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.
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