the attack Tuesday and called for a moment of silence. The Sun-Times on Friday also published a two-page American flag with an excerpt from the National Anthem.

In the same city, the Chicago Tribune published what it called an "unprecedented" evening extra Tuesday, a 24-page broadsheet. Its Wednesday paper included no food section, no features section (which usually carries the comics), and no weekly "Women's News" or "Working" columns.

Although The New York Times -- unlike Long Island, N.Y.-based Newsday and the New York Post -- published no extra editions, 10 of the New York Times Co.'s 14 regional newspapers printed extras, as did the Times Co.-owned Boston Globe.

The Globe's rival Boston Herald flexed its investigative muscle to break several stories Wednesday, reporting that law-enforcement officials in Massachusetts identified at least five Arab men as suspects in the attacks launched from Logan International Airport, that a car laden with Arabic-language flight-training manuals was seized in the Logan parking garage, and that, once airborne, the hijackers on one of the flights used makeshift knives from shaving kits and other sources.

Some 75 of Gannett Co. Inc.'s 97 daily papers also published extras Tuesday, with six even publishing a second extra.

Around Pittsburgh, 80 miles north of the Pennsylvania plane crash site, the Greensburg-based Tribune-Review produced four special sections in 24 hours and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran its first extra since Pearl Harbor, editors said.

Out West, all major dailies contacted by E&P published extras or significantly boosted press runs.

The San Diego Union-Tribune published an extra Tuesday, selling about 46,000 copies. The Copley Press Inc. paper upped its regular press run on Wednesday, and it printed a full-page, full-color American flag as part of its Friday paper.

Los Angeles Times spokeswoman Martha Goldstein said that 25,000 copies of her paper's eight-page extra edition were on the streets shortly after noon PDT Tuesday.

The San Francisco Chronicle's late edition was essentially converted into an extra Tuesday, selling 74,000 copies that dwarfed its previous record of 14,000 copies. Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Phil Bronstein said the paper tried to put context into the coverage. "We wanted to reflect how this has changed life dramatically and how security is now threatened," he told E&P.

Many extras were snatched up as historical keepsakes, some by profiteers. "People are buying like 20 copies and scalping them," an Arizona Republic spokesman said of its Tuesday extra. "It's despicable."

Joel Davis, Mark Fitzgerald, Lucia Moses, and Todd Shields all contributed to the reporting of this story.