I get paid to be the internal critic of The Washington Post, the proverbial burr under the saddle, the cranky old guy at the tail end of the newsroom who listens to all those cranky readers. But not this week. There was little to be critical about when it came to news coverage. Usually I get hundreds of e-mails, phone calls and letters every week from readers complaining about this or that story. But many of the messages I received in recent days were complimentary of the paper’s reporting of the horrific events that began unfolding in New York and at the Pentagon early Tuesday. And well they should be.
The Post has put out a string of extraordinary newspapers. Soon after the first hijacked airliner smashed into the first of the two World Trade Center towers in Manhattan at 8:45 a.m. Tuesday, reporters, editors and photographers poured into the paper, including those who were on leave or vacation or would otherwise have had the day off. Five hours later, shortly after 1 p.m., 50,000 copies of a “Special Late Edition” of the Tuesday morning paper were off the presses and quickly sold out — 20 pages of fresh news about the stunning terrorist attacks, 16 stories, an editorial, three op-ed columns and lots of pictures.
By 10:45 Tuesday night, the first edition of the Wednesday paper had closed with 74 bylined stories about the wave of attacks, two editorials, 10 op-ed columns and loads of graphics and photos. About 150,000 extra papers were printed that night, putting more than a million copies of the Wednesday paper onto newsstands and into people’s homes. In the morning, the news boxes that I passed on the street were sold-out. Thursday morning’s press run was augmented by 100,000 copies.
The Post was not alone. Of the six or seven major American newspapers I looked at, all had risen to the challenge, with strong, solid, well-organized coverage of an event like no other in a long, long time. The routine use of color for news photography now by newspapers was dramatically on display, eating into some of the visual edge that television has always had on newspapers. The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News all published special editions. Maybe there were others. The Wall Street Journal, with offices right across the street from the tumbling towers, had to evacuate its damaged building and newsroom and move operations to New Jersey but still managed to put out an excellent newspaper Wednesday morning, with two particularly gripping first-person accounts from staffers caught in the maelstrom.
American television news also performed with great skill and professionalism, providing riveting coverage that was hard to pull away from and that is vital to an informed public during such a crisis. The Post’s Web site, updating its file constantly throughout that first, dreadful day, recorded an astounding number of “page views” by cyber-visitors, far eclipsing the 10 million on Election Night.
But this column is about newspapers. It’s about The Post at its very best — with comprehensive reporting and powerful writing at a crucial moment in our lives — and it’s about all those people who, after watching TV for hours or logging on to the Web, were sitting in buses, cafes, offices, kitchens and parks the next morning reading their newspaper. People, I believe, still look to their newspaper as some sort of final, reliable authority, as a source of reassurance — even if the news itself is not reassuring — that they are informed. TV and the Web are central to modern communication, and they are faster than the news on paper. But newspapers still have one advantage — time; time to think, to do more reporting, and time for skilled editors to insert themselves between reporters and the public. Newspapers, therefore, have always struck me as somehow more durable than vulnerable, instinctively connected to our fundamental needs, humanity and sense of community, no matter what we’ve seen on a screen.
