Newspapers, we enjoy saying in the trade, are the rough draft of history.
The draft can be pretty rough indeed, because history often shows up disguised as routine news, and only in retrospect does it look historic.
That’s what makes events like last Tuesday’s so much fun. And so challenging. Most days, most newspapers are unique to their region – but occasionally, parochial responsibility is overwhelmed by the broad sweep of an international event. So when, for the first time, an African-American took the oath as president of the United States, no editor anywhere in the world doubted the historic nature of the next day’s front page.
The pressure was on to present it in a way that readers would find memorable. So on Wednesday, every newspaper did the same thing.
And every newspaper did it differently.
At such times, it’s interesting to look at papers across the country and compare how each presented essentially the same news, to see how many ways there are to slice the same story. Today, the Internet makes that easy. You can cast your net as widely as you like: On a site called Newseum.org, you can view more than 700 newspaper front pages worldwide, most of which had Barack Obama in a leading role and no two of which were identical. Just follow the links to “front pages” and “archived pages” to see for yourself.
At The Plain Dealer, planning the Wednesday paper had begun weeks before, with the decisions that we would commemorate the day with a 16-page special section that would wrap the paper, and what broadly would be in it, how many people we would have on the scene in Washington, D.C., and how we would cover the reaction here in Cleveland.
Page One, of course, was left to the events of the day.
And while the day was dramatic and moving in myriad ways, there was no one iconic photo, no single statement that leapt out of President Obama’s inaugural address.
Gathered with her editors to discuss the blank page in front of her that would become the next day’s Page One, Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg felt strongly that the photograph should be of “The Moment” – Obama taking the oath of office – and that the headline should be the key words from the new president’s address.
That’s not as obvious as it sounds. Real life doesn’t always follow our plan, as a quick scan through those 700 other front pages will show you. There were lots of other ways to do it.
“It quickly became clear that there was no one perfect photo of the president taking the oath of office,” she said. “He and the chief justice were standing about six feet apart, and there were lots of people in the background.
“There were other photos in other settings that were more striking, more poetic. But we thought it was important to have the historic moment. When people look back at this day, that’s what they’ll remember, and that’s what we thought should be on our front page.”
Goldberg and her editors boiled the new president’s speech down to about eight possibilities for the words that would go in the lead headline. They didn’t want a label head, like “Mr. President.” They wanted a phrase that captured the spirit of Obama’s address. They considered “A new era of responsibility,” before deciding on a crisper, more active quote.
So our lead headline read, “We have chosen hope over fear.” Under that ran a six-column photo of President Obama, with his wife, Michelle, at his side, facing Chief Justice John Roberts and reciting the oath of office. Across the bottom of the page were the stirring final words of Obama’s challenge to the nation.
If you look through those other front pages, you will see that some, like the Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle and Newsday, did use a label headline. Some, like the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today, used a photo of the Obamas strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. Some used the “responsibility” headline, some concentrated on change, remaking America, and other words from his speech. The Los Angeles Times used the same photo we did, but a different headline. Others used a headline similar to ours, but a different photo.
The Plain Dealer of today is immediate. Our cleveland.com Web site gives you the news electronically as soon as it happens, as it did Tuesday. But we learned – or relearned – on the day Obama was elected that the Web is not a substitute for newsprint. You can’t frame a BlackBerry page or put it in a scrapbook.
We printed lots of extra papers last Wednesday. Through Friday, people had bought 55,000 of them. Page One was a piece of history, and readers knew it.
